There was one "accessory" which the airplane of the Hun lacked, and which all his mechanical skill and ingenuity were not able to provide: _a pilot with the dash and daring of the French!_ Even in those first dark days when the French planes were the equals of their adversaries neither in numbers nor in capabilities,--a continuous stream of gallant French pilots took to the air and proved that they could surprise and outmaneuver their slower-thinking opponents. While they held the line in their inferior craft, French manufacturers were rushing newer and better equipped machines to reenforce them.
Great Britain was far behindhand in aircraft production when the trumpet of war sounded,--in fact, her air force was considered a negligible quantity by friend and foe alike. By dint of persevering search she managed to scrape up a small group of planes of many makes and for the most part antiquated. She sent them--along with her "contemptible little army "--to France, and there they succeeded in holding their own during the first great German push. When the Stories of heroic fighting against hopeless odds, of British airmen flinging their lives in challenge against the foe in the great air struggle, began to reach home, the British lion repented his tardiness and a program of aircraft construction on a large scale was instituted without delay.
In carefully standardizing those first airplanes there was one point which the crafty Germans overlooked: which is, that you can't make a dray horse run fast, nor a race horse draw heavy burdens. The same thing holds good with the "steeds" of the air. A plane which is designed for great speed is never as good a burden bearer as one which is built to lift heavy weights at the expense of swiftness in flight. As soon as the duties of the airplane began to be specialized, the airplane itself began to appear in certain definite types.
Now of course the duties of the airplane in wartime are numberless, but out of the early confusion _three_ types of machines were finally evolved, which, with the addition of equipment, such as a camera, machine guns, etc., are suitable for practically any sort of work over the land. They are:
3. The bombing machines (including the day and the night bombers).