To return to the Royal Flying Corps. During 1915 railway junctions were the principal bombing objectives, and raids were carried out on an ever-increasing scale, formations of fourteen to twenty machines taking part. At the Battle of Neuve Chapelle for instance, the railway junctions at Menin, Courtrai and Douai were attacked. One officer of No. 5 Squadron, carrying one 100 lb. bomb, arrived over Menin at 3,500 feet, descended to 120 feet, and dropped his bomb on the railway line. The first V.C. of the Royal Flying Corps was obtained at the Second Battle of Ypres by Lieutenant W. B. Rhodes-Moorhouse, who in bombing Courtrai came down to three or four hundred feet, under heavy fire, but piloted his machine 35 miles back to Merville at the height of a few hundred feet, and died a few days later from his wounds. One of the most instructive features of the Battle of Loos in September, 1915, was the definite co-ordination of bombing attacks with army operations. Many types of machines, belonging both to Army and Corps Squadrons, carried bombs in order to destroy dumps, communications, cut off reinforcements, and the like, while at the Somme bombing was carried out by formations of Wings. In October, 1917, 113 tons, and for a period of six days in March, 1918, 95 tons, of explosives were dropped. This illustrates the enormous progress of bombing which was so largely resorted to in the later stages of the war. The hand grenades of 1914 had become bombs weighing three-quarters of a ton: the pilot's pocket a mechanically released rack: and aim, assisted by instruments, was becoming fairly accurate. Night bombing, necessitated by the fact that by day a large machine heavily laden with bombs was an easy prey to the fighting scout, came into prominence in 1916, increasing in intensity up to the end of the war; and raids into Germany recommenced. Early in 1918 these raids included the bombing of Maintz, Stuttgart, Coblentz, Cologne, and Metz. Machines sometimes dropped their bombs from heights of about 12,000 feet and at other times descended to within 200 feet of their objectives. _Contact Patrol._ Contact patrol, the name given to the direct co-operation of aircraft with troops on the ground, was first extensively practised at the Battle of the Somme, though experiments in this direction had been made in 1915, messages being dropped at the Battle of Neuve Chapelle at pre-arranged points.