to assess that which has since occurred.

At the beginning of the year 1912 the Royal Flying Corps did not exist.
At the beginning of the Great War, in 1914, England found herself with
an air service which, though much smaller than those of Germany or
France, was so excellently manned and organized, trained and equipped,
that it placed her at a bound in the front rank of aviation.

The machine was stable, but the engine still unequal to the tasks laid
upon it. Civil Aviation practically did not exist.

I shall now describe the extension of air duties under war conditions;
the increasing value of aircraft for general action and air tactics and
their development and far-reaching effect as the right hand of strategy.
This resulted in the expansion of our flying corps from a total of 1,844
officers and men, and seven squadrons with some 150 machines fit for war
use, to a total of nearly 300,000 officers and men, and 201 squadrons
and 22,000 machines in use at the end of the war, and in the evolution
of the machine to a point where we can regard it, not only as a weapon
of war, but as a new method of transport for commercial purposes in
peace.

CHAPTER II

WAR

GENERAL REMARKS ON WAR DEVELOPMENT.

In dealing with the story of the beginnings of aviation and the
evolution of aircraft up to the war, we have seen that though its growth
was infinitesimal compared with that which came with the impetus of war,
the air service took definite and practical shape more rapidly than had
up to that time any other arm of the Army or Navy in peace.

In 1914 we had reached a point where we possessed a small but mobile and
efficient flying force, equipped and trained essentially for
reconnaissance. Although experiments had been made, little had been
achieved in the use of wireless from aircraft, air photography, bomb
dropping, armament or the development of air fighting. As with the Army
and Navy, war quickened and expanded all the attributes of air
operations in a way which could not have been foreseen before the
struggle occurred; and, as it would have been impossible for the Army
and Navy to build up their war organization without the foundation of
the pre-war service, so it was the splendid quality of the original
Royal Flying Corps that made this expansion possible.

Before the war the Royal Flying Corps was considerably smaller than the
air services of either France or Germany, and to attain even the
strength with whi