Few histories of early airpower cover reconnaissance in detail. Generally, they tend to be popular, anecdotal, and concentrate on “knights of the air” or early fighter pilots. Some research was conducted on bombing but in 1914, forward firing machine guns were a thing of the future. This book focuses on the time before air-to-air combat, when aviation was used solely for reconnaissance. The press represented the Zeppelin dirigible simultaneously as a symbol of German inventiveness and as a wonder weapon. Dirigibles subsidized by the German Armydeveloped alongside military aviation. A series of tragic accidents in 1910 and 1911, however, gave the dirigible a black eye. Three commercial ships, as well as the army airship Z2, were lost and in September 1911, the army airship M3 burned during the Kaiser maneuvers. Simultaneously, airplanes challenged the reliability of dirigibles, especially as smaller airplanes displaced smaller nonrigid airships for tactical reconnaissance. The nonrigid dirigible model’s inadequacies in strategic reconnaissance and bombing overshadowed its advantages of field use and transportability.
The German Army preferred airplanes because they were easier to handle, service, and prepare then were the dirigibles. The War Ministry, which controlled the budget, favored airships, considering them safer and longer range and therefore more suitable for reconnaissance. However, in a 1911 quarterly aviation magazine, Maj. Herrmann Lieth-Thompsen cautioned against relying on airships. He argued that airplanes would prove better in aerial reconnaissance and foresaw reconnaissance skirmishes similar to the cavalry in screening operations.