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prevent their being seen by the enemy, the Staff of the First Army Air Service was completing its plan of employment for our first operation as an army.

The plan of employment is the most important document which has to be prepared at the beginning of an operation, and from its complete and thorough understanding does success or failure result.

A plan of employment tells each branch of aviation what it must do in accordance with the general object of the operations, and how every detail is to be handled as occasions may arise.  In general, it provides for three distinct phases of a combat :

First, the preparation of the attack, where great secrecy is necessary, when hostile reconnaissance of all kinds must be prevented, and while we find out all we can about the enemy without showing too much activity;

Second, the actual attack up to the first objective, that is, where we strike, and in which the mission of the aviation is to destroy the aviation of its enemy, then to attack his ground troops, and to insure proper cooperation and observation for our own infantry and artillery;

Third, the exploitation of the battle, where the enemy is pursued both in the air and on the ground, every organization behind his line is attacked by bombs and machine guns, where the aviation attacks with the troops, and where our air reconnaissance is pushed miles into his territory.

Our theory of operations was to assign to the troops themselves the aviation which they needed for their own operations, that is, the Observation Squadron to the Army Corps for use by the Infantry and Artillery, and Pursuit Groups for their local protection.  All the rest, which made up the great bulk of the aviation, particularly pursuit and bombardment, was to be put into a central mass and hurled at the enemy's aviation, no matter where he might be found, until a complete ascendancy had been obtained over him in the air; after this, to attack his ground troops, his trains, his depots of ammunition and supplies, and his railroad stations and lines of communication.

In addition to this, his airdromes were attacked both night and day, so as to force him either to arise and accept combat, or to lose his airplanes in the hangars themselves on his own fields.

Not only do tactics of this kind have a decisive effect, if successful, on the enemy's Air Service, but they have a great effect on the morale of the troops over whom the Air Service is acting.  The ordinary soldiers in the Infantry or Artillery, and even their officers, know comparatively little about whether an airplane they see is an enemy or a friend.  Their presumption is always that it is an

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