ABSTRACT
The development of aviation and the sciences upon which it is based has been very largely due to military interests. Everyone is aware of the enormous advances in the technique of aviation between 1914 and 1918. At the beginning of the war aeroplanes were delicate auxiliary instruments, to be compared with periscopes and range-finders rather than with battleships or battalions. Only two of the aeroplanes in the Royal Flying Corps were fitted with radio transmitters. Messages were reported to the ground by flash lamps or coloured pistol lights. By the end of the war they had become offensive military units, to which battleships and battalions occasionally became auxiliaries. Air Marshal Sir R. Brooke-Popham has described how the Turkish Eighth Army was destroyed as a fighting formation by aeroplane attacks in the Palestine campaign of September, 1918. It was discovered retreating through a defile. Every aeroplane was concentrated against it. In a few hours it ceased to exist as a fighting force.
