visit Long Island.

Not a day passes but from

early morning to night one can hear the drum of engines high in the air. The planes fly overhead by the scores, some singly, some in battle formation. Often one sees lone aviators practising acrobatics, looping and spiralling, shooting toward earth in the nose-dive or tail-spin, in hair-raising fashion. The skill with which they perform these evolutions gives evidence of their training. In fields all over the country this same dangerous work is being done by an army of as fine young men as have ever taken to the air. To scores of them the training has ended in death, and they have given themselves to the cause of liberty and justice as truly as though they died in battle. The first Americans to die in battle were aviators, and daily the list grows longer with the names of those gallant young souls who have made the supreme sacrifice.

Our aircraft programme will succeed, if somewhat tardily. The invention of the Liberty motor, a good motor which could be made rapidly in large numbers, was an achievement. The trouble was that it was too much adver

tised and so much expected of it that other matters of equal importance were neglected. One wonders why it was advertised at all. The Germans never knew of the tanks until the tanks were rolling toward them over the Flanders fields, spitting fire. By the vaunting of the motor's virtues and the announcement that it alone would be used on our airplanes, capable inventors were discouraged from efforts in improving engines. We should have had aviation experts in charge of the programme from the beginning, and we did not. More work and fewer optimistic statements on the part of the War Department would have brought efficiency out of confusion much sooner than it really

came.

This practically sums up the situation. What has been said is corroborated in the report made public on August 22 by the Senate's investigating committee. This committee found that a substantial part of the original appropriation of $640,000,000 had been wasted. It declared that of the planes sent abroad but 67 De Haviland 4's had reached the front by August 1, and that these were good only for

day bombing and observation; that at the same date we had not at the front a single Americanmade chasse (or plane of attack) or heavy bombing-plane. It found that $6,500,000 was wasted on Bristol planes, as these had to be scrapped, after several lives had been lost in trials. It found that, though 3,000 fast fighting Spads were ordered in September, 1917, this order was cancelled because they could not be adapted to the Liberty motor. It found that, though facilities were ready to build the Caproni bombing-machine in the fall of 1917, only one experimental plane had been completed. While commending the Liberty motor for certain purposes, the committee declared that it was too heavy and too powerful for the lighter types of planes, and that we should have manufactured the best types of foreign motors contemporaneously with its development, instead of which we subordinated all the other phases of the aircraft programme to its perfection and production.

A few days after the Senate committee's report was made public Secretary of War Baker again acted to correct the trouble. He ap

pointed Mr. Ryan, second assistant secretary of war, with full charge of all our activities in the air. Mr. Ryan not only was made responsible for the production of aircraft, but for operation of the department of military aeronautics, for the purpose of co-ordinating both of these branches of the work. By the same order Benedict C. Crowell, first assistant secretary, was placed in charge of the munitions programme, succeeding Mr. Stettinius, who was then abroad as a special representative of the department.

The placing of a man of Mr. Ryan's abilities at the head of our air programme should prove beneficial. After he became head of the production board marked changes for the better were noticed. Engines and planes of the best types were ordered, and our real programme was put under way. A year late, but still next year we should prove a power in the combat in the air.

CHAPTER VII

NAVAL PREPARATION

'N considering the problems faced by America

IN

in her preparation for war there has been, at times, a tendency to compare the work of the Navy Department with that of the War Department. Such comparison is unfair. Our navy, at the outbreak of the war, was a finely organized machine, ready for instant action. Our army was so small that it hardly sufficed for police work. Under the theory that the sea protected us from foreign aggression, the navy was always considered our first line of defense, and had been treated with fair generosity by Congress, while the army was stunted and starved by niggardly appropriations. Nearly a year before the beginning of hostilities Congress more than doubled the customary appropriation for naval purposes, allotting large sums of money for new ship construction, for machine-shops, dry-docks, and ordnance. In the same session the army was practically neg