Eyes All Over the Sky: Aerial Reconnaissance in the First World War by James Streckfuss

Author:James Streckfuss [Streckfuss, James]
Language: eng
Format: azw3
Tags: HISTORY / Military / World War I
ISBN: 9781612003689
Publisher: Casemate
Published: 2016-05-19T04:00:00+00:00

Map 2: England, Wales, and Scotland. © Sydney Barth

CHAPTER 7

The Air War over the Sea

When in August, 1918, I found on visiting France a complete chain of Naval Aviation Stations engaged in a systematic patrol of the waters of that “neck of the bottle” through which our troops and supplies had to pass, I had but to examine the weekly charts of German submarine operations to realize how much our aviators were doing to make these waters safe.

—Franklin D. Roosevelt, Flying Officers of the United States Navy 1917–1919

The protection given to convoys by the presence of accompanying aeroplanes is considerable and though attacks have actually been carried out when D.H.6 aeroplanes have been present, there is no doubt but that the enemy’s submarines have been seriously hampered in their operations by the constant fear of being attacked or sighted by aircraft. In this connection it is of interest to note that the day of greatest losses was one on which aircraft were unable to operate.

—P. R. C. Groves for Director, Air Division, Employment of Aeroplanes for Anti-Submarine Work on North East Coast

Although airmen’s attempts to liaise with the infantry during the war did not always achieve spectacular results, cooperative efforts between aviators and sailors proved far more impressive. At the outset of the war the British Royal Navy implemented a North Sea blockade to prevent merchant ships from reaching their destinations and keep the German surface fleet bottled up in port.1 The military and geopolitical effects of the blockade, though slow to show themselves, eventually proved effective, slowly bleeding Germany of resources, sapping the morale of the German people, and giving the United States a financial stake in Allied success.2 More narrowly, the blockade set the tone for the war at sea and for the next four years German naval activity in the Atlantic, the North Sea, the English Channel, and the air war over these waters centered on efforts to either break the blockade or, failing that, to inflict similar damage on the Allies.

Naval aviation differed significantly from its land-based counterpart in the way it interacted with the non-flying forces it supported. Military aviators regularly separated their reconnaissance missions from offensive operations, observing or photographing enemy activities that bombers or the artillery dealt with at a later time. Naval flyers similarly reported their sightings to nearby cooperating surface vessels, but the fleeting nature of floating targets frequently forced naval aviators to attack the targets they spotted immediately.

An American, Eugene Ely, demonstrated what the future held for naval aviation when he successfully flew an airplane off the deck of USS Birmingham in November 1910 and then two months later landed one on the deck of the Pennsylvania.3 The British created an Air Department within the Admiralty and began their own experiments in cooperation between aircraft and naval vessels in 1912, still more than two years before the beginning of the war.4 The duties naval aviators anticipated performing included scouting for the fleet using aircraft carried aboard ships, patrol work along the British coastline, and cooperative missions flown alongside defending flotillas and submarines.

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