June, 1915. We
were spotting for the guns of H.M.S. "Lord Nelson" bombarding Chanak.
The sky and sea were a marvellous blue and visibility excellent, the
peninsula, where steady firing was going on all the time, lay below us,
the Straits, with their ships and boats, the Asiatic shore gradually
disappearing in a golden haze, the Gulf of Xeros, the Marmora, and
behind one the islands of the AEgean affording a perfect background. No
one who was at the Dardanelles, however vivid the horrors and the heat
and dust and flies, will forget the beauty of the scene, especially at
sunset, and it was seen at its best from the basket of a kite-balloon.

The ever-increasing assistance rendered by aircraft to surface vessels
in crippling Germany's submarine campaign is shown by the fact that in
1915 ten submarines were attacked from the air and in 1918 126 were
sighted and 93 attacked. Nor was the principle forgotten in countering
the submarine menace that offence is the best defence, and among the
many duties of R.N.A.S. aircraft, based on Dunkirk from the early days
of the war, were anti-submarine patrols along the Belgian coast and the
bombing of hostile submarine bases, such as Bruges.

As in the case of the Army Corps observation machines, fighting scouts
became necessary for the protection of patrols and to counter the
enemy's efforts at raids and sea reconnaissance, and the considerable
amount of experiment in air fighting which the R.N.A.S. had made before
the war bore useful fruit.

For the immediate protection of the Grand Fleet seaplane and aeroplane
bases were established at Scapa Flow and Thurso at the beginning of the
war, but, owing to damage from a gale in November, 1914, aircraft
operations with the Fleet were carried out from the seaplane carrier
"Campania." The problem of using carriers with the Fleet had not been
seriously tackled before the war, and though experiments were
strenuously carried out, and there were fourteen carrier ships in
commission in 1918, and a seaplane carrier operated with the Battle
Cruiser Squadron at Jutland, the use of aircraft in this way did not
become very efficient. One of the chief difficulties was limitation in
size, and consequently in radius of action, of aircraft employed from
carriers or the decks of battleships. The total number of aeroplanes and
seaplanes allotted to the Grand Fleet in 1918 was 350.

Seaplane carriers occasionally co-operated with fighting ships. For
instanc