Good afternoon, and it's great to be back here again. I'd like to ask first of all just are there any naval aviators in here? Any Marines? Not aviators. What about grunt? I just want to be careful about who I'm going to Anyway Striking the hornet's nest is actually comes from an expression by Woodrow Wilson during World War one and it will become a little more self-explanatory as they go along in a way this is a An exploration of the road not taken if you can go back to a time before The aircraft carrier before the Navy had really figured out what it was going to do with the airplane there were a number of various things that were tried various Options that were explored and this is one. This is one that has received almost no scrutiny because the role of strategic bombing of course was taken over by the the army Air Force and as time went by and the Navy then made its transition to to carry a warfare, but I Think it's it's an interesting Story and there is a connection between what happened here and what happened a generation later and so Hopefully you will enjoy walking this path with me today When we hear the term strategic bombing usually certain pictures come to mind Right, we see this Anybody ever fly in one of these by the way Yeah, I've been up on one of these a couple of times and It's quite an experience or we see pictures like this Or We see this If you recognize this what we usually don't think of when we hear strategic bombardment is this Here we have We'll come back to this, but this is a a handy page Obama, this is really the first successful strategic bomber actually ordered in 1914 Which tells you something about how rapidly? Aviation technology was advancing when you think that this thing was ordered 11 years after the Right-brother first trip down in North Carolina Pretty remarkable We don't usually think of this All right the Dreadnought Navy of 1918 or These characters are not usually considered a great pioneers in avial aviate naval aviation anybody recognize this gentlemen That's William Benson. That's the first CNO Here we have justices Daniels the secretary of the Navy both of whom were continually criticized by the flyers for their lack of support for aviation initiatives, although I think that reputation is a Little bit unfairly earned, but again, we'll come back to that We don't think about this when we think about strategic bombardment and yet this German U-boat is going to be the heart of What the Navy is all about? quick review 1914 Europe goes to war over the next three years Germany raid wages a submarine campaign of varying intensity until finally in The winter of 1917 the decision is made to engage in unrestricted submarine warfare try and drive Britain out of the war This will eventually bring the United States into the war a couple of months later Now the US Navy had been preparing for a battleship war For the previous decade had put together a fleet of dreadnoughts They were going to be of almost no use During the war the challenge is going to be the submarine the submarine the submarine the submarine Until the spring of 1918 Virtually all of the naval personnel that were in Europe were dealing with this issue of the submarine How do you get it? now The particular threat that the US Navy focused on in the early days was in this arena if you Read Admiral Sims book the victory at sea he talked specifically about this Germany had occupied the coast of Belgium and It established a network of bases at our stand Zabruga and Bruges from which submarines were sent out into the North Sea into the English Channel to try and Intercept British commerce and they had been quite successful at this and when the United States entered the war in April of 1917 The Allies were losing Shipping at the rate of eight or nine hundred thousand tons a month simply unsustainable Unsustainable amounts so what was to be done about that and One group in the Navy Thought that maybe Those little airplanes those unappreciated airplanes might play a role and They sent a fellow by the name of Kenneth Whiting and a small group of untrained enlisted men few officers to Europe as a kind of an advanced guard of naval aviation efforts and Whiting was taken sort of in hand by the Allies and taken on a tour of various Bases and such one of the places that he was taken was Dunkirk Dunkirk which is right down the coast From Belgium and Dutch Dunkirk's was really the cockpit of the effort to deal with this this submarine threat here and He was An aggressive energetic Officer he had a lot of a surprising amount of leeway for a junior officer and He really really pushed hard for the establishment of a US Navy Facility in Dunkirk to be used against the German submarine threat in this area and in fact His proposals were agreed to and this became one of the first US stations that began operations during the war What they were trying to get at Was this this is a surveillance? photograph of Bruges, this is the the Basin at Bruges This is connected to the ocean by canals which head out to the coast to Zabruga and Ostend and in here were based Fertilizers of destroyers and submarines and the submarines were sheltered here So the the huge concrete submarine pens that we think of with regard to World War two were absolutely in use during the First World War and these were all heavily defended they were heavily defended by a ring of any aircraft guns by coastal emplacements by very heavy artillery that was in place there by Land-based aircraft by as I say flotellers of destroyers and various other Warcraft and They had a rather Safe sanctuary from which to operate and the question was what do you do about this threat? Now this is where the US Navy was going to originally set up operations. This is Dunkirk Harbor We're talking at this point about flying boats Flying boats you can't take off out in the open water of the English Channel. You need a Calm protected area, which means you're in this harbor and you can see from the layout here How difficult that was going to be and anything but relatively small aircraft really could not operate from here And that's going to become a challenge. This is where the American station was located right there That site still exists today. It's been cleared of everything But the seawall where they were located is still quite visible if you visit the site This is what the Americans were going to use. This is a Lidi Donate to know Flying boat It's kind of a pig actually In against the headwind you could make 50 or 60 miles an hour. I'd carried a very light bomb load Not terribly maneuverable and with this Navy crews were going to go out looking for submarines Out in the North Sea and in the English Channel and they would mount patrols in the morning usually and patrols later in the afternoon and the chances of finding a submarine was relatively limited The chances of actually be able to mount an attack against one was even less There was said that you could spot a surface submarine at a distance of about five miles Okay At 60 miles an hour it would take five minutes to get to that submarine Which is about five times longer than it took for the submarine to get under the water This was never going to work in addition If Dunkirk is close to the German bases Well, then it also means it is easily subject to attack in July of 1918 Let's see the Navy had been there since Say September of 1917. It was recorded. There had been 150 attacks on Dunkirk either by enemy destroyers aircraft or artillery This is the result of a bombing attack in And I think April of 1918 This is one of the scout aircraft that was used as a kind of an escort for these More lumbering flying boats that was not that was not hit directly But obviously a nearby blast has shredded that thing And that was one of eight aircraft that were knocked out that day Dunkirk was not going to be the answer to trying to deal with the submarine threat The answer was going to be offered by these gentlemen Dunkirk of course is up in Flanders. This was the British sector of the front for the most part While the US Army was largely under the influence of the French the US Navy was largely under the influence of the British and Naval aviation even more so was under the influence of the British and the most important People in that process over here is General Charles Lam. He was in charge of the British naval aviation efforts in The Dunkirk area and it was his mission to somehow deal with the submarine the fellow on the right there is Spencer Gray who was a Wing commander with the Royal Naval Air Service and he had led some of the earliest attacks by the Royal Naval Air Service on German targets actually in Germany and in Cologne and Düsseldorf and Between them and others they had developed this notion that rather than Hunting after submarines all over the place You should go directly at the bases that the Germans operated and This is really the first strategic bombing campaign Carried out in the war because they begin efforts on in these In this direction as early as 1915 and 1916 They were never able to devote All of the men and all the material necessary because every time They would get ramped up in this operation. They would be calls from the British Army for support against ground operations Say at the Battle of the Somme and elsewhere and so it was a very sporadic effort When the Americans got to Dunkirk in 1917 General Lam essentially put his arms around Kenneth Whiting and said my boy. Do I have something for you and Whiting who was looking for a mission looking for a role to Emphasize the importance that naval aviation might assume was completely Taken over with this notion that What the British had been trying to do the Americans were now going to Assist in and ultimately replace in terms of making the the principal effort and so In terms of an organized philosophy strategic bombing really is a British innovation the German bombing of the war was More in the lines of terror bombing in other words There was no concentrated effort to try and knock out Production facilities or so forth, but the British had developed a theory of going after industrial production against iron mines against Various factories and so forth that was the goal was only partially implemented, but the Americans Got a hold of that and said this is a great idea and Bought into it completely continued to develop it and The Navy oddly enough given those battleships that we have seen There are people in the Navy who decided that yeah, this is not such a bad idea and the reason is relatively simple if you accept That the greatest threat is the submarine Then the question is how are you going to be able to get at the submarine? It's going to be very hard to chase them down. You're not going to be able to send the fleet into attack Bases in Germany How do you get at the submarine and the answer somebody said came up with was fine? We'll fly there. This is the one thing that we have where we can approach these bases We can destroy these bases from the air and in the end Benson and Daniels Supported it and the effort to do that what became known as the Northern bombing group was the largest single Aviation program that the Navy instituted during the war With literally thousands of personnel devoted towards this as it turns out Once the idea caught hold then several other bombing initiatives Took place and so then the notion that the Navy was either technologically backward or not very ambitious in its Aspirations is simply not true from top to bottom the Navy supported this as the most likely way to be able to defeat the submarine That's the jet-handle page. That was what they hoped to use. This was the Principal British bomber of the war first design is the 0100 type then the 0400 type This thing actually in its physical dimensions is almost the size of the 17 Now not nearly the weight Not nearly the load but in terms of its physical dimensions I don't have a picture, but by the end of the war the British had developed something called the Hanley page 1500 which was just beginning to be deployed which could fly from Britain to Berlin and back carrying a couple of tons of bombs in performance it Was not that dissimilar from a World War two bomber not nearly as slow not as well protected But in terms of the bomb load and the distance it was an extraordinary Thing and this is what the Navy hoped to be able to use and this fellow here more than anybody else is The one who's responsible for putting the Navy on this track. His name is Robert Lovett he was a junior Lieutenant at the time just recently commissioned he was The son of the president of the Union Pacific Railroad he was yeah student and He became the sort of go-to young guy at Naval Aviation Headquarters in Paris He was extremely smart very organized very analytical and it was who having spent time With the British going over piles of statistics it came to the conclusion That it doesn't make any sense to chase submarines All over the ocean you will never find them if you want to find submarines you go to where the submarines are and He began developing a proposal in the winter of 1918 To do just that He was supported by this fellow. This is Eddie McDonald. He was a young naval aviator Manapolis in 1912 Won the Medal of Honor at for action at Veracruz He also Came to see this as a great idea and in fact their boss Hutch Kohn who was a destroyer man and an engineer With no flying experience at all But who because of his rank and at his minute his administrative assistant Experience had been put in charge of aviation in Europe by by Sims Said to these two go at it He sent them off to the British where they Went on a series of missions with the British Flying over Belgium at night during the day came back even more enthused with the idea wrote up a proposal Which was then forwarded to Washington to create a a group of squadrons That would be used to bomb these German facilities day and night continuously Until they were literally obliterated in the language that they used The squadrons would be located here in the pot of Calais over in this area right here. Here's Dunkirk The targets are up there. This is where they were going to be Set up Command was going to be given to this fellow here captain David Henry Han. He was another destroyer man He had been captain of a of a Q ship earlier in the war and he was now placed in charge of this This is this bombing campaign the Navy hoped to mount frankly, he knew nothing about aviation and Spencer Gray who we saw before became attached to the naval service and he provided a great deal of Guidance in fact the head of marine aviation Complained that it was really Spencer Gray that was running the naval aviation and not the Navy a Whole series of bases were established. This is the the headquarters That was set up in the the Navy produced Miles and miles and miles of these prefab Dormitory office structures. I was looking at some of the photographs Inside of Newport during the second of the First World War and you can see acres of these sort of structures to house the recruits That were training here This was going to be the principal bombing base at St. Engelberg You'll notice obviously it's in the French countryside in fact, they couldn't begin operations until the the spring harvest had been completed and that required that required a Good deal of patience on the part of the Navy that was anxious to get going They established a large supply base in the south of England in a place called Eastley, which is near South Hampton you see it here in its It's really formative stages. It eventually grew to be a base with in excess of 2000 personnel there Which for the time was a very large facility Now the Navy hoped to use that That handy-page bomber which was the the sort of the Rolls Royce of bombers during the war and in fact It was powered by Rolls Royce engines They were not enough of them around And instead They made do with this. This is the Caproni Bomber The Navy ordered a goodly number of these things They were awful Poorly manufactured the engines poorly machined Months and months and months behind schedule when they finally began Flying them training and then trying to fly them from Italy up to France Because the railroads were too clogged and shipping was in too short demand of The 19 or an initial air crane aircraft only eight of them made it safely The rest of them went down often in flames from the Faulty Carburetors in the Fiat engines here we see another Another close-up these aircraft managed to carry out two Actual combat missions only one of which delivered munitions on the target In late September One of these was Taxing on the field it hit a Kind of a depression in the ground the plane knows forward the forward part of the fuselage hit the ground and Buckled back which trapped pilots in there the engines caught fire and the pilots burned to death and That was the end of the use of the Caproni's and so these heavy bombers which was supposed to be the heart of This this bombing effort We're grounded and no further missions of that sort were flown This is that this is one of these planes at Caproni and you'll notice the high-tech Vehicle they're being used to service the field That this was a big-time program though At least in its conception Was evidenced by the fact that when the Naval Affairs Committee of the House representative sent a large delegation to Europe in the summer of 1918 to Just inspect everything that was going on they spent considerable time at Engelvert at the bombing the bomber base and this is This is a group of them meeting and in fact That's Bob Lovett right in there who was placed in charge of the heavy bombers now heavy bombers Only flew at night they were slow Cruising realistically no matter what the speck said probably around 75 miles an hour They were large targets and by 1917-1918 any aircraft fire had reached a Tolible level of efficiency and you didn't want to fly one of these things Over a heavily defended target in the middle of the day and so instead They would fly at night and they would fly in probably around 7500 feet, which was really the effective ceiling they would then turn the engines off and descend and And drop their their bomb load on the glide at probably around 5,000 feet The point being that it's hard to drop a bomb on a target Certainly hard by 1918 standards when there is no Effective bomb site, which means you have to get pretty close and a mile of altitude was considered pretty close But it's also almost a point-blank shot for three four five inch An aircraft gun and so you only went at night which meant it was almost impossible to find a target so Now The heavy bomber effort was a failure great idea But the technology was not up to it the ability to supply Aircraft dependable aircraft was not up to it But that had only been part of the program the other half was to use lighter day bombers think the World War one equivalent of the B-25 and these were going to be used by Marine Corps of Flyers and so you're going to have the Navy flying the heavy bombers at night And you're going to have the Marines flying the lighter bombers during the day and the idea that was by hitting a target Repeatedly day at night day at night day at night Eventually you grind down the anti-aircraft defenses, which allows you to bomb from lower and lower heights Which then allows you to to knock out The target at least that was the idea now the Marines Got into this game Because the army had shown very little interest in having anything to do with the Marines. What a big surprise when the Marines decided to send infantry to Europe in 1917 The fledgling Marine Flyers said well, we should send Marine Flyers with them to provide reconnaissance observation Services of that sort great idea So the Marines sent this fellow Alfred Cunningham To Europe in the fall of 1917 to sort of get the lay of the landscape and to negotiate with the the American Army about The logistics of all this he got to army headquarters and the army basically told him Thank you very much, but we don't want to have anything to do with you We'll maybe let you run a training depot a couple of hundred miles away in the south of France Well, that didn't suit Cunningham who was a a an aviation zealot I mean he really was they he's known as the father of marine aviation and he really does deserve the title so he goes off to Dunkirk and who does he meet but the British and general lamb and The Navy guys there and he says ah, this is something that the Marines can get involved in and so he goes back to the United States and he puts comes up with a proposal which he Sends to the general board that the Marines will man several squadrons of escort aircraft small aircraft to Support an augmented Patrol bombing effort in other words those those DD's that I showed you before Going out and looking for submarines and that's what he goes to the general board with the general board said That's a great idea, and they send it to Europe and in Paris Hutch Krohn says we're not so fast We've got this much better idea to use the heavy bombers against the land targets There is a typical bureaucratic fight over a period of about two months in the end the European based idea is is receives the support of Benson and Daniels and The Marines are given the the job of handling the day bombing part of this Here you see The marine training bears that training base down in Miami There's actually although it can't quite tell there are three different sorts of aircraft There this is about five miles outside of downtown Miami The training took place there in the summer of the spring and early summer of 1918 Here they're actually assembling one of the the training aircraft that they were using you'll notice We've got wings on the left side, but no upper wing no wings on the right side yet The airplanes came to the base and knocked down in crates and then were assembled there When the Marines had completed their very rudimentary training They came to Europe in the July of 1918 and then were distributed Among some of the British squadrons where they would go on a series of missions the idea being to to learn the ropes To see what were things really like over the front What is it like to try and deliver a bomb load while you are under heavy attack by either enemy aircraft or enemy? Any aircraft fire This is an aircraft of one of the squadrons that the Marines were with and I don't know how clearly you can see this but There is damage here here and here a An aircraft shell has come up and literally passed through the aircraft without exploding and The pilot was able to Land this thing because it hadn't exploded so there had been no blast damage. There have been no shrapnel He had not been Had not been killed and he was actually able to to land this thing here we see The assembled flying personnel one of the Marine squadrons ultimately four Complete squadrons arrived there again. There was a problem getting them equipped with aircraft by October of 1918 They had enough aircraft to launch the equivalent about one squadron-sized attack during the day By this time also Something else had happened The whole reason for this effort for the heavy bomber effort was to get those submarine bases but when in the summer and fall of 1918 Germany began to retreat as the Allied forces advanced and in early October 19 for 18 they abandoned those facilities and so they didn't need to be bombed out of existence the Allied armies literally in that case walked in and occupied them So what do you do with the Marine flyers who are in the field? In fact, they became part of the tactical forces That were involved in the Allied ground advance so they never actually got into the strategic bombing game Here we have three ground crew turning over the propeller on a DH4 this would have been the the light bomber That one of the light bombers that they were equipped with It's got a high compression 400 horsepower Liberty engine and to turn that thing over by hand Required this sort of daisy chain effort here These were not very safe machines to fly They were prone to all sorts of problems and This is actually a famous incident in Marine flying history and It's occurred right at the end of the war There's a sort of a line here That is a berm that it has been thrown up probably by a Small bulldozer and on the side that you see all the personnel running around is a bomb dump This is where the ordinance for those aircraft was held. It's located Was located right at the end of the runway at La Fren, which was the major marine operating base a Young pilot by the name Ralph Talbot who a couple of weeks earlier Had performed the exploits which was going to win him and his gunner the Medal of Honor Was at the field that day his airplane had been damaged they were Reworking and refitting the engine and he was going to take it out for a test hop He had with him a buddy of his by the name of Colgate Darden Who in later time is going to become the governor? I think of Virginia. He's going to come to president University of Virginia. It goes on to a very distinguished career in in law and in education and politics and Talbot invites Darden along for a ride Now they're flying a DH4 DH4 this is again this light bomber where the pilot is essentially sitting just under the wings and The gunner is sitting behind the fuel tank in an aft cockpit Darden Doesn't want to be bothered Fastening his seatbelt and so he's literally sitting on his seatbelt in this rear cockpit They rev up the engine Starts to head down the The field No go can't get the revs high enough bring it back Fiddle some more turn around come back. They just start to lift off Just may be getting about Got far off the ground When they get to the end of the field the bottom the undercarriage hits the berm the plane flips over Into the bomb dump the DH4 with that That fuel tank in the middle there was prone to fire The plane went up push Hopefully Talbot was crushed to death by the tank before he burned Because he was trapped in the plane and what you're looking at here There is part of the frame of The wings and we now have a massive fire in the middle of this bomb dump and the crew is Obviously trying to deal with that With the risk that this whole thing is going to go up Hence the rather unfocused nature of this photograph Um It's one of the only things like this I've ever seen What about Darden when the plane hit the berm and flipped over? He went flying literally flying out of this thing and Came down in the surrounding fields probably in excess of a hundred feet away Very badly injured in terms of broken bones and such and with this chaos They simply assumed that he was in this conflagration He was not and eventually they found him To the hospital to London home to the United States and and and have a life This occurred around the 28th of October in early November the war is over now It sounds like Okay, not much success. What's the big deal? Well, this was only part Of what the navy was up to in the the field of of bombing This is the shot taken in a place called killing home. Killing home is on the northeastern shore of england across the The north sea From from Holland This was set up Again as a bombing base With these large These were age 16 flying boats These guys are doing machine gun practice here And these planes were to be used to launch raids against german fleet installations On the northwest coast of germany This actually became the largest navy aviation operating base during the war Um Fully manned about 1500 personnel. And so this was another Idea of how do you get at the enemy? will bomb them His man named John Callum John Callum was a Curtis contract pilot before the war He was essentially in charge of aviation activities for the navy in Italy During the war and he proposed a plan to create a southern bombing group The southern bombing group was going to be the the analog if you will to this northern bombing group That hutch cone and his men had tried to put together This bombing group would have had over 900 aircraft As part as its as its full compliments And the fact is that the navy gave this serious consideration and sent an inspection team a high level inspection team To italy right towards the end of the war to see about implementing this thing And it's only because the war ended that the effort was not made To put this one into effect And then we have this Henry Mustin another important figure in the early history of aviation naval aviation He again was trying to deal with this this puzzle. How can we get a bomber? That has enough of a payload Close to these heavy german targets Because the flying boats Were simply not well suited for bombing operations. They were too big. They were too underpowered They carried too small a bomb load. You needed a a ground bomber But how do you get one close enough? Well, he said You build a boat a high powered boat And you put a bomber on it now this is a caproni And you take this thing out And you crank up the engines on the bomber to full power You get the boat headed into the wind at full speed And they did all their engineering calculations and they decided that they could get that whole thing moving At about 60 miles an hour into the wind At which point that's fast enough For the bomber to simply lift right off The boat That was the theory Don't laugh it works um The navy supported this They they began Experiments especially down at hampton roads several of these craft were developed and Just as the war was ending They attempted to launch one of these things It was not successful. There was something wrong with the release mechanism But a couple of months later, they did put a smaller aircraft on one of these And in march of 1919 actually launched an airplane from one of these high speed high speed boats The idea that must have had was That we will build about 2,500 of these And send swarms of bombers Against the german fleet In keel Williams-haven and so forth and so if you actually add it all up There were four major bombing Campaigns that the navy either tried to institute Contemplated experimented on All during that year of 1918 because it was only in 1918 this activity was taking place, which is um Pretty rapid when you think about it to be able to try and put these programs together at that speed now In the end They were not successful The war ended there were technical issues um The army never liked the idea that the navy was doing this Thought it was an absolutely an invasion of their missions And literally as soon as the war was over this was an area that the navy dropped and Turned its attention back to the question of how do you get aircraft with the fleet and of course that That issue was solved within a couple of years With the introduction of the aircraft carrier So the army gets a hold of the The bombing mission which is going to be developed sort of intellectually and technologically During the 1930s especially But there is a navy connection between Here and what happens in 1940s This is that young whiz kid bob love it the one who had Put together into the navy's first plan To uh put together this strategic bombing operation He had been bedeviled Not by organizational problems He was able to um Find the man the personnel He was able to get them trained He was able to get bases established In terms of the operational aspects of it just carrying out of and organizing and carrying out of raids No problem the one thing That put the kibosh on the whole plan was the ability to get obama both technically technically And In terms of just simply supply and numbers well After world war one He goes to work on wall street Maintains an interest in this area In 1940 He gets a call essential from the secretary of war henry stimson who basically says bob I need you back in washington And he goes to washington in 1940 as a special assistant To the secretary of war And his job is to Go out and survey america's industrial capacity To build bombers and to build aircraft for the war in 1941 He gets his position upgraded to assistant secretary of war for aviation And he then is in charge On the civilian side of the army the army air forces entire bombing effort in the second world war and During the war in interviews. He talked about The experience of world war one And how the idea had been that you needed to strike at a target Continuously relentlessly until it had been completely destroyed And that philosophy not his alone, but that philosophy is what runs through the entire Bombing program the second world war and who of course is his closest ally during the war hap-onald who is running the entire show and so intellectually at least The the seeds of this that the the navy had been Dealing with all those years ago Comes to fruition in another war generation later So thank you very much Yes and I separate forces to Queenstown among others At the beginning of the war in 1917. That's right There was a lot of activity between the surface ships and aviation support in terms of surveillance and directing attacks and citing submarines and all that jazz Did they have any kind of communication systems set up? There that was reliable and also with regard to this strategic effort to coordinate With the forces at sea at the early stage of this program well certainly not in May of 1917 June july when those first naval Units arrived There in fact there was virtually no aviation in ireland at that time Um, and that is one reason why the navy Established air bases there in 1918 because the british had not established Bases there in terms of coordination it was there were a number of a number of ways that Coordinated coordination occurred, but not the way you would think of today for instance um, you would have A pilot shooting flares You would have a pilot dropping a sort of a float buoy device that would contain a message They would literally fly by a plane and you know flap their wings and so forth, but the ability to communicate by This would be a telegraph radio telegraph Was very limited and was prone to Breakdown it was literally just in its beginning stages and the ability to talk Was only being experimented with and so the the the coordination actually Was a kind of a A three-way thing you would have an airplane out on patrol and if it was lucky It would spool out its Antenna which was literally a you know a long piece of wire 50 or 100 feet that would you would Spool out behind the aircraft and you would communicate with the base Back on land Then they would communicate Out to the water if your plane was on the water you couldn't communicate because you had no antenna So it was very very hit or miss Yeah, is there any indication that the Germans were doing the same thing? Experimenting with with mom with what with bombing? Well, of course the Germans had A fairly substantial Abombing effort that was directed both against England You know called the the literature sometimes called the first battle of britain. Uh, the uh Uh, there was a one plane about the size of the henley page call us stock in the giants And you had then the famous gaffa bomber, which was a little bit it's smaller And those raids were carried out on and off over an extended period of time and became People who Were in london, you know the americans especially who arrived in london in 1917 1918 would talk about the bombing raids And of course you also had the zeppelins which were attempting to carry out raids although those by the end of the wars Those have been eliminated because they were simply too Too vulnerable. So the answer is absolutely they did. There are also some raids that were launched against, uh, paris They did not have nearly The number of aircraft and Ultimately, uh, one of the comments that I somebody I was reading was talking about seeing a down gaffa and remarking on how fairly crude it was as an aircraft But they were not used in any coordinated way this notion that we're going to pick A ball bearing plant and we're going to keep hitting this thing and hitting this thing that was not That was not part of it Of sure in the back I guess was a yeah, go ahead. Yes The uh, the uh, let's let me I know it's here somewhere ah The way this worked Was in here underneath in the structurally the strongest part of the aircraft There was a compartment of Probably about the size of this and the bombs were loaded in vertically And were dropped that way and there was what's that? Well, they're within the body of the plane, but they are hanging there and there's a release mechanism and uh It was not perfect and on more than one occasion It would stick and you'd wind up with this this this bomb now sort of hanging precariously there And you would have to get the rear cockpit gunner would sort of work his way forward in the cockpit because I mean in the fuselage, which is There's a big space I mean some of these were converted to commercial aircraft use after the war and he'd literally have to kick the bomb loose boom And of course you're over this Sort of lattice which is open and there is your target down 5000 feet below your But you know As odd as that sounds I was up in a b-24 once a couple of no number of years ago And there were these large waste windows where originally Machine guns had been mounted and we're flying along unless you're in about 2000 feet up in the air And I got my arm on the end of the window and I'm looking out looking out and all of a sudden occurred to me I'm 2000 feet in the air. I'm moving in 180 miles an hour and I'm leaning out a window, you know, this is But if I could do that and I am morbidly afraid of heights then I guess these guys could to anyway that was the delivery system on on these these vertical Um These vertical compartments Yes, this is a little bit of an aside, but I'm struck by one thing and that is You've taken us from the original by planes all the way up through world war one And at the very end the bombers these monstrous things now that you're talking about giving us an idea How large they are and we're still in by planes Yeah, when did the single wing come out? I would I would have guessed it would have been Well, there were single wing aircraft monoplanes in during the war during world war one. Um, the the germans used a A monoplane seaplane fighter There were A number of french aircraft that were single engine Planes the the germans the germans referred to my eindecker, which was a single wing aircraft. There were a number of them For a variety of reasons Partly structural partly aerodynamics and so forth They found it This is technology that they were more familiar with that's where they had started You could do certain things with a biplane with Smaller the span of wings in terms of maneuverability and so forth, but the the single wing airplane definitely was around One of the most effective aircraft was the the fulker E8 I think which was a was used towards the end of the war, which was a single single wing aircraft Yeah, sir. Did any of the aircraft manufacturers carry over and survive into world war two? Oh sure. Well, Hanley page did Now we didn't talk at all about the Americans, but That big flying boated killing home was made by Curtis, you know Curtis became Curtis, right? You made the p40 so they carried over a number of the Sopwith carried over so yeah, you're great many of them carried over What would you like to know about the Liberty engine? What's that? A Liberty engine the ones that they use here for the most part with 12 cylinder the Liberty engines also came as eight but a liberty is a In terms of length it's probably about like that. It's got these big bolted on cylinders on the top So it's a very tall engine from sort of top to bottom So you're not going to put it under the hood of your Of your car. It's very heavy and In terms of reliability though once they got the bugs out of it It was about as good as anything else short of the Rolls-Royce Eagle but the problem with that was that required enormous amounts of very fine Handwork whereas the Liberty was designed from the get-go to be mass produced by semi skilled Labor if you've ever heard a Liberty engine an un muffled one They are Just it is deafening The noise that these things make so you can imagine what have been like in an airplane seated Maybe three feet from this thing roaring and you're up at 18,000 feet. You got oxygen deprivation and I mean it was The physical demands of this were really extraordinary and A great many people washed out because it was simply Too much of a strain Depending on high compression low compression pistons between 330 and 400 plus the army used the navy used the low compression engines the The army used the high compression ones. So something plot north of 400 horsepower which means they could take a DH4 which was it was a big biplane And they could crank that up to about 120 125 miles an hour, which was considered quite Speedy for the time Typically between 14 1800 in that in that range Yes, sir Did any of these gentlemen Or anyone who was anyone assigned to go look at the british aircraft carrier program? The um The the navy was kept informed of it during the war Bought through the the attest ray and through sims staff When the war ended a couple of the naval aviators were actually assigned to the grand fleet And to to see what was going on there and the british actually worked quite closely With the americans for a short period there the first american Zeppelin if you will is a british construction it was designed or you know built with The cooperation of the british who built it and the americans now in fact the The thing crashed and the crew was killed, but there is quite a bit of cooperation There so the answer is Godfrey de chivalier I believe was with the british for a time on the carriers in maybe december of 1918 Well With within there were Proposals coming out of the general board In 1918 to build a large Carrier force there were Designs worked up in a you know a partial basis in 1918 As soon as the war was over Just as an example naval aviations projected budget For 1919 I think was supposed to be something in the order of 225 million dollars By the time the budget process was done they were left with 25 million dollars In terms of the navy at the as a hold which already had a substantial building program Part of which had been put on on hold Um It became kind of a war as to who's going to get the dollars And so the notion that you're going to build these these carriers, which are still kind of an untried idea As opposed to finishing the battleships. Well, that was a no brainer But there was a strong interest from the general board In this right from the get go Right from the get go At what point in time did the carrier become Practical and useful As soon as Two Issues were solved The first was to get an unobstructed flight deck and By the end of the war By the end of the war by 1919 There was pretty much accepted, you know the early british carriers some of them Were converted battle cruisers and so you had the Superstructure in the in the middle and so you had to take off Deck and a landing deck and you had all kinds of Airflow issues and that was a disaster but In relatively short order they got to the the flush deck carrier The second was Not to launch them because aircraft at this point are are so slow That Literally again you turn an aircraft into the wind you crank it up to full speed You only have to get an airplane moving at 30 or 40 miles an hour And that plus the the wind over the deck is going to lift it right off the question of landing safely and the big sort of technical question during the The early 20s was what system are you going to develop to be able to land plane safety and Sometime you should go on youtube and there's there's footage of early landing experiments on the Langley Which was the navy's first carrier kind of an experimental effort and you'll see them coming in and again they're coming in very slow and You know maybe a hook will catch and and maybe the plane will flop over and maybe you have guys Running on deck to grab this thing but when that problem of of of making a Landing with with the cables that you know to drop the aircraft once that was solved and that was that was By the by the 20s They became very practical