War in the Third Dimension - Aerial Warfare in World War I

Overview

When World War I began, the rival armies charged into battle with frightening new weapons that seemed ready to change the very nature of war. One promising new piece of military hardware -- the airplane -- wasn't quite ready to hit its mark. That didn't stop a few passionate advocates from making big plans for airplanes, or from dreaming up ways to use them in war. By the end of the war these visionaries would transform the flimsy airplanes of 1914 into powerful and dependable weapons, and take war where it had rarely gone before: beyond the two dimensional realm of our planet's surface, into the third dimension of the air above.