Adjt. Prince: By airplanes; yes, sir. It is always much safer to attack from above.
Then you have the bomb-dropping machines, which carry a lot of weight. They go out sometimes in the daytime, but mostly at night, and they have these new sights by which they can stay up quite high in the air and still know the spot they are going at. They know the wind speed, they know their height, and they can figure out by this new arrangement they have exactly when the time is to let go their bombs.
Senator Kirby: Something in the nature of a range-finder?
Adjt. Prince: A sort of range-finder.
Adjt. Rumsey: It is a sort of telescope that looks down between your legs, and you have to regulate yourself, observing your speed, and when you see the spot, you have to touch a button and off go these things.
Adjt. Rumsey: In a raid my brother went on there were sixty-eight machines that left; the French heavy machines, the English heavy machines, and then the English sort of half-fighting machine and half-bombing machine. They call it a Sopwith, and it is a very good machine. They went over there, and the first ones over were the Frenchmen, and they dropped bombs on these Mauser works, and the only thing that the English saw was a big cloud of smoke and dust, and they could not see the works so they just dropped into them. Out of that raid the fighting machines got eight Germans and dropped them, and the Germans got eight Frenchmen. So, out of sixty-eight they lost eight, but we also got eight Germans and dropped six tons of this stuff, which is twenty times as strong as the melinite. We do not know what the name of the powder is. The fighting machines on that trip only carried gasolene for two hours, and the other ones carried it for something like six hours, so we escorted them out for an hour, came back to our lines, filled up with gasolene, went out and met them and brought them back over the danger zone.
Adjt. Prince: Near the trenches is where the danger zone is, because there the German fighting machines are located.
Senator Kirby: How far was it from your battle front that you went?
Adjt. Rumsey: I think it was about 500 miles, 250 there and 250 back; it was between 200 and 250 miles there.
Senator Kirby: Beyond the battle front?
Adjt. Rumsey: Yes; or, to be more accurate, I think it was nearer 200 than 250.
The Chairman: What do you think of the function of the airplane as a determining factor?
Adjt. Prince: There is no doubt that if we could send over in huge waves a great number of these bomb-dropping machines, and simply lay the country waste--for instance, the big cities like Strassburg, Freiburg, and others--not only would the damage done be great, but I guess the popular opinion in Germany, everything being laid waste, would work very strongly in the minds of the public toward having peace. I do not think you could destroy an army, because you could not see them, but you could go to different stations; you could go to Strassburg, to Brussels, and places like that.
The Chairman: Then, sending them over in enormous numbers would also put out of business their airplanes, and they would be helpless, would they not?
Adjt. Prince: Absolutely. You not only have on the front a large number of bomb-dropping machines, but a large number of fighting machines. When the Somme battle was started in the morning the Germans knew, naturally, that the French and British were going to start the Somme drive, and they had up these Drachens, these observation balloons, and the first eighteen minutes that the battle started the French and the English, I think, got twenty-one "saucisse"; in other words, for the next five days there was not a single German who came anywhere near the lines, but the French and English could go ahead as they-felt like.
Admiral Peary: Have you any idea as to how many airplanes there are along that western front on the German side?
Adjt. Prince: There must be about 3000 on that line in actual commission.
Admiral Peary: That means, then, about 10,000 in all, at least?
Adjt. Prince: I should think so; I should say the French have about 2000 and the English possibly 1000, or we have about 2500.
Adjt. Rumsey: If they have 3000 we have 4000; that is, right on the line.
Adjt. Prince: We have about 1000 more than they have, and we are up all the time. The day before I left the front I was called to go out five times, and I went out five times, and spent two hours every time I went out.
