Page:Collier's New Encyclopedia v. 01.djvu/76

AERONAUTICS keep within speaking radius of his commander in the air and his ground station. At the beginning of the war, aerial supremacy resided with the Germans, but as the conflict progressed it gradually swung to the side of the Allies, so that when the armistice was signed they had an overwhelming superiority in men and machines.

Far overshadowing this phase of aerial warfare, however, was the bombing machine. These were first developed and used on a large scale by the Germans. The dropping of bombs on fortified places came well within the spirit of the articles of war. But Germany went further and dropped them upon the helpless civilian population of Paris, London, and other cities. The claim that these were fortified towns in the accepted meaning of the word was merely a pretext. Not even hospitals were spared in the savage warfare she adopted. The design was not merely to inflict a certain number of casualties, which after all could not be considerable, compared with the whole population, but shake the nerves and weaken the morale of the people back of the firing line. How greatly they failed of this effect is now a matter of history. At first, Germany relied for this work chiefly on her Zeppelins, of which more than a hundred were constructed during the war. But these giant dirigibles proved unsatisfactory. They were too unwieldy, were largely at the mercy of wind and weather, and offered too great a target for anti-aircraft guns and the hosts of planes that rose in the air like a swarm of wasps to attack the huge craft with bombs and incendiary bullets. Gradually their use was abandoned as their vulnerability was demonstrated. Thirty at least are known to have been destroyed, and the great majority became unserviceable before the end of the war. The same fate overtook the majority of the Gross, the Parseval,and the Schuette-Lanz types of dirigibles.

The bombing planes which replaced them had manifest advantages over their predecessors. They were speedy, less liable to be sighted by the enemy, and large enough to carry a heavy complement of bombs. Their military value was enormous in breaking up enemy bases and depots and preventing the concentration of troops. During eight days of the German drive in 1918, French airmen dropped 317 tons of bombs in the German lines, and produced a demoralization that greatly increased the effectiveness of Foch's counter-offensive.

Airplane bombs are constructed with great care, and so shaped that they offer the least possible resistance to the air. They have fins on their tails to assure a perpendicular fall. They are carried on the planes either suspended under the wings or fuselage of the planes or car-