Glenn Curtiss had war on his mind practically from the first time he took his seat in an airplane. He practiced dropping mock bombs onto a mock battleship on Keuka Lake. He flew an army officer who sat on the wing and fired his Springfield rifle at a ground target, despite fears that the recoil might throw the airplane out of control. As cadets cheered when he flew over West Point in 1910, he was brooding on how easy it would be to bomb the place.
*There had been crude uses of airplanes in battle before the Great War. At least three American pilots, flying airplanes from three manufacturers, had contracts to fly and drop bombs for various factions in Mexico. On one of our many invasions of Mexico, a Curtiss seaplane took minor damage from ground fire near Vera Cruz, for the first combat flight in U.S. history.
*Our Curtiss Jennys searched for Pancho Villa in Mexico. They never found him, and they all broke down. Their open cockpits flooded in thunderstorms, and they told horror stories about carving new propellers with a jackknife. (Just tall tales… you can’t do that.)
*Still, for most militaries, the only real use they could think of was scouting. In maneuvers off Cuba, Curtiss seaplanes spotted an approaching enemy fleet, giving their own fleet enough warning to meet the mock attack. Future admiral John Towers in an airplane spotted a submerged submarine commanded by future admiral Chester Nimitz, kicking off decades of very cranky relations between the two.
*In 1903, Wright brothers made first airplane flight. In 1906, Santos-Dumont made the first flight in Europe. In 1908, Curtiss and his associates made their first flights.
*But by 1909, when Curtiss flew spectacularly in the Grande Semaine d’Aviation in Reims, he was the only American pilot, and he had the only American-built airplane. How and why had the Europeans advanced so rapidly in just three years?
*Although some would argue otherwise, and although their effect may be overstated, I think that the Wright patent suits had some chilling effect on American research and development. But more important than what we DIDN’T do is what the Europeans DID do, and what circumstances drove them.
*Simply put, military aviation posed no threat to America. Neither Mexico nor Canada was likely to send swarms of warplanes across the border, and if they had they’d only have been threatening El Paso or Bar Harbor.
*All the strong European nations, on the other hand, had OTHER strong European nations right on their borders. They had to know what the guy on the other side of the hill was doing, and preferably they had to stay one jump ahead of him.
*This urgency only deepened, of course, once war actually got under way. So Europeans had an incentive, even a desperation, to innovate in their military aviation, where America did not. Even once Europe was at war, we still took a lackadaisical approach, with the result that with one exception, no American-designed airplanes were used in World War I combat, because none of them were equal to World War I combat. Our pilots flew British and French designs, such as SPADs.
*Besides airplanes, Europeans, especially Germans, were also ahead in airSHIPS… lighter-than-air craft, most famously the Zeppelins.
But what the powers were still lacking was a doctrine for the use of aircraft – a set of ideas as to how they were best employed. When doctrine was developed, it often embodied wooly thinking about this perplexing new invention. (Remember that almost all the top political and military leadership were born BEFORE the Civil War.)
*Even so, the First WORLD War was the first AIR war. And that’s the topic of the free presentation I’ll be giving for the next Steuben County Historical Society Winter Lecture, 4 PM Friday March 4 at Bath Fire Hall. Hope you’ll join us!