Week 6

Research

-This week research was mainly focused on the American air effort in World War I. Research was by looking for articles on the internet, looking for books at the school library, and looking for any good videos. As research went on, the Battle of St. Mihiel keep coming up, so more digging was done on the Battle of St. Mihiel. It was kind of frustrating trying to find good reliable sources about fort this topic, but eventually some good sources were found. There was also some information on the Battle of St. Mihiel in a book at the library called The Great War in The Air, by John H. Morrow, Jr. This book gives great information on the aviation history of World War I and covers all air powers during the war.  I found out that the Battle of St. Mihiel was the first battle where the Americans were unified under one person, General Pershing. The Battle of St. Mihiel was the first step towards driving the Germans out of France  in 1918.
       
-America, compared to the European powers, was far behind in aviation. First off, America did not have the factories readily capable to mass produce aircraft. Second, America did not have much leadership that had the ambition or knowledge to start a successful aviation program. Colonel Mitchell was appointed head of all American air power in all of France. Colonel Mitchell was very ambitious in fact of how many aircraft and personnel he requested from Congress. When the time came to the start of the battle, Colonel Mitchell had acquired 701 pursuit aircraft, 366 observation aircraft, 323 day bombers, and 91 night bomber (Morrow, 1993). It was the largest collection of air power to date. The Battle of St. Mihiel lasted from September 12-16. The Battle of St. Mihiel should the world how important air superiority to win battles and changed the way the wars will be fought in the future.


Video
-Click here for short video on the American War effort and the Battle of St. Mihiel. It is a brief, but informative video and is pretty interesting.

Final Project Progress
-Right now I am working on gathering information on a few different topics that all deal with aviation in World War I. I will hopefully be able to interconnect all of my tour made on tour.builder to help give a great lay-out of how aviation in World War I changed the world. There will be a tour of American air effort and the Battle of St. Mihiel, British air service, French air service, Italian air service, Russian air service and Austro-Hungarian air service. The French aviation and air service interconnects with every allied air service in a number of different ways. The main reason is because the French had the largest infrastructure set up for producing aircraft before and during the war. Many of the Russian aircraft were French patented and many American aircraft used in the war were French designed and made. I would like to find some more information on the Eastern Front air services because I feel that people do not know as much about them.

                                                                                                                                                                                                                                    Problems

-One problem that I found is that the main focus on history of World War I tends to be more heavily documented and focused on the Western Front. The main reason for this is because America was only on the Western Front of the war. Another problem that I am faced with is that some sources have different information on the topic at hand. I end-up having to check the credibility of the source and cross reference it with other sources.