THE TACTICS OF THE AIR.
THE first stage in the use of dirigible air craft in war has been reached. A dirigible has been used to carry out a reconnaissance in actual fighting ; its crew has recon- noitred the enemy's position, made sketch plans, taken photographs, and dropped bombs, and two facts have become abundantly plain. One is, that we are at the beginning, and that there is evidently no limit which we can foresee at present to the use of air craft in war; the other is, that the possession of an effective air fleet is an imperative necessity, not of to- morrow, but of to-day. If, to-day, war were declared between two Powers, the Power possessing the most efficient air fleet, eaeteris paribus, would win. This, if any military expert ever doubted it, has been made a clear certainty by the work of the Italian dirigible PI in a reconnaissance of the Turkish position near Bengazi, described by the special correspondent of the Turin Stampa. The Stampa's account appears in the Times; of June 18th, and may be briefly summarized.
The P1 left he hangar at six in the morning, carrying on board the Commandants Pence, the pilots, Captain Saymandi and Lieutenant Benigai, and a supply of bombe. It rose over the sea to a height of 1,000 metres, turned eastward over the oasis of Soda, and satisfied itself that at the moment the oasis contained none of the enemy. Next it turned south to- wards Sidi Mufta, near which, at the foot of the Djebel and on the plain, lay the Turkish lines. As soon as the P1 came near the camp the Turks opened rifle fire ; this proved futile, and the P1 dropped a bomb among the tents which took in- stant effect. The Turks ceased their rifle fire and brought their artillery into action. They bad previously planted their guns on the slopes of sandhills, burying the tail of the carriage so as to take the recoil without overturning the gun. They sent their shells up almost vertically, but their fire was wild and harmless, and the dirigible, dropping bombs, proceeded on its course ; it com- pleted an exact reconnaissance of the enemy's camp, estimated the numbers of Turks and Arabs, took photographs of t he position, and in two hours returned unharmed to the Italian lines, with the whole plan of the Turkish position at the disposal of the Italian general. The dirigible, in short, that morning obtained for nothing information for which a general a few years ago would have sacrificed troops as a plain duty. She was unopposed; she was in the position of a warship able to outrange the ships engaging her; she could bit without being hit and see without being pursued. It must have been an exhilarating two hours for her Italian crew ; for the Turks it is difficult to imagine a more hopeless and help- less experience.
But what would happen in another war—in a war in which both sides possessed an air fleet P The first obvious point is that it would be impossible for a dirigible to reconnoitre an enemy's position as the P1 re- connoitred the Turkish position with nothing more to fear than a stray rifle bullet through her envelope, and with very long odds against even that. The ascent of a dirigible on one side would be countered by a dirigible or a number of aeroplanes ascending on the other. Hero, of course, we come at once to the question whether for war purposes the future is with the dirigible balloon or the heavier-than-air machine. The probabilities. no doubt, are that in the future it may be possible to build aeroplanes capable of carrying a crew of twenty-five or thirty, and that large aeroplanes of this kind would be easier to control than dirigibles with their 'huge
envelope offering so vast a surface to a rough wind. But. we are dealing for the moment with the war conditions, not of to-morrow, but of to-day, and to-day, if the weather made it possible, dirigibles would be used for reconnaissance because of their capacity for carrying a crew in addition to the pilot. Another advantage, too, which the dirigible possesses over the aeroplane is that it can ascend verti- cally, whereas the aeroplane must leave the ground at an angle and necessarily must take some time in circling up to any considerable height. We may imagine, then, two armies lying opposite each other, as, for example, the Russian and Japanese armies lay before the battle of Liao-yang. It would be the object of the attacking general to discover the strength and the disposition of the enemy, so that he might know where to drive in his wedge or throw the full weight of his numbers. He decides, then, to send up his dirigible before dawn, so that with the earliest light he may gain the know- ledge he needs of what lies before him on the ring of hills across his front. She goes up, and with her, or after her, as soon as it is light enough, to cruise about and above her, goes her squadron of aeroplanes. She has to journey out five miles or more, perhaps, before she can begin to see what she wants, and she may have to reconnoitre a front extending over twenty miles of hills. The enemy she goes out to spy lies waiting for her, knowing that the sound to listen for is the drone of her engine six thousand feet above him, and that the moment he hears that drone in the dark sky he must at peril of his country's life send up his own ship or his own destroyers to cut her down before the light comes, or before she can use her eyes and see what he means to hide from her, and turn back with his secret to her own camp. He must send up his fleet, or part of it, but even so he can only do so in doubt. For how is he to know that the drone he hears is the drone of the real brain he is to fear P May it not be, perhaps, merely a ship sent up as a feint to puzzle him, to draw off the attack of part of his force while the real eye and brain wait their oppor- tunity in another ship following the first? May it not be merely the first of a number of feints designed one after another to drain his camp of destroyers, until numbers tell, as they must in such a war, and some ship at last flies out from the attacking lines to find no destroyers waiting for her, but a clear sky about her and the enemy's lines below P For that, surely, is the end to which necessity would drive the two armies. The defending force would be bound to search out each ship as the roar of its motor came from east, or west, or north, or south, and round each ship as it was discovered the accompanying and attacking squa- drons of aeroplanes would hum like wasps seeking where to sting. Each would try to get higher than the other, as hawks try to tower above their quarry ; each would try to get the weather-gauge of the other, as ships tried in the days of sails. Each would try to reach the brain of the other, and at the touch of the bullet engines and planes would reel down out of the fight—the first tidings perhaps which would come to the armies waiting below to tell them how the battle was going 6,000 feet in the air above them. Or you may guess that the commander of the dirigible, directing the fight round him, would see perhaps that his accompanying squa- dron outnumbered his attackers, 'and that it would be worth his while to lose plane for plane; he might, a new Nelson in the Empyrean, show some air-signal to order his squadron to engage the enemy more closely, and that might end in aeroplanes going down locked in couples, with the survivors free to push home their victory. All the while, six, seven, perhaps ten thousand feet below, the opposing armies on the hills would have perforce to wait, "hushed in grim repose," for the result of the battle they could not see.
To imagine such a fight, it may be objected, presupposes too much. Does it presuppose that the airmen on each side in a battle of the future will be gifted with superhuman courage, impossible skill, nerves which as a fact men do not possess? That was said once about the officers and men who manned torpedo craft and submarines. And it is probably no more true of air craft than it has been proved to be true of the most dangerous form of duty undertaken at sea. There will be men found to take any risks and all risks. We may remember, to begin with, that though it is doubtless the fact that the ordinary average man cannot contemplate ascents in an aeroplane to a height of six or seven thousand feet as anything but a nightmare, the skilled airman has no such feelings of horror and fear. To him height is not horrible; all he asks for is a sound machine. As the sailor in Shakespeare says, " Give me sea-room and I care not," so he asks only for air-room, and the further he is from the earth the safer he feels. And, possessed of sound machines and with a duty to do, we may take it for granted that the officers who take up their aeroplanes, or the pilots and crews who go up in dirigibles, will do their • duty. It will be a duty which will carry honour with it, perhaps, with a certainty and to a degree that has not as yet been attainable by any branch of an army's fighting forces. But the duty will be there to be done ; and with the drone of air- ships and aeroplanes already humming over African battle- fields, over French and German flying-grounds, over England from Hendon to Salisbury Plain, the question of the future of war in the air has been removed a stage further—from the duty of fighting to the duty of supply. Tho dirigible and the aeroplane are already instruments of modern warfare, and each modern army must complete its equipment. Next, we may suppose, we may look for a manual of aerial tactics.
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