Historian delves deep into the archives to ferret out story of WWI naval aviation

LAKEVILLE — Each major war has seen new fighting techniques and new ways of responding to them.

The French and Indian wars of the mid-1700s, for example, saw Roger’s Rangers and others adopt  hide-and-shoot guerrilla methods favored by the Indians, and the Patriots in turn used that method to surprise the British soldiers at Lexington and Concord.

World War I brought the menace of German submarines and spurred European and American governments to hastily fight back using aircraft to bomb protected U-boat ports in Belgium.

The United States was slow to enter the war and lagged behind the English, French and Italians in airplane know-how. But the learning curve served this country well come World War II.

Lakeville historian Geoffrey L. Rossano dove headfirst into the historical record to put together a richly detailed and compelling story, “Striking the Hornet’s Nest: Naval Aviation and the Origins of Strategic Bombing in World War I” (Naval Institute Press, $49.95).

A graduate of Tufts University and the University of North Carolina, Rossano is a history instructor at Salisbury School. His earlier book, “Stalking the U-boat,” won the 2010 Roosevelt Prize in Naval History.

Rossano was born in Brooklyn, N.Y. Childhood familiarity drew him to his subject.

“I’ve long had an interest in naval aviation,” he said. “I’ve flown in a variety of vintage aircraft. But as a kid growing up near an operating air base, as we went to church on Sunday I’d see a sign by the road saying this is where Charles Lindburgh took off on his solo flight to Europe.”

Over several years, Rossano interviewed pilots and read their letters and became familiar with primary resources in archives in Washington, D.C., and Paris. 

“Zero of these sources have been digitized,” he said. “I needed to be at the archive.”

He traveled to sites in Europe. He corresponded with descendants of pilots and others. But mostly he read official documents.

“A lot of military materials are in massive collections in downtown Washington,” he said.

“I hefted boxes, hour after hour. I sifted through reports. One thing about the military, they kept everything. I had to get into the heads of the people who cataloged the stuff. I had to see patterns.”

For materials in the French language, Rossano relied on a good dictionary and a helpful bilingual graduate student who was doing her own research at the next table.

“It was a story I felt no one had developed to its fullest. So I did new research and put it together,” Rossano said.

His collaborator, Thomas Wildenberg, also a published military historian, concentrated on the technical  development of aircraft and Rossano did the rest. They talked through the book’s organization, wrote their chapters independently then melded them to have a uniform voice.

The story in a nutshell is, once the United States enterd the war, the Navy identified the importance of taking out German U-boat bases through air strikes. The trouble was, this country had neither adequate aircraft nor trained pilots. Thus a collaboration with the British and French.

In this country, Glenn Curtiss manufactured aircraft, but his world-class flying boats were limited to landing and taking off from water, and they were too slow in the air to evade strafing from the ground, too bulky to outmaneuver German fighters.

“When war broke out in 1914, the United States was not too far behind, but Europe went full bore. The U.S. built trainers here, but ended up buying Handley Page bombers from England and Caproni fighters from Italy.”

The Navy aviators modeled themselves after the Europeans. 

“I got to know these characters and have a great deal of respect for them,” Rossano said. “It’s amazing that within 15 years of the Wright brothers and Kitty Hawk, aviation had developed this far.

American pilots, many of them from Yale or Harvard or other schools, “were hard-flying, hard-drinking, hard-partying” young men who showed themselves well.

(Rossano was interviewed for the new documentary “The Millionaires Unit — U.S. Naval Aviators in the First World War,” which Salisbury Forum will screen at the Millerton Moviehouse on Jan. 17, 2016.)

The Northern Bombing Group’s mission to wipe out the submarine bases ultimately fell short. 

“Except for being a nuisance,” the historian said, “we were never able to break up the German U-boats. The idea made sense, facilities were within striking distance, the bombs were big enough to do damage, but the British and Americans never had enough aircraft to conduct major raids. Sporadic raids of four or six or eight bombers did not have much effect.”

There were disagreements and turf struggles along the way, but all in all the Navy deserves great credit for pulling together an air force.

Rossano points particularly to Robert Lovett, “a whiz kid who comes back a generation later to mobilize the American aviation industry and get a large number of aircraft into action for World War II. He and ‘Hap’ Arnold were kind of twins in that.

“They brought to the 1940s what had been started in the late 1910s.”