The First World War was not the first conflict in which aerial bombardment of enemy cities played a part. Austrian troops besieging Venice had tried to use free-flying balloons to carry explosive charges and incendiaries across the lagoon to the city. Nor was it the first time that strategic airpower made measurable, material contributions to a war effort. Arguably, the Persian Gulf War or the recent Kosovo War holds this distinction. The First World War did, however, awaken European leaders to the necessity for some sort of defence of population centres that would once have been considered out of range of enemy action. This realization, combined with a serendipitous lack of resources and precedents, produced an air-defence organization that has, in most respects, served as the model for similar organizations since. By 1918, England had invented most of the elements of the modern, integrated air-defence system: interceptors, specialized communications, navigation, blind-landing, and target acquisition equipment, a network of primary and reserve airfields, antiaircraft weapons, an early warning system, and, above all, centralized command and control. By war's end, Britain's defenders could, in principle, assess, track, and plot incoming raids, predict targets, issue warnings, and vector interceptor aircraft against attackers from a central headquarters. Success was, as we shall see, elusive, given the technology available at the time. But the basic approach developed in Britain's between 1914 and 1918 has never been superseded. http://www.century-of-flight.net/Aviation history/airplane at war/nocturnal defence.htm
Thanks for the link to the site with the drawing of the Supermarine PB31 Nighthawk. As they say, "A thing of beauty is a joy forever" - words rarely, if ever, applied to that particular aeroplane. Gareth
