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Aviation History
1911
1911 - 1096.PDF
standing that no reference was to be made to any question of policy of the War Office, which rule was most loyally adhered to by all speakers, and must still hold good. This does not mean, however, that all technical references to the prize conditions need be avoided, in fact, any information that would indicate the general lines an aeroplane must assume to satisfy War Office prize conditions is welcome. I will now call on Major Radcliffe to give his lecture. REQUIREMENTS OF THE MILITARY AEROPLANE. MAJOR RADCLIFFE :— Introduction.—In the presence of so many distinguished officers far more qualified than I am to give an opinion, it is with the greatest diffidence that I venture to address you. But, having had the privilege of attending the last meeting of the society here, and hearing what was said then, I have been asked to continue the discussion from the military point of view. Here let me say at once that I am speaking entirely in a private capacity, having no claim to expre s official opinions, consequently I will ask you to take what I have to say as just the views of the military "man in the street." The Work Required.—Colonel Capper told us last time what the general requirements of the military aeroplane were. Then Mr. Archibald Low put before us very vividly the perplexities with which the designer finds himself faced when he tries to meet all the demands made on him by the soldiers, which seemed to include everything from an aneroid to an armour plate. It is obvious, therefore, that we soldiers must limit our demands to what is really vital. To do this we must go back to first principles and define the work we want an aeroplane to do. It will then be for the designers, the makers and the pilots to say what type or what different types of machine are required to do the work. Now the work we want done is, first and foremost, reconnaissance, that is, to obtain and to bring b ick information about the enemy. Although, as we shall see later, it may sometimes be necessary in the air, just as it is on land or on the sea, to fight in order to get this information, the fighting will only be a means to the end, and whatever developments may be possible in the future, it is to-day primarily as a scout, not as an instrument of destruction, that we regard the aeroplane. The scouting we want done falls into two classes : i. Long distance, or strategical reconnaissance. ii. Close quarter, or tac ical reconnaissance. The conditions for each class present considerable differences and I will try to make these clear by one or two examples of what has actually happened in war. Strategical Reconnaissance.—In illustration of Class i, I will ask you to fly back wi h me in imagination to the memorable year of 1805—just before Trafalgar. During that summer Napoleon had intended to invade England, and assembled a vast army near Boulogne for that purpose. Thanks to Nelson he had to abandon that scheme, and at the end of August he broke up his camp at Boulogne and marched right across Europe to attack the other States of the Coalition—Austria and Russia. I will now ask you to look at Diagram I, which is a rough enlargement of the area shown by the large white patch on the map of Europe. It represents the country between the Rhine, the Danube, and the Main. Distances from Ulm :—Strasburg, 105 miles; Heidelberg, 90 miles; Wurzburg, 98 miles; Bamberg, 115 miles; Stuttgart, 45 miles ; Nuremburg, 90miles. The block, A, represents the Austrian army, 8o,ox> strong, under Mack ; the blocks, F, are the French troops. The dotted lines show the routes followed by the various bodies of troops. The diagram shows the situation at the end of September. Mack, the Austrian General, was waiting for his allies, the Russians, to come up from the east, and was comfortably established behind the River Iller with his right flank on the fortress of Ulm and a detachment about Ingolstadt, observing the small Bavarian force that had decamped to the north when the Austrians invaded Bavaria. He was expecting the French to advance through the Black Forest and, sure enough, the Austrian advanced troops encountered various columns of the enemy coming through all the defiles, with infantry in support. So, naturally enough, he concentrated his attention and his available means of a reconnaissance, that is to say his cavalry, in that direction. We will now, in imagination, make a present to Mack of a serviceable aeroplane or two and see what they might have done for him. He would naturally have directed them towards Strasburg and the Rhine in the first instance, but would also have told one or two to take a trip round by Stuttgart, say, or Wurzburg. Well, these aeroplanes would have discovered a state of affairs that is represented by Diagram II—Napoleon and 200,000 men making straight for the Austrian flank and line of communications, and not coming through the Black Forest at all. The movements DECEMBER 23, 1911. reported there were simply a blind cleverly put up by the French Cavalry under Murat, and especially designed by Napoleon to deceive Mack, Up to October 2nd Mack had no knowledge whatever of the move ment of the French army from the North. Between the 2nd and the 6th, by which date the French were almost upon him, and, as indicated by the dotted lines, he gradually became aware of his danger, and at the last moment tried to change front and face north along the Danube. But he was too late. The French columns swept across the Danube on the 6th, 7th and 8th ; wheeled right-handed round to the west, cutting off the Austrians from their line of retreat thr.mgh Augsburg on Vienna, and finally, with the exception of a detachment under the Arch duke Ferdinand, that broke out to the north, rounded up the whole army in Ulm, which surrendered on the 17th October. I have taken this particular campaign because, in addition to giving us a dramatic example of what reconnaissance, or the want of it, means, it presents several features that we may expect to find recurring in a war to-day. The strategical deployment on a wide front ; the advance in numerous columns, converging towards the area in which the enemy is known to be opera.ing, with the object of enveloping one or both flanks; the rapidity, secrecy and inflexible resolution with which the movements are carried out and the leader's will imposed on the enemy, all these are salient characteristics of the policy favoured by one great school of military thought on the Continent to-day. It is true that such marches as this one of Napoleon's, from the Straits of Dover to the Danube (over 400 miles), have been rendered unnecessary by railway transport; still, you must get your troops out of the train and properly formed up before you can get within striking distance of the enemy. Therefore, the approach march from the concentration area in which you detrain has still to be done by road. The detraining stations that the enemy are likely to employ are usually known, more or less, in peace-time, and these detraining stations g.ve a valuable clue to the direction in which our strategical reconnaissance must be pushed. Now let us see what the essential requirements of this strategical reconnaissance are :— In the first place it is obvious that we want to get as early information of the enemy as possible, in order to make our little arrangements. For instance, Mack might reasonably have expected his airmen to make good the country up as far as Heidelburg and Nuremburg. This means a radius of action for the aeroplane of at least 100 miles. In the second place, both in order to get there and back with the news in the shortest possible time and in order to escape inter ference from the enemy, we must have speed. Provided you can give me something that can beat anything the enemy has got in the way of speed, I am prepared to gamble on that and dispense, for this particular class of reconnaissance, with any other means of defence. Thirdly, my chances of escape will be much improved if you can give me a silent machine. Two things then I must have for this class of reconnaissance, viz. :— i. Wide range of action ; ii. speed, and, if possible, silence as well. Now, as to what we can do without. This class of reconnaissance starts from and returns to a more or less comfortable home with every facility for rising, landing, repair and adjustment. Therefore a very heavy landing chassis would not seem necessary, and the whole machine may be lightly constructed. Then again, no very great detail in the reports is necessarv at this stage. You will see that the French army was advancing on a very wide front. During the critical period—2nd to 6th October—prac tically every main road in this zone would have been covered with troops and transport to a depth of 20 or 30 miles. It would be the same to-day. A Continental army corps, en one road, takes fully 30 miles, including its ammunition columns and baggage trains. If at this stage of the proceedings a commander can be told the approximate frontage and depth of the zone in which the roads are covered with the enemy's troops and the direction of his march, that information alone will be of the highest value to him, even without ' any details as to what the different columns are composed of. I can conceive it possible for this particular class of reconnaissance to dispense, at a pinch, with a special observer, on the assumption that the pilot alone, with a certain amount of experience in that line, could make the necessary observations. For strategical reconnaissance then, what we must have is wide range of action, speed and, if possible, silence. To get this we are prepared to sacrifice everything else and throw overboard guns, ammunition, armour plates, and, if necessary, even the separate observer—though one would like to have kept him if possible. Tactical Reconnaissance.—Turning now to the second class of IlOi
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