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Updated: June 29, 2025
The latter proceeded at once to the attack upon the raiding air fleet, while the destroyers, the heavier Zeppelins, and a number of submarines sped out to sea to attack the British ships. The mist, which grew thicker, turned the combat from a battle into a mere disorderly raid, but out of it the seaplanes emerged unhurt.
The seaplane, the newest naval machine at the time, and as yet an untried factor, was to see maiden service first at the hands of the British, when on the 25th of December a raid on Cuxhaven was made. Seven naval seaplanes attacked a fleet of German cruisers and destroyers lying off Schilling Roads near the German port.
With favoring winds at her back, and with the lightest load she had carried, she covered the distance in one hour and forty-four minutes, an average speed of 86.7 nautical miles an hour, or more than 99 land miles. This was a new record for the seaplanes on the ocean flight. Meanwhile Harry G. Hawker and Lieut.-Commander Mackenzie Grieve, the Sopwith team waiting so long at St.
As we lunch and talk, on this cruiser at rest, messages come in perpetually; the cruiser itself is ready for the open sea, at an hour and a half's notice; the seaplanes pass out and come in over the mouth of the harbour on their voyages of discovery and report, and these destroyers and mine-sweepers that he so quietly near us will be out again to-night in the North Sea, grappling with every difficulty and facing every danger, in the true spirit of a wonderful service, while we land-folk sleep and eat in peace; grumbling no doubt, with our morning newspaper and coffee, when any of the German destroyers who come out from Zeebrugge are allowed to get home with a whole skin.
When the rains had finished, by May, 1916, in the Belgian Congo, General Molitor began to move upon Tanganyika. Soon our motor-boat flotilla and the Belgian launches and seaplanes had swept the lake of German shipping; and the first Belgian force landed and occupied Ujiji, the terminus of the Central Railway.
The navy has also developed a catapult arrangement for launching seaplanes from the decks of war-ships. This is a moving wooden platform, carrying the seaplane, which runs along a track over the ship's deck. The platform drops into the sea, and the seaplane proceeds on its course through the air.
All landing places are now commanded by lines of trenches and are ranged by field guns and howitzers, which, thus far, cannot be located as our naval seaplanes are too heavy to rise out of rifle range. There has been a muddle about these seaplanes. Nominally they possess very powerful Sunbeam engines; actually the d d things can barely rise off the water.
Seaplanes are also sent from the decks of naval vessels to scout the waters through which a fleet may be travelling, while large vessels serving as parent-ships for the smaller seaplanes from which they fly and to which they return ply the infested waters. The service is a valuable one, and a thrilling one, and only the best types of men were selected by the Navy Department to engage in it.
Every schoolboy knows what happened then, how the Prince, in this crisis, turned from grief to defiance, how he dared General Wood to do his worst, how the American commander sank the Koenig Albert and two more transports in the next half hour with a loss of five seaplanes, and how, finally, Frederick William, seeing that the entire German expedition would be annihilated, surrendered absolutely and ran up the stars and stripes above German dreadnoughts, transports and destroyers.
The use of seaplanes to attack merchantmen and smaller warcraft became a feature of the Austrian and German campaign, and in November and December, 1915, several attacks were reported on steamers of the Allies. Two German aeroplanes dropped bombs on a British patrol ship off North Hinder Lightship in the North Sea on November 6, 1915, and set her on fire.
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