A Summer Bright and Terrible Read Online Free Page A

crashed—and steered as best he could for
England.
    In the dim light of the rising dawn, the
weather held clear and somehow the engine continued its steady beat. In less
than half an hour, he could make out a darkening along the horizon: England!
But the famous white cliffs of Dover were nowhere to be seen.
    He had no idea where he was, and the prize had
specified that the flight be from Calais to Dover. Then he spotted three ships
all going in the same direction. Reasoning that they might be headed for a
port, and that the port might be Dover, he turned around and flew in that
direction. Luckily, he was right: Just as the winds began to pick up and bounce
him around, he saw the famous white cliffs.
    “The wind was fighting me now worse than ever.
Suddenly at the edge of an opening that appeared in the cliff, I saw a man
desperately waving a tricolor
flag, out alone in the middle of a field, shouting ‘Bravo! Bravo!’ I attempt a
landing, but the wind catches me and whirls me round two or three times. At
once I stop my motor, and instantly my machine falls straight upon the land. I
am safe on your shore.”
    The man was a French newsman who was waiting
for Latham, but who welcomed Bleriot just as effusively, wrapping him in the
French flag and kissing him soundly on both cheeks. Bleriot had flown for
thirty-seven minutes and had covered twenty-four miles. Many others had flown
for greater distances but, as we all know, symbolism is greater than reality. “England
is no longer an island,” Lord Northcliffe exclaimed as the crowds went wild. “England
is no longer an island!”
    Winston Churchill soon saw what he meant,
lamenting that “England came into big things as an accident of naval power when
she was an island. Through an accident of airpower she will probably cease to
exist.”
     
    The first hints of the power of air had
come as early as 1911, when the Italians used primitive airplanes to bomb the
Senussi tribes in Africa. The Italians’ action broke all the rules of civilized
warfare, as they weren’t able to distinguish between spear-carrying warriors
and baby-carrying women, but no one in Europe or America seemed to care.
Actions taken against African blacks had little to do with civilized peoples.
    But then on Christmas Eve of 1914, in the first
year of World War I, a single German airplane ventured over England and dropped
one tiny bomb into the garden of a suburban home outside Dover. The Kaiser was
horrified; honourable men did not conduct warfare against helpless women and
children, though Italians might, nor could such cowardly actions have any
conceivable effect on the battlefields, where the real decisions of victory or
defeat would be made. He absolutely forbade any further such adventures.
    And yet . . .
    Others began to think about it. True, that lone
bomb had done nothing to help Germany’s cause. On the other hand, could the
British do anything to stop more airplanes from dropping more bombs? The German
naval staff, in particular, was intrigued. War had begun, the army had invaded
France, but the U-boats were not yet seen as an effective weapon and the
Kriegsmarine was not part of the war; they were irrelevant. How could they get
into the action? Searching for some way to justify their existence, the
admirals hit on a unique development. Count Ferdinand von Zeppelin had
perfected gigantic, lighter-than-air dirigibles that, the admirals suggested to
Kaiser Wilhelm, could carry bombs over England and drop them, not on
civilians—not on women and children, certainly—but on military targets. The
admirals pointed to the London docks as suitable for attack.
    Still the Kaiser refused. The accuracy of bombs
dropped from a height sufficient to keep the zeppelins safe from ground fire
was clearly insufficient to safeguard the homes of families living near the
docks.
    But the months began to slip by without the
anticipated successes in the trenches of France, and increasingly the admirals
suggested,