Willis J. Abbot

“ An art which the fighting aviator must master early in his career is that of high diving. Many of us have seen a hawk, soaring high in air, suddenly fold his pinions and drop like a plummet full on the back of some luckless pigeon flapping along ungainly scores of feet below, or a fishhawk drop like a meteor from the sky with a resounding splash upon the bosom of some placid stream and rise again carrying a flapping fish to his eyrie in the distant pines. The hunting methods of the hawk are the fighting methods of the airman. ”

“ That is perhaps too sanguine a dream while human nature remains what it is, and nations can still be as covetous, ambitious, and heedless of others' rights as are individuals. But beyond doubt a prolonged period of peace awaits the world. What then is to be the future of the aircraft and the submarine which had to wait for war to secure any recognition from mankind of their prodigious possibilities? ”

“ Hurled along by the wind she dragged the soldiers after her. Fearing disaster to the men the commandant reluctantly ordered them to let go. The ship leaped into the black upper air and disappeared. All across France, across that very country where in 1916 the trenches cut their ugly zigzags from the Channel to the Vosges, she drifted unseen. By morning she was flying over England and Wales. Ireland caught a glimpse of her and days thereafter sailors coming into port told of a curious yellow mass, seemingly flabby and disintegrating like the carcass of a whale, floating far out at sea. ”

“ It showed to the world—and to our own countrymen who needed the lesson as much as any—that we had among our youth scores who, moved by high ideals, stood ready to risk their lives for a sentiment—stood ready to brave the myriad discomforts of the trenches, the bursting shrapnel, the mutilating liquid fire, the torturing gas that German autocracy should be balked of its purpose of dominating the world. ”

“ In little more than half an hour thirty-six thousand tons of up-to-date British fighting machinery, and more than 1200 gallant blue jackets had been sent to the depths of the North Sea by a little boat of 450 tons carrying a crew of twenty-six men.
The world stood aghast. With the feeling of horror at the swift death of so many caused by so few, there was mingled a feeling of amazement at the scientific perfection of the submarine, its power, and its deadly work. ”

“ All at once there is a mighty swoop through the air like the drop of a bird of prey, and in no time the black flyer is immediately over the Englishman and the air is filled with the furious crackling of a machine gun, followed by the rapid ta-ta-ta of two or three more, all operated at the highest speed just as during a charge. ”

“ Through one of the holes aft the commander descends by a breakneck iron ladder into the black hole lit by electric glow-lamps. The air is heavy with the smell of oil, and to the unaccustomed longshoreman it is almost choking, though the hatches are off. The submarine man breathes this air as if it were the purest ozone. Here in the engine-room aft men must live and strain every nerve even if for days at a time every crack whereby the fresh air could get in is hermetically sealed. On their tense watchfulness thirty lives depend. ”

“ The air would be full of Allied airmen—the great bombing planes flying low and inundating the trenches with bombs, and the troops on march with the deadly fléchettes. Over every German battery would soar the observation plane indicating by tinsel or smoke bombs the location of the guns, or even telegraphing it back by wireless to the Allied batteries safe in positions which the blinded enemy could never hope to find. Above all in myriads would be soaring the swift fighting scouts, the Bleriots, Nieuports, Moranes or perhaps some new American machine to-day unknown. ”

“ When the aviators have an attack in contemplation they fly low and snap their fingers at the puff balls of death as the shrapnel from their appearance when bursting may well be called. Naturally, efforts were made early in the war to lessen the danger by armouring the body of the machine sufficiently to protect the aviator and his engine—for if the aviator escaped a shot which found the engine, his plight would be almost as bad as if the missile had struck him. ”

“ On days when the clouds form almost a solid flooring, one feels very much at sea, and wonders if one is in the navy instead of aviation. The diminutive Nieuports skirt the white expanse like torpedo boats in an arctic sea, and sometimes, far across the cloud-waves, one sights an enemy escadrille, moving as a fleet. ”

“ As we have traced the development of both dirigible and airplane from the first nascent germ of their creation to the point at which they were sufficiently developed to play a large part in the greatest of all wars, let us now consider how hosts of young men, boys in truth, were trained to fly like eagles and to give battle in mid-air to foes no less well trained and desperate than they. ”

“ The thing most astonishing to me about that experience was how a submerged submarine can thread its way through a mine field. For though the water is luminous and translucent one can hardly make out the black hull of the boat under the turret and a mine would have to be on top of you before you could see it. The men who watch for mines must have a sense for them as well as particularly powerful sight. ”

“ The maps of the battlefields of this war are the marvels of military science. Made from the air they show every road and watercourse, every ditch and gully, every patch of woodland, every farmhouse, church, or stonewall. Much of the early work of the aviator is in learning to make such maps, both by sketches and by the employment of the camera. It is no easy (p. 112) task. From an airplane one thousand feet up the earth seems to be all a dead level. Slight hills, gentle elevations, offer no contrast to the general plain. A road is not easy to tell from a trench. ”

“ It was at Mons in the third week of the Great War. The grey-green German hordes had overwhelmed the greater part of Belgium and were sweeping down into France whose people and military establishment were all unprepared for attack from that quarter. For days the little British army of perhaps 100,000 men, that forlorn hope which the Germans scornfully called "contemptible," but which man for man probably numbered more veteran fighters than any similar unit on either side, had been stoutly holding back the enemy's right wing and fighting for the delay that alone could save Paris. ”

“ To the non-professional an amazing thing about the employment of aircraft in war has been the rapidity with which pilots are trained. The average layman would think that to learn the art of manœuvring an airplane with such swiftness as to evade the attacks of an enemy, and to detect precisely the proper moment and method of attacking him in turn, would require long and arduous practice in the air. But as we have seen in earlier chapters, inventors like the Wrights, Bleriot, and Farman learned to fly with but a few hours spent in the air, with flights lasting less than ten minutes each. ”

“ Lives must be risked to demonstrate a theory, or to justify a calculation. Aeronautics is no science for laboratory or library prosecution. Its battles must be fought in the sky, and its devotees must be willing to offer their lives to the cause. In that respect the science of aviation has been different from almost any subject of inquiry that has ever engaged the restless intellect of man, unless perhaps submarine navigation, or the invention of explosives. ”

“ It will take the cream of the American youth between the ages of eighteen and twenty-six to man America's thousands of airplanes, and the double cream of youth to qualify as chasers in the Republic's new aërial army.
Intensive and scientific training must be given this cream of youth upon which America's welfare in the war must rest. Experience has shown that for best results the fighting aviator should be not over twenty-six years old or under eighteen. The youth under eighteen has shown himself to be bold, but he lacks judgment. ”

“ In a time when brave and skilful aviators, with a mistaken idea of the ethics of their calling, were appealing to sensation lovers by the practice of dare-devil feats, the Wrights with admirable common sense and dignity stood sturdily against any such degradation of the aviator's art. In this position they were joined by Glenn Curtis, and the influence of the three was beginning to be shown in the reduced number of lives sacrificed in these follies when the Great War broke upon the world and gave to aviation its greatest opportunity. ”

“ You have the sensation of growing heavier and sinking as the boat grows heavier and sinks, even though you may not be able to see through the turret window, or the periscope, how the bows are gradually submerged and the water climbs higher and higher up the turret until all things without are wrapped in the eerie twilight of the depths. ”

“ This extraordinary invention is curiously reminiscent of the fact chronicled in earlier chapters of this book that the most modern airplanes are so built that should the aviator become insensible or incapacitated for his work, if he will but drop the controls, the machine will adjust itself and make its own landing in safety. Unaided the airplane drops lightly to earth; unaided the submarine rises buoyantly to the air. ”

“ Lake sat down, and we had an opportunity of talking with him at leisure. He is a stout-shouldered, powerfully built man, in the prime of life—a man of cool common sense, a practical man, who is also an inventor. And he talks frankly and convincingly, and yet modestly, of his accomplishment.
Having finished our lunch, Mr. Lake prepared to show us something about the practical operations of the Argonaut. It has been a good deal of a mystery to us how workmen penned up in a submarine boat could expect to recover gold from wrecks in the water outside, or to place torpedoes, or to pick up cables. ”

“ And meanwhile these underwater craft so preyed upon British foodships that in the days of the greatest submarine activity England was reduced to husbanding her stores of food with almost as great thrift and by precisely the same methods as did Germany suffering from the British blockade.
Aircraft and submarines! Twin terrors of the world's greatest war! The development, though by no means the final development, of dreams that men of many nations have dreamed throughout the centuries! They are two of the outstanding features of the war; two of its legacies to mankind. ”

“ Getting started is the hardest part of an attack. Once (p. 164) you have begun diving you're all right. The pilot just ahead turns tail up like a trout dropping back to water, and swoops down in irregular curves and circles. You follow at an angle so steep your feet seem to be holding you back in your seat. Now the black Maltese crosses on the German's wings stand out clearly. You think of him as some sort of a big bug. Then you hear the rapid tut-tut-tut of his machine-gun. ”

“ But whether undertaken as part of a general programme of frightfulness or as reprisals for cruel and indefensible outrages air raids upon defenceless towns, killing peaceable citizens in their beds, and children in their kindergartens, are not incidents to add glory to aviation. The mind turns with relief from such examples of the cruel misuse of aircraft to the hosts of individual instances in which the airman and his machine remind one of the doughty Sir Knight and his charger in the most gallant days of chivalry. ”

“ In an interview widely printed at the time, Lieutenant Warneford thus told the story of his casual meeting of a German Zeppelin high in air between Ghent and Brussels and his prompt and systematic destruction of the great balloon. The story as told in his own language reads like the recountal of an everyday event. That to meet an enemy more than a mile above the earth and demolish him was anything extraordinary does not seem to have occurred to the aviator. ”

“ We are not preaching dreadnoughts that take four years to build. We are not asking for a million men taking nearly a year to gather, equip, drill, and transport to France, in imminent danger of destruction by the enemy's submarines every mile of the way.
We ask you for a cheap, simple device of wood, wire, and cloth, with an engine to drive it. All its parts are standardized. In a few weeks the nation can be equipped to turn out 2000 of them weekly. We want within the year 100,000 of them. We do not ask for a million men. ”

“ For in the clumsy, gaudy bag, rolling and tossing above a smoky fire lay the fundamentals of those great airships that, perfected by the persistence of Count Zeppelin, have crossed angry seas, breasted fierce winds, defied alike the blackest nights and the thickest fogs to rain their messages of death on the capital of a foe. ”

“ At once the submarine was seen to be the great problem confronting us. Its attack was not so much upon the United States, for we are a self-contained nation able to raise all that we need within our own borders for our own support. But England is a nation that has to be fed from without. Seldom are her stores of food great enough to avert starvation for more than six weeks should the steady flow of supply ships from America and Australia to her ports be interrupted. ”

“ The art has given a new word to the world—camouflage. Correspondents have repeatedly told of their amazement in suddenly coming across a battery of 75's, or a great siege gun so cunningly hidden in the edge of a thicket they would be almost upon it before detecting it. From an airplane 2500 feet or more in the air it requires sharp eyes to penetrate artillery disguises. A French poilu in a little book of reminiscences tells with glee how a German observation aviator deceived his batteries. ”

“ The instinct for art and decoration, so strong in the French mind, had been given full play by the constructors of this balloon and it was painted with something of the gorgeousness of a circus poster.
A tremendous crowd packed the park near Paris whence the ascent was made. Always the spectacle of human lives in danger has a morbid attraction for curiosity seekers, and we have seen in our own days throngs attracted to aviation congresses quite as much in the expectation of witnessing some fatal disaster, as to observe the progress made in man's latest conquest over nature. ”

“ The real vulnerable part of a ship of war is the thin skin of its hull below water and below the armor belt. This is the point at which the torpedo strikes. Admiral Fiske's device permits an airplane to carry two torpedoes of the regular Whitehead class and to launch them with such an impetus and at such an angle that they will take the water and continue their course thereunder exactly as though launched from a naval torpedo tube. His idea was adopted both by Great Britain and Germany. ”