‘At that time the defence of England was entirely in the hands of the Navy. The Army was still piously supposed to be the Expeditionary Force. Naturally, as part of the Navy, the R.N.A.S. was supposed to be responsible for the defence of the country against aircraft; a perfectly logical position, and an eminently sensible one, for the Navy has always been able to obtain all the money it has wanted for any scheme it might have in hand. Consequently there seemed to be no reason why Mr. Churchill’s rhetorical phrase—to which one might have returned the time-honoured question, “Is that a threat or a promise?”—should not have become before long a literal truth. There was one point on which all of us seem to have tripped up, however—namely, that in talking or thinking of invasion by aircraft we all pictured to ourselves a fleet of machines coming over in broad daylight, and the world’s aerial navies grappling in full sight, complete with central blue as fitted. None of us seems to have had the sense to see that nocturnal invasions would be very much more effective, both morally and practically, than any daylight show could have been. ‘If the Germans had sent their airships over early in 1915, in daylight, they would certainly have been wiped out by aeroplanes. We had very few aeroplanes then; not a fraction of the number we should have had if the supply of engines and machines had been properly handled before the war by the Government. But nevertheless, we had some few, such as Sopwith tabloids and Bristol scouts, quite capable of reaching and catching and destroying any airship of that period, if it could be seen. The destruction of the very first Zeppelin ever brought down by an aeroplane—that which ultimately wrecked itself after being damaged and made uncontrollable by Squadron-Commander Bigsworth, R.N.—proves it, for this officer was flying a standard 80 h.-p. Avro, a considerably slower machine than either of the single-seaters mentioned. The Germans spotted this quickly enough, and so their ships only came over at night, with the result that for over a year they came and went unhindered, so far as defensive aeroplanes were concerned. The only people who suffered were the gallant young officers of the R.N.A.S., who went up to try to abolish the airships.