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Updated: July 8, 2025
These schools of combat are connected with the ecoles de perfectionnement with which the pilot has finished. In the combat school he learns battle tactics, how to fight singly and in fleet formation, and how to extract himself from a too dangerous position. Trips are made in squadron formation and sham battles are effected with other escadrilles, as the smallest unit of an aerial fleet is called.
The next German offensive against Verdun had been foreseen. In consequence, the staff had organized a safety service to avoid all surprise by the enemy, to meet attacks, and prepare the way for the reinforcing troops. But the violence of the Verdun offensive exceeded all expectations. Our escadrilles had done their duty as scouts before the attack.
The stove is set up there and all animate life from the lion cub to the pilots centre around its warming glow. The eight escadrilles of fighting machines form a rather interesting colony.
The squadrons, numbering more than 270, were divided into bombing, chasing, patrolling and field escadrilles, these last being intrusted with scouting, photographing, and artillery work, in constant touch with the infantry. Most of these novelties were servilely copied from French aviation.
The bombardment squadrons are made up of slow machines with great carrying capacity, such as the Voisin; the pursuit or battle squadrons the escadrilles de chasse are composed of small and very fast 'planes, such as the Spad and Nieuport; while the general utility squadrons, used for reconnoissance, artillery regulation, and photographing, usually consist of medium-speed, two-passenger machines like the Farman and the Caudron.
Up they went, singly or in pairs, gyrating playfully, always climbing, and swooping higher, higher, until to the naked eye they became mere dots in the clear sky. By this time it was noticeable that they had somehow divided into two squads or escadrilles; and at a signal from Commander Byers down below they began maneuvering like two hostile squadrons about to engage in aerial battle.
Early in 1915 appeared the Fokkers, which were one-seated, and new two-seated machines, Aviatiks or Albatros, which were more rapid, with the passenger at the rear, and furnished with a revolving turret for the machine-gun. But early in the summer of 1915 the progress realized in aviation resulted in its forming a separate branch of the army, with campaign and enemy-chasing escadrilles.
The organization of the French air service, with its system of airplane and seaplane squadrons, dirigibles and observation balloons, schools, repair-shops, and manufactories, is entirely an outgrowth of the war. The airplanes are organized in escadrilles, usually composed of ten machines each, for three distinct purposes.
Frequently pilots from other escadrilles will be our guests in passing through our sector, and through these visitations we keep in touch with the aerial news of the day, and with our friends along the front. Gradually we have come to know a great number of pilotes de chasse. We hear that so-&-so has been killed, that some one else has brought down a Boche and that still another is a prisoner.
Here again, copying the French services, Germany strengthened her chasing escadrilles during the whole winter of 1916-1917, and by the following spring she possessed no less than forty. Before the war she had given her attention almost exclusively to heavy airplanes. French types were plagiarized: as the Morane had been altered into the Fokker, the Nieuport became an Albatros.
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