But if we were to follow the methods which all the belligerent nations of Europe are employing on their sea coasts we would establish in this district ten aeronautical stations. This would be no match for the British system which has one such station to every twenty miles of coast. Ours would be farther apart, but as the Sound could be guarded at its entrance the stations need only be maintained along the south shore of Long Island and down the Jersey coast. Each station would be provided with patrol, fighting, and observation airplanes. It would have the mechanical equipment of microphones, searchlights, and other devices for detecting the approach of an enemy now employed successfully abroad. Its patrolling airplanes would cruise constantly far out to sea, not less than eighty miles, keeping ever in touch with their station. As the horizon visible from a soaring airplane is not less than fifty miles distant from the observer, this would mean that no enemy fleet could approach within 130 miles of our coast without detection and report. The Montauk Point station would be charged with guarding the entrance to Long Island Sound and, the waters of Nantucket shoals and Block Island Sound where the German submarine U-53 did its deadly work in 1916. The Sandy Hook station would of course be the most important of all, guarding New York sea-going commerce and protecting the ship channel by a constant patrol of aircraft over it.
The modern airplane has a speed of from eighty to one hundred and sixty miles an hour--the latter rate being attained only by the light scouts. Thus it is apparent that if an alarm were raised at any one of these stations between New London and Barnegat three hours at most would suffice to bring the fighting equipment of all the stations to the point threatened. There would be thus concentrated a fleet of several hundred swift scouts, heavy fighting machines, the torpedo planes of the type designed by Admiral Fiske, hydroaėroplanes capable of carrying heavy guns and in brief every form of aėrial fighter. Moreover, by use of the wireless, every ship of the Navy within a radius of several hundred miles would be notified of the menace. They could not reach the scene of action so swiftly as the flying men but the former would be able to hold the foe in action until the heavier ships should arrive.
The enormous advantage of such a system of guarding our coasts needs no further explanation. It is not even experimental, for France on her limited coast has 150 such stations. England, which started the war with 18, had 114 in 1917 and was still building. We at that time had none, although the extent of our sea coast and the great multiplicity of practicable harbours make us more vulnerable than any other nation.
SOME FEATURES OF AĖRIAL WARFARE
As devices to translate German hate for England into deeds of bloody malignancy and cowardly murder the German aircraft have ranked supreme. The ruthless submarine war has indeed done something toward working off this peculiar passion, but it lacked the spectacular qualities which German wrath demanded. As the war proceeded, and it became apparent that the participation of Great Britain--at first wholly unexpected by the Kaiser's advisers--was certain to defeat the German aims, the authorities carefully inculcated in the minds of the people the most malignant hatred for that power. As Lissauer's famous hymn of hate had it--
French and Russians it matters not, A blow for a blow, and a shot for a shot. ................................. We have one foe and one alone-- England!
By way of at once gratifying this hatred and still further stimulating it the German military authorities began early in the war a series of air raids upon English towns. They were of more than doubtful military value. They damaged no military or naval works. They aroused the savage ire of the British people who saw their children slain in schools and their wounded in hospitals by bombs dropped from the sky and straightway rushed off to enlist against so callous and barbaric a foe. But the raids served their political purpose by making the German people believe that the British were suffering all the horrors of war on their own soil, while the iron line of trenches drawn across France by the German troops kept the invader and war's agonies far from the soil of the Fatherland.
[Illustration: ©International Film Service.
The U. S. Aviation School at Mineola.]
