In answer to the aircraft program of the United States, Germany renewed her energies, and her construction of airplanes during the last year of the War was on a larger scale than ever before. Her small fighting machines, or speed scouts, include the _Fokker_, the _Halberstadt_, the _Roland_, the _Albatros_, the _Aviatik_, the _Pfalz_ monoplane, the _Rumpler_, the _L.V.W._ and a number of others.
Some of these we have already seen at work. The _Roland_ is one of the latest types of German two-seater scouts. Every effort has been made in it to decrease the "head resistance" by careful streamlining, reduction of the number of interplane struts, etc. Swift flying and a rapid climber, it has won for itself the title of _The German Spad_. The _Pfalz_ is built either as a monoplane or as a biplane. It is a machine somewhat similar to the _Fokker_. The monoplane, however, has two machine guns, one on each side of the pilot, and firing through the propeller.
Among airplanes used by the enemy for general service duties over the lines, the _A.G.O._, the _A.E.G._ and the _Gotha_ undoubtedly take the lead. All are heavily armed with machine guns and bombs and are driven by powerful motors.
Yet for all the desperate German struggle for supremacy, her machines and her pilots did not prove the equals of the Allies in the air. The airplanes of France, England, Italy and America maintained a ceaseless vigilance over the lines, giving chase to every enemy plane or squadron of planes that made its appearance on the horizon. Our airmen showed the most dauntless courage, and they continually outwitted and outmaneuvered the slower thinking Hun. Our speed scouts challenged his reconnaissance and bombing planes, and prevented them from performing their missions effectively; our own reconnaissance airplanes gave him a hard time of it; and our bombing machines proved themselves the strong right arm of the service--taking the place of the big guns in raining heavy explosives upon enemy troops, bombing his military bases, and making life in general most uncomfortable for the foe.
It is a far cry from those first standardized _Taubes_ to the many makes and patterns of German airplanes of the present day. As the Allies met those first maids-of-all-work with a mixed company of airplanes of many and untried talents, so to-day they are meeting her efforts to imitate their own versatility in aircraft with machines which are carefully standardized in every detail. It should be an object lesson to Germany that the Allies have triumphed in each case.
