THE NEW ARMIES OF THE AIR.

Wairoa Bell, Volume XXXI, Issue 215, 11 January 1918, Page 4 (Supplement)

THE NEW ARMIES OF THE AIR.

It is gratifying to have the assurance of such an authority as the Editor of “The Aeroplane'* that, great as the growth of the Army has been, one may fairly assume that the growth of the British flying ser- , vices—which comprise the Royal Naval Air Service and the Royal Flying Corps—has been greater. One cannot, of course, give numbers, so that he can only indicate in a general way the immensity of the expansion which has taken place. As a branch of the senior service the R.N.A.S. must, opinion of “The Aeroplane,” be considered first. When the war began the R.N.A.S. had# just completed a concentration of all their available machines for the naval review—which turned out to be the mobilisation of the fleet —at Spithead. They managed to raise on that occasion about twenty seaplanes, one flying boat, and about twenty shore-going aeroplanes. The service was commanded by a post-cap-who had one commander under him and about half a dozen squadroncommanders, who ranked as lieutenantcommanders. There was one big station for land machines and five seaplane stations along the coast. The Admiralty regarded the whole thing as rather an interesting hobby for a few enthusiasts backed by Mr Winston Churchill. Besides seaplanes and aeroplanes the R.N.A.S. had a small but good German airship, a small French airship which was nearly as good, and some curiosities in the way of little British airships which had been handed over by the Army. To-day the Admiralty thinks so much of the R.N.A.S that it issues special communiques almost daily recording the prowess of naval aviators ashore and afloat; in fact, the R.N.A.S. covers more paper in this way than does the whole of the rest o<f the British Navy. The R.N.A.S. is commanded by a commodore of the first class, who is also Air Lord on the Board of Admiralty. He has two other commodores as colleagues, and probably half a dozen postcaptains among his subordinates. Wingcommanders, who rank -with commanders R.N., are reckoned by the dozen, and squadron-commanders are so numerous that without a copy of the Navy List one could not hope to keep track of them. There are naval ail* stations all along the coact, and almost any one of them has more machines than the whole R.N.A.S. possessed befor tlie war. In addition to coast defence work, which includes submarine catching, tlie R.N.A.S. has stations abroad, especially in the Mediterranean, whence it chases submarines, and it has a larger number of seaplanecarrying ships, which enable it to work further from land than its coast patrols dare to go. Detachments of the R.N.A.S., sometime-:; with seaplanes, sometimes with shore-going machines, are co-operating with the army in Flanders, in the Balkans, in Egypt, in German East Africa, and in Mesopotamia, each detachment being many times as large as the whole of the original R.N.A.S. In addition to its seaplanes and land areoplanes, the R.N.A.S. has hundreds of airships of various sizes, which do good work in patrolling for submarines and escorting food ships in dangerous waters. Also it has Hiany kite-balloons, which are J used for artillery observation. The j airship and kite-ballcon sections employ i thousands of officers and men, so one may well imagine how vast a thing is the R.N.A.S. of to-day. Vast-as is the R.N.A.S., however, it is -v comparatively small affair compared with the Royal Flying Corps. At the outbreak of war the R.F.C. was little if any stronger than the R.N.A.S.- Only * month before the war a coneentratio a of all the squadros of the R.F.C. was held on Salisbury Plain. To the best of the writer’s recollection tfhe five squadrons there aseembled could only get together about forty .aeroplanes. When war began five squadrons were more or less fully equipped by borrowing machines and motor transport from the Central Flying and all fle v the Channel to France successfully, which was a gre:.t feat in those days. The R.F.C. was then commanded by a brigadier-general, and he Iliad about seven or eight majors under him, commanding the squadrons or on the staff. To-day the R.F.C. is a whole army in itself. Its then commander is now a lieutenant-general, a rank which would entitle him to command an army corps in v 'he field. As in the cas° of the R.N.A.S., the R.F.C. has special communiques all to itself, issued by the general officer commanding-in-shief in various parts of the world, which is an honour not accorded to any other branch of the King’s Army. The R.F.C. now fights its own battles in the air, and takes a hand in everybody else’s battles as well, whether at home o,r abroad. Even in England,” the ' writer proceeds, “.one can obtain some idea of the expansion of the coi*ps. When I passed an aerodrame near London the other day,” he says, “I counted more aeroplanes in the air at once than the vdiole R.F.C. was able to put in the-air during its pre-war review, and every one of them was a better machine than the best which flew the Channel with the original Expeditionary Force. That was only one aerodrom: everyone anywhere in England, except in the mountain districts knows that it is nearly .as hard to get miles away from an aerodrome as it is to get miles away from a railway station. The privileged people who can now drive motor-cars In the country will tell one that on any reasonably fine day they meet more aeroplanes than motor-cars. Every aerodrome employs dozens of officers and hundreds of men. The squadrons run into hm-

dreds, the officers into thousands, and still the corps keeps on growing. New aerodromes are constantly opened, and one begins to wonder where we are going to grow our 1918-19 potr toes. Moos of this wonderful expansion is taking place at home, for the bulk of it is concerned at present with training. When the demands of the training establishments settle down to a fixed figure, instead of growing daily greater, we may then let the German see what tlie weight, of the corps really is. Probably by that time, however, the war will be over, for the growth of the R.L.C., or of the Imperial Air Service, as it will doubtless be known before long, cannot stop until we have the same preponderance over all other nations in the air that we l ave on the sea.. Such preponderance i.i this Empirre’s only hope cf survival in the future.”