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The Great War in the Air
Military Aviation from 1909 to 1921
By John H. Morrow Jr. The University of Alabama Press
Copyright © 1993 John H. Morrow Jr.
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8173-9143-0
CHAPTER 1
To 1914
"Flying has been brought to a point where it can be of great use in ... scouting and carrying messages in time of war."
THE WRIGHT BROTHERS TO CONGRESSMAN M NEVIN, 18 JANUARY 1905
"Everything presently serves war, there is no invention whose military use the military does not contemplate, no single invention that it will not endeavor to use for military ends."
NICHOLAS FEDOROV, 1906
From its origins flight offered the prospect of a new arena of warfare. Within 10 years of the Montgolfier brothers' first ascent in a hot air balloon in 1783, the French Revolutionary army had formed an airship company of captive balloons for observation. In July 1849 Habsburg unmanned balloons launched from ships bombarded Venice, though lightly and ineffectively, before the city was subdued by artillery. Both sides in the American Civil War used tethered balloons for observation, while in the Franco-Prussian War the French used free balloons to lift mail and people over the Prussian siege of Paris in 1871. Yet free flight in balloons was a difficult and unreliable proposition, since the balloon was completely at the mercy of capricious wind currents and weather. While such flight could satisfy a thirst for adventure, it had limited military potential. By the 1890s the European armies' airship units employed only captive observation balloons, of which the preferred type was the German sausage-shaped Drachen. The British army used captive balloons in its 1880s African campaigns and during the Boer War; the French used them in colonial campaigns in Tonkin in 1884 and on Madagascar in 1895; the Americans used them in Cuba during the 1898 Spanish-American War.
The Military and Powered Flight to 1909
The military's adoption and use of observation balloons paved the way for its later acceptance of powered flight. The military units in charge of balloons usually assumed the responsibility for powered flight. Their operational mobility requirement — the capability to launch or dismantle ships within 30 minutes to incorporate them into an army's line of march — foreshadowed the early demands that the military would place on dirigibles and airplanes. Ballooning also gave rise to a network of aviation technology societies — composed of soldiers, scientists, and engineers promoting technology — and aeronautical clubs — consisting of supporters of practical balloon flight. Both types of organizations later sponsored powered flight. Historian Lee Kennett points out that in 1883, one year before the dirigible's invention, Albert Robida's War in the Twentieth Century envisaged a sudden, crushing air strike, while Ivan S. Bloch's 1898 treatise on warfare expected bombardment from airships in the near future. By the end of the nineteenth century, balloon flight had provided a foundation of civilian and military institutions and established certain expectations for military powered flight.
The French army pioneered military powered lighter-than-air flight in dirigibles. In 1884 French army officers Charles Renard and Arthur Krebs invented the first successful nonrigid dirigible, which was powered by an 8-hp electric motor. Renard, a graduate of the Ecole Polytechnique and in 1877 instrumental in establishing the world's first aeronautical laboratory at Chalais-Meudon, became the head of the army's new Directorate of Military Aerial Ballooning in 1888. The absence of a suitable engine thwarted his later efforts to build a 100-hp dirigible and prompted the army to wait until private industry could furnish dirigibles. Overworked and burdened by this failure and the rejection of his candidacy to the French Academy of Sciences in 1904, Renard committed suicide on 13 April 1905. This tragic figure had laid the experimental foundation for French military aviation at Meudon.
The invention of the gasoline engine in the 1880s and the development of more reliable and efficient high-speed gasoline engines in the 1890s made powered flight a definite possibility by the turn of the twentieth century. The French army bought the first military airship, a nonrigid dirigible, from the Lebaudy brothers in 1906 and issued the first contract for a military airship from them later that year. By the end of 1907 the French army was developing a fleet of transportable dirigibles like the Lebaudy ship La Patrie, which was 3,500 cubic meters in volume, 60 meters long, and smaller, cheaper, and easier to handle than the Zeppelin — a newer and more frightening behemoth east of the Rhine.
In Germany in the early 1890s Swabian Count Ferdinand von Zeppelin had proposed a rigid airship that would be able to fly for a week, tow transport vehicles in an "aerial express train," explore the African interior, fly over the North Pole, and serve as a vehicle for long-range reconnaissance, bombardment, and troop and supply transport. After checkered beginnings — an 18-minute flight in 1900 by his first Zeppelin and an abortive second dirigible — in 1907 Zeppelin's third ship, the LZ3, flew 350 kilometers in under eight hours. The German General Staff and the Imperial Office of the Interior overruled a reluctant Prussian War Ministry, granted Zeppelin more funds, and challenged him to cover at least 700 kilometers in 24 hours of uninterrupted flight with his airship. The LZ3's 11,300 cubic-meter volume and 128-meter length dwarfed other airships, but its greater flexibility and load would be partially offset by its dependence on bases in Germany.
A 12-hour round trip by Zeppelin's LZ4 on 1 July 1908 unleashed such a clamor in the German press that the War Ministry awarded Zeppelin more funds. The LZ4's fiery destruction on 5 August 1908 while attempting the 24-hour voyage spurred a popular campaign that raised over seven million marks for Zeppelin construction, enabling the count to establish airship and engine companies. The resulting enthusiasm of the General Staff, civilian agencies, and the Kaiser, who had encouraged Zeppelin and would proclaim him "the greatest German of the twentieth century" before its first nine years elapsed, forced the War Ministry to accept the LZ3 as army airship Z1 early in 1909, before the Zeppelin had met its performance stipulations. By 1909 the army had also accepted a Parseval airship of some 2,500 cubic meters in volume and 50 meters in length, with its own semirigid dirigible.
In England, as historian Alfred Gollin has shown, the flight of the LZ4 portended a new avenue of assault on the island nation: the air. Press magnate Alfred Harmsworth, the Lord Northcliffe, had recognized that "England was no longer an island" when Albert Santos-Dumont flew in 1906, although his conception of the threat as "aerial chariots of a foe descending upon England" indicated no realistic appraisal of its nature. R. B. Haldane, who became Secretary of State for War in 1906, was interested in aviation and in 1907 monitored British experiments carefully. H. G. Wells's The War in the Air, published in 1907, dramatically portrayed the destruction of cities and, ultimately, of civilization by gigantic airships and planes in the first major aerial conflict. After Zeppelin's flight of 1908, Lord Northcliffe's Daily Mail carried speculations about Germany's use of airships to invade England. In October 1908 the Committee of Imperial Defense (CID) established a subcommittee on aerial navigation, before which the Honorable Sir Charles Rolls of Rolls Royce testified in December that "England will cease to be an island." A General Staff memorandum on the subject in November noted other nations' efforts in aviation and acknowledged that airships would likely be used for reconnaissance and, possibly, for bombing in future conflict. The subcommittee's final report was due shortly after the new year. Meanwhile, at the Government Balloon Factory at Farnborough, the semirigid airships, Nulli Secundus I and II, failed to live up to their portentous names in 1907 and 1908.
By the end of 1908 airships had not emerged from the experimental stage. Germany and France led the other powers in military lighter-than-air aviation. In Italy a dirigible built by two lieutenants of the Italian War Ministry's Engineers Brigade, who had been assigned the task by their commander in 1904, flew over Rome in October 1908. In the United States the U.S. Army Signal Corps accepted its first dirigible in 1908.
At the end of 1908, therefore, the military effectiveness of the dirigible was still questionable, and the suitability of the various types for warfare remained undetermined. At this crucial juncture, when armies were beginning to acquire airships, the airplane burst upon the stage of European aviation. The French army had been interested in heavier-than-air flight before it was practical. From 1892 to 1894 the French War Ministry subsidized inventor Clément Ader with 550,000 francs to develop a steerable flying machine capable of carrying passengers or explosives at a speed of 55 kilometers per hour at an altitude of several hundred meters — a performance that would be some 15 years in advance of aviation technology. In stipulating a military vehicle, the War Ministry was not guiding Ader along paths that he was loath to tread. Like future aviation inventors, he believed that aviation should be used first and foremost in the national defense, and he regarded the military establishment as a source of subsidies and contracts. The early aviation inventors did not balk at their creations' potentially bellicose applications. They actively sought the military's attention, often with claims that their inventions would end war. In Ader's case the army, disappointed at the lack of results, ceased its aid, and in 1898, at the age of 58, Ader abandoned his experiments to write about aviation. Like other aeronautical experimenters before the twentieth century, he had been defeated by the absence of a light, powerful, and reliable engine.
That same year, 1898, the only other military establishment to sponsor heavier-than-air flight — the U.S. War Department's Board of Ordnance and Fortification — granted $50,000 for the airplane project of Smithsonian scientist S. P. Langley, whose abject failure in 1903 made the War Department wary of future winged projects.
The only significant heavier-than-air flights before 1908 were Wilbur and Orville Wright's experiments. After their first flight at Kitty Hawk on 17 December 1903, they remained far ahead of European competition through 1908. Yet European skeptics, particularly the French, believed either that the Wright brothers had not flown or that their exploits were insignificant. French seaplane designer Antoine Odier and aviator and inventor Albert Etévé acknowledged that the Wrights had flown but were convinced that their achievements were ignored until the Wrights appeared in Europe in 1908, by which time French aviators believed they had technologically surpassed the Wrights. On the contrary, however, the Wrights' exploits had not been ignored, and French aviators had not surpassed their efforts as of 1908.
Despite their efforts, the Wrights had no military contracts. Although they advised Congressman Nevin on the flying machine's usefulness in January 1905, the U.S. War Department's Board of Ordnance and Fortification rejected their offer of a "Flyer." The brothers then conducted intermittent negotiations with the British, French, and German armies between 1905 and 1908. The British War Office insisted on flight demonstrations with no prior commitment to purchase, while the brothers, afraid of piracy, insisted on an advance guarantee of purchase if the plane met its advertised performance. French performance stipulations remained beyond attainment, and the Prussian War Ministry found the price too high. The Wrights were unwilling to haggle over their $200,000 price for the machine and patent rights because they were convinced that no one else could develop a practical airplane within five years. Confident of their achievement, yet confronted with these impasses and dogged by the fear of patent espionage, the Wrights dismantled their aircraft and did not fly from October 1905 until May 1908.
Neither the interest nor the negotiations ceased, however. German General Staff Captain Hermann von der Lieth-Thomsen advised his superiors early in 1907 that it was dangerous merely to observe foreign aerial progress, but General Staff negotiations with the Wrights foundered on the War Ministry's continued objections to the price. German interest rekindled French ardor, but once again French stipulations — the ability to take off from any location, to clear uneven terrain, and carry an observer to a minimum 300-meter altitude — stymied the brothers. By 1907 British army balloon chief Col. J. E. Capper, who had earlier been interested in buying a Wright plane, had become more interested in sponsoring the aviation experiments of Britain's resident American wild West showman Samuel Cody and British Lt. John Dunne. The pressures of the arms race in the early twentieth century kept the European powers, particularly the French and Germans, interested in the Wrights, but not sufficiently to meet the brothers' demands.
The foreign interest may have had some effect in the United States. In 1907 the U.S. War Department sent Maj. G. O. Squier to Europe to study aviation progress and established an aeronautical division in the office of the chief of the Signal Corps, which requested bids for both an airplane and an airship (which it received in 1908). The Wright brothers won the airplane contract, and when Congress failed to appropriate the $200,000 requested by the Signal Corps for aviation in 1907, the U.S. Board of Ordnance and Fortification covered the contract's cost. Although at flight trials at Fort Myer, Virginia, the plane surpassed the contract's performance requirements, its crash on 17 September 1908, severely injuring Orville Wright and killing Lt. T. E. Selfridge, delayed acceptance of the U.S. Army's first airplane until August 1909.
In 1908, while the Wrights negotiated, a small coterie of French inventors began to make significant strides in winged flight. After the turn of the century, France had emerged as the European center of winged flight. French army Capt. Ferdinand Ferber, a polytechnician and artilleryman whom Renard brought to Meudon in 1904, managed a powered glide in 1905 similar to the Wright brothers' first flight in 1903. Brazilian emigré Alberto Santos-Dumont, the toast of Paris since a 1901 dirigible flight, flew a box kite-like machine 220 meters in November 1906. Although neither accomplishment deserved much military note, in 1905 engineer Gen. Joseph Jacques Césaire Joffre recognized the necessity of continuing aeronautical research, although he had reservations about the army's practical use of airplanes.
By then the French possessed the best-known early European airplane engine, engineer Léon Levavasseur's V8 Antoinette of 24 and then 50 horsepower. The Wright brothers' four-cylinder engine had produced 12 and later 30 horsepower at 180 pounds. The 50-hp Antoinette weighed only 110 pounds because Levavasseur, through trial and error, determined the minimum admissible engine weight by reducing the parts' thickness until they broke under tests.
The 24-hp Antoinette had powered Santos-Dumont's hop in 1906, the year that Gabriel and Charles Voisin founded the first aircraft workshop making planes for sale in the Parisian suburb of Billancourt. Capable craftsmen as teenagers, the Voisin brothers, then in their 20s, had built everything from guns to kites. After Clément Ader's early experimental craft Avion lured Gabriel irretrievably from architecture to aviation, he founded his own firm with 60,000 francs of capital. After an attempt in 1905 to collaborate with another early inventor, Louis Blériot, foundered within the year, he joined forces with his younger brother. On 13 January 1908 the 50-hp Antoinette powered a Voisin biplane flown by French aviator Henri Farman over the first officially monitored closed-circuit kilometer at Issy-les-Moulineaux. The official French history of military aviation proclaims this event "the true birth of practical aviation" because Farman, flying the wheeled Voisin, was the first to manage to take off under the plane's own power, while the Wright biplane lacked wheels and required a launching apparatus.
Farman had managed to stay airborne for 30 minutes by August 1908, when Wilbur Wright arrived in France to show the brothers' wares. By December Wright had astounded French spectators by easily outdistancing French competition and raising the duration record to two hours and 20 minutes. That month French businessmen Henri Deutsch de la Meurthe and Lazare Weiller founded the Compagnie Générale de la navigation aérienne to exploit the Wright patent. Yet the official French history of military aviation suggests that Farman's exploit in the Voisin during the fall held more significance for military aviation than the Wrights' achievements. Perhaps French pride led them to denigrate the Wrights' achievements and exaggerate Farman's successes.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from The Great War in the Air by John H. Morrow Jr.. Copyright © 1993 John H. Morrow Jr.. Excerpted by permission of The University of Alabama Press.
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