ment. It
proved to be a fair-weather craft. Seaplanes were used, early in the
war, to carry out reconnaissances in the neighbourhood of the Ems river;
of those launched for this work more than half had their floats broken
up, and sank before they could rise from the water. Moreover, in
addition to this main objection, there were other obstacles to the
development of torpedo-carrying aircraft. The chief of these were what
are officially described as 'operational difficulties'. On the high
seas, it must be remembered, and in other easily accessible waters,
there were no enemy ships to be attacked. To use torpedoes against
warships in their harbours or sheltered waters, specially designed
aircraft must first make long and difficult flights. In the meantime,
while the war was young, there was a distressing shortage of aircraft
for other and more immediate purposes nearer home. The ships assigned as
carriers for aircraft had to be employed at times in mine-seeking and
other necessary operations. The machines themselves were much in demand
for the purposes of reconnaissance. Experiment continued at Calshot;
practice attacks were carried out with machines from Felixstowe, and
convinced the naval authorities of the value of torpedo aircraft; a
successful torpedo aeroplane, called the _Cuckoo_, was designed in 1916
by Messrs. Sopwith, and was produced in the following year by Messrs.
Blackburn; finally, in 1917, the Commander-in-Chief of the Grand Fleet
asked for two hundred torpedo aeroplanes to be provided for the fleet at
the earliest possible date. The bulk of these machines had to be made by
inexperienced firms, so that the first squadron of torpedo aeroplanes
for the fleet was not completed till October 1918, when it embarked in
H.M.S. _Argus_. There had been earlier schemes for a torpedo seaplane
school at Felixstowe and at Scapa in the Orkneys; but now, in the
summer of 1918, a torpedo aeroplane school was established at East
Fortune, and the 1918 programme arranged also for another torpedo
aeroplane school and a torpedo aeroplane experimental squadron, both at
Gosport.

In any future war there can be no doubt that torpedo aircraft will prove
to be a weapon of enormous power. As Lieutenant Hyde-Thomson remarks in
a paper which he prepared in 1915, they will be a menace to the largest
battleship afloat. They have double the speed of a destroyer, and a
large measure of that suddenness of attack which is the virtue of a
su