aviation. On November 14, 1910, near Hampton Roads, Virginia, civilian pilot Eugene Ely took off from a wooden platform installed on the scout cruiser USS Birmingham (CL-2). He landed safely on shore a few minutes later. Ely proved several months later that it was also possible to land on a ship. On January 18, 1911, he landed on a platform attached to the American cruiser USS Pennsylvania (ACR-4) in San Francisco harbor. The first use of airplanes in an actual war occurred in the 1911 Italo-Turkish War with Italian Army Air Corps Blériot XI and Nieuport IV monoplanes bombing a Turkish camp at Ain Zara in Libya. In the First Balkan War (1912) the Bulgarian Air Force bombed Turkish positions at Adrianople, while the Greek Aviation performed, over the Dardanelles, the first naval/air co-operation mission in history. The United States Army used airplanes for scouting and communications in its 1916-1917 campaign against Pancho Villa. Air reconnaissance was carried out in both wars too. The air-dropped bomb was extensively used during the First Balkan War (including in the first night-bombing on 7 November 1912), and subsequently used by the Imperial German Air Service during World War I. World War I In World War I both sides initially made use of tethered balloons and airplanes for observation purposes, both for information gathering and directing of artillery fire. At first, enemy pilots simply exchanged hand waves, but a desire to prevent enemy observation led to airplane pilots attacking other airplanes and balloons, initially with small arms carried in the cockpit. The addition of deflector plates to the back of propellers by French pilot Roland Garros and designer Raymond Saulnier in the Morane-Saulnier monoplane was the first example of an aircraft able to fire through its propeller, permitting Garros to score three victories in April 1915. Dutch aircraft designer Anthony Fokker developed a successful gun synchronizer in 1915, resulting in German Leutnant Kurt Wintgens scoring the first known victory for a synchronized gun-equipped fighter aircraft, on July 1, 1915. The Allies quickly developed their own synchronization gears, leading to the birth of aerial combat, more commonly known as dogfighting. Tactics for dogfighting evolved by trial and error. The German ace Oswald Boelcke created eight essential rules of dogfighting, the Dicta Boelcke. Both sides also made use of aircraft for bombing, strafing, maritime reconnaissance, antisubmarine warfare, and the dropping of propaganda. The German military made