Airships In War.

New York Times 100 years ago today, July 14, 1912:

Will Turn the Battlefield Into a Chessboard

THE AEROPLANE IN WAR. By Claude Grahame-Whlte and Harry Harper. Illustrated. J.B. Lippincott Company. $3.

    To get anywhere near the ideal in war it is necessary to go back to the primitive. Then, if two men evolved a mutual hatred of one another, they fought it out between themselves, and each shouldered the responsibilities of his own dislike and his own fighting. The more civilized we grow the farther we get from that ideal. The man who sends the challenge and the man who takes it up recede further and further from the battlefield and suffer the results of their actions less and less. And the aeroplane, like every other invention that has been turned to martial use, intensifies this condition. It will make, say Messrs. Grahame-White & Harper, of the battlefield a chessboard, at which the two commanders in chief will sit, using men and guns as their pieces. And so war, becoming more and more a thing of cold-blooded intelligence instead of hot-blooded brute force, will become more and more a thing satanic, malevolent, horrible.
    Up to the present the work of the war aeroplane has been confined to scouting, but our authors think that it will soon prove its worth as an engine of destruction which, in large squadrons of weight-lifting machines, will make organized onslaughts and rain down tons of missiles over any given spot. They also believe that, with the inevitable improvements in weight-carrying possibilities, it will soon become practicable to transport troops by aeroplane, especially for their quick movement in an emergency. And this is their prevision of the next conflict: "Probably waged with light guns firing explosive shells, the next great war will begin, not on earth, but several thousand feet in the air."
    Prophecy, however, is allowed to fill but an extremely small part of the book's 250 pages. Nearly the whole of it is taken up with account and discussion of what has actually been done. Brief as is the history of the aeroplane, that of the flying machine for purposes of war is far shorter. But the authors, after a chapter devoted to the dawn and progress of aviation, go into it with much detail, and recount very fully those first experiments in the French manoeuvres of the Autumn of 1910 that set the civilized nations agog, and inspired everywhere the conviction that a revolution in military methods impended. Then follows a full review of the development of military aviation in every country in which it has been attempted. And the two authors take occasion every few pages to be openly and emphatically ashamed of England's backward position in this matter, and to point out earnestly and enthusiastically how necessary it is that she should join in this new martial movement and bring her interest, equipment, and experiment up to at least an even line with those of her national rivals. A chapter inserted while the book was going to press gives a summary of the British Government's military aviation programme for 1912-1913, which the authors find inadequate and disappointing. There is discussion also of the training of army airmen, the cost of war aeroplanes, of wireless telegraphy, and photography as aids to aerial reconnaissance, of the development of all-weather war aeroplanes, of the problem of artillery fire and the aeroplane, of weight-carrying aeroplanes and their destructive potentialities, of the value of the aeroplane in naval warfare. On this, last question the authors are enthusiastic, believing that, for coastal use and for use from the decks of ships at sea, fast-flying aeroplanes would be invaluable.
    Reviewing the use of the aeroplane by the Italians in their Tripoli campaign, Messrs. Grahame-White and Harper decide that it demonstrates "the value or the scouting aeroplane when used in difficult or inaccessible country." They think it is hardly to be doubted that the aeroplane "will entirely change military reconnaissance."
    With painstaking enthusiasm the two authors have brought together and discussed every item of the development of military aviation, and their book breathes their ardent belief that in order to save itself from early destruction every nation of the earth ought at once to set loose a cloud of flying fighters.