World War I: The Birth of Military Aviation

The widespread use of aircraft in World War I (1914-18) altered both the nature of aviation and public opinion about flight and fliers. Although aircraft had seen extremely limited use as military weapons in the last few years before World War I, in 1914 most Europeans still considered flight to be the province of adventurous spirits who flew for sport and for excitement, without any real practical purpose. By the end of the conflict aviation was very big business, however, for many thousands of aircraft and engines had been built in a multitude of factories, most of which had no connection with aviation before the start of hostilities in August 1914. The air forces of the combatants, too, had grown into potent weapons of war, revealing to the far-sighted the potential that in World War II (1939-45) was to usher in the era of total war in which every man, woman and child, no matter how remote from the actual fighting front, was liable to attack.

Yet when World War I started few foresaw what was about to happen, for the role of aircraft was still uncertain. Although experiments with armament, principally light machine-guns and small bombs, had been carried out before the war, general military enthusiasm for the concept of armed aircraft had been lukewarm at best. This was understandable to a certain extent, for the already limited performance of most types of aircraft was seriously hampered by the addition of extra weight in the form of armament. Most generals could see little real scope for the employment of aircraft in war, nor could they see any purpose to be served by providing aircraft with armament to shoot at other aircraft serving in a similarly ill-defined role.

Despite military authorities' refusal to study the benefits and disadvantages of aircraft with any insight, enthusiasts called for aircraft to take their place in the nations' armed forces. This pressure, combined with a desire not to allow any one country to take a lead in building an air force, eventually led the French, German, British and other European governments to sanction the introduction of aircraft into their military forces. France and Germany soon led the field, and public indignation about this continental lead then forced the British government to spend more generously on their forces.

Thus the armed forces now had aircraft. But what were they to do with them, and how best were the services to exploit these expensive machines and the equally expensive force of men to fly and maintain them? The only possible solution in the years immediately preceding World War I seemed to be reconnaissance of two types: firstly tactical or strategic reconnaissance for commanders, and secondly spotting for the artillery. In the former, it was hoped, a trained officer would be able to use the vantage point the aircraft gave him to observe and note down enemy dispositions and movements and then report them to his command. In the latter an officer could spot the fall of his battery's shot, and then issue corrections which could be delivered in a weighted container, by signalling with manoeuvres or, it was hoped, by radio once a suitably light transmitter had been developed. France and Germany, both of whom placed great reliance on artillery, were quick to adopt the role of artillery spotting for their air forces. The United Kingdom, however, still lagged behind technically and theoretically, despite the efforts of many junior officers, and until 1914 its air forces were seen as an unwanted supplement to the cavalry in the latter's traditional capacity as light reconnoitring forces. The various military aircraft competitions held in 1911 and 1912 had been intended to produce types that could be standardised for the squadrons, thus easing procurement and maintenance problems. Yet it was one thing to select what was considered a type suitable for widespread use, and another to get it into 'mass production' and thus into widespread service. The aviation industry of the period was just not geared to mass production: most factories had experience only in the building of 'one-off' types for designers or for very limited production. The result, in military terms, was that chosen designs could not as yet be built in sufficient quantity and there could be little standardisation of types within the squadrons.

In this respect the Germans and French were better off than the British. The Germans fielded a large number of Taube (dove) types derived from the experiments of Etrich and Wels, as well as units homogeneously equipped with tractor biplanes of Albatros and Aviatik design. The French had squadrons of Voisin bombers, and Bleriots and Morane-Saulniers for reconnaissance work.

The British, almost inevitably, went to war with several French aircraft plus a large miscellany of British types, the best of which were the Royal Aircraft Factory's Bleriot Experimental (B.E.) 2, the Sopwith Tabloid, the Bristol Scout D and various marks of Avro Type 504.

During the first stages of the war, the Allied powers operated 233 aircraft 160 French and 73 British in France) against the Germans' total of 246. At first the weather was superb, but the aircraft had not been designed for intensive operations and their serviceability was low, a factor compounded by the number of different types and engines in service at a time when the Mies were in full retreat and all logistical backing was run on an extemporised basis. Losses were tolerable, however, and the Royal Flying Corps (RFC) began to turn in useful reconnaissance reports. At first the high command was loath to heed the information received from this novel source, but when British reconnaissance airplanes brought in the first news of the Germans' great :eft wheel to sweep down past the west side of Paris, information which was subsequently confirmed by orthodox methods, the generals at last began to realise that in aircraft they had an important new aid. The art of camouflage against air reconnaissance was as yet unknown, and so the observers of the 'recce-jobs' had an easy time and could turn in useful information.

Although their primary tasks were reconnaissance and artillery spotting when the front was stable, the young and adventurous pilots of the day saw no reason why both sides should enjoy such benefits, when it might be possible to prevent the enemy from acquiring information by simply shooting at him and perhaps forcing him down. It was not long, therefore, before the first weapons made their appearance in the air. Initially these weapons consisted of personal equipment such as rifles and pistols. The resultant aerial duels stood little chance of inflicting mortal damage on the combatants. More hopeful, or perhaps just less realistic, innovators tried shotguns, hand grenades, bricks and even grappling hooks on the end of lengths of cord, the last of which it was hoped would hit and destroy the enemy's propeller. Others decided that flying close to the enemy might cause the pilot's nerve to fail and so cause him to come down. In fact, this last tactic was used against the first airplane verifiably forced down in combat, when a German two-seater was brought down by the aerial antics of three pilots from No. 2 Squadron, RFC, led by Lieutenant H. D. Harvey-Kelly on 25 August (who usually occupied the forward of the two seats so that the removal of his weight, on or near the airplane's centre of gravity, would not affect the trim of the machine on solo flights), was located between the wings, which seriously curtailed his field of vision and of fire, surrounded as he was by a mass of rigging and bracing wires, many of which would be cut by bullets. This problem was especially acute on early models of the B.E.2, the standard British two-seater in the first period of the war. The matter was later reconsidered and improved by reversing the positions of pilot and observer so that the observer had an improved field of fire over the aircraft's rear.

Although armament was fitted to two-seaters from the earliest days of the war, two-seaters were not really suited to conversion into fighters, or 'scouts' as such aircraft were then designated, as they were too big, too heavy, clumsy and slow. A single-seater fighter was required, but tractor types were almost universal by 1915 and the problem of the position of the gun relative to the propeller remained unsolved.

If the gun were fixed to fire forwards along the airplane's longitudinal axis and pilot's line of sight, some of the bullets fired would almost inevitably hit and damage one or more of the propeller blades. Various alternatives were tried, including the provision of guns angled out from the centreline of the aircraft by about 45 degrees, but the sighting of guns along such great deflection angles was so difficult as to make the expedient virtually useless.

The only practical solution to the sighting problem was to fix the gun along the airplane's centreline, so that basically all the pilot had to do was aim his whole machine at the target and press the trigger. What was needed was a method of stopping the occasional bullet from striking the propeller blades. Experiments carried out before the war by Franz Schneider of the German Luft-Verkehrs Gesellschaft (LUG) concern and by Raymond Saulnier of the French Morane-Saulnier company had paved the way, with the invention of primitive interrupter gears which halted the action of the gun when there was a propeller blade in front of the muzzle. But both experimenters' efforts had foundered on the problem of 'hang-fire' rounds. Here the fault lay with the manufacture of the primer and propellant for the ammunition: inconsistencies in the chemical compounds meant that bullets occasionally fired fractionally later than they should, obviating the work of the interrupter and shattering a blade. To preserve these expensive items, Saulnier had fitted experimental propellers with special steel deflectors, wedge-shaped The capture of this remarkable French airplane was a welcome surprise to the Germans, who immediately ordered Anthony Fokker, the enigmatic Dutch designer who was working for them, to copy the system on his recently introduced M 5 Eindecker monoplane. In just 48 hours, Fokker's team of talented designers and engineers produced not a copy of the primitive French system but an efficient interrupter gear for the 7.92mm (0.312in) Parabellum machine-gun then in widespread use as the standard German aerial gun. (Early in 1916, the 7.92mm/0.312in MG 08/15 machine-gun made at Spandau near Berlin superseded the Parabellum as the standard fixed gun, hence the popular Allied misnomer of the gun as the 'Spandau') The Fokker interrupter was tested on an M 5k monoplane and proved highly efficient, and the armed version of the M 5k was ordered into production as the E-I.

The new fighter entered service over the Western Front, and soon earned itself a fearsome reputation. Allied aircraft, which were mostly as agile and as fast as the German machine, could not cope with the technological advance of the interrupter-governed machine-gun, and for warfare severe Allied casualties began to accrue. The press was quick to exploit the period as that of the 'Fokker Scourge', in which the prey were `Fokker fodder'. The emotional controversy that resulted cast the first doubts on the way in which Allied aircraft were designed and procured, especially when no Allied counter to the Fokker was produced.

Over the Front, the 'Fokker Scourge' was at first limited in its effect because the Germans had not evolved a tactical system to make full use of the type's impact. The E-I, soon joined by the slightly larger and more powerful E-II and E-III, was issued to the Fliegerabteilungen (flight sections) on the basis of one or two machines to each unit. Luckily for the Germans, prescient officers in the Bavarian air force, one of the several semi-autonomous national forces that made up the Imperial German air service, realized that better results would be gained by grouping the presently scattered fighters into homogeneous units. Thus was born the Kampfeinsitzerkommando (single-seater fighter unit), of which three were formed in the late summer of 1915.

The Fokkers ruled supreme in the autumn and winter of 1915, with the Allies apparently loath to copy the German interrupter gear. Instead a variety of expedients were tried, with the result that the inferior German fighters continued to dominate the skies during the crucial early stages of the Battle of Verdun, that military and emotional bastion of France where the Germans had determined to 'bleed France white'.

In the spring of 1916, at last, the Allies began to make headway, albeit still without an interrupter gear. The French produced the delightful Nieuport Type 11 Bebe (baby) sesquiplane, with a Lewis gun firing over the top wing to clear the upper arc of the disc swept by the propeller. The British introduced the Airco (de Havilland) D.H.2, a neat pusher biplane with a Lewis gun mounted at the front of the one-man nacelle. The Bebe first achieved prominence over Verdun with Les Cigognes, an elite French formation that was basically an adaptation and expansion of Boelcke's ideas. The British considered it unwise to its single sets of interplane struts and 'half' struts supporting the centre section, also had a Lewis gun for the observer. Much to the annoyance of RFC officialdom, the Pup received its nickname from its scaled-down family likeness to the 11/2-Strutter, and despite strenuous efforts to dissuade pilots from using the nickname, 'Pup' was so popular that the authorities were forced to accept it as official. The Pup was in many respects the first adequate fighter. Its performance was excellent, it had a fixed machine-gun with interrupter gear, and its agility was phenomenal.

Unlike many other aircraft, however, the Pup's manoeuverability was not secured at the expense of other factors, and the type lives in the memory of those who have flown it as one of the most tractable and delightful aircraft ever built. Its control response was smooth, clean and swift, allowing the pilot to place his machine exactly as he wished.

Towards the end of 1916, however, the inexorable see-saw of technological advance over the Front had swung the balance in favor of Germany once again. Realising that the Allies would produce a counter the Eindecker by the middle of 1916, the Germans had set about developing a new generation of aircraft late in 1915. By the last months of 1916 these were beginning to enter service with the Deutsche Luftstreitkrafte or German air force, formed in October 1916 from a variety of flying units. At the heart of this resurgence in German air superiority was the series of Albatros single-seat fighters, starting with the D-I, -II and -III, the last of which entered service early in 1917. These sleek, shark-like biplanes with their plywood fuselages and well-cooled engines were capable of very good performance. Most importantly of all, however, they were armed with two machine-guns, which gave them twice the firepower of Allied types.

The immediate consequence of the arrival of these new German fighters was total command of the air, and, in what became known in the RFC as `Bloody April', the British suffered losses in aircrews and aircraft of some 30 per cent, their highest losses of the entire war. Most tragic of all, from the long-term point of view, was the loss of many survivors of the previous year's hard times. With these men went most of the practical experience in how to fight an air war, so crucial in helping the new pilots, who were shot down in droves by the `Albatri' or Tee-strutters' as they were known in the slang of the RFC. The life expectancy of RFC subalterns on the Western Front in the 'Bloody April' period was between 11 days and three weeks. Bearing in mind that experienced pilots stood considerably more chance of survival, the life expectancy of new arrivals must have been a matter of hours, or at best, days. A high rate of losses was almost inevitable for the RFC as Trenchard still insisted on offensive patrols and aggressive work even by two-seaters, most of which were by now the newer Armstrong Whitworth F.K.8 and Royal Aircraft Factory R.E.8. Both of these were large biplanes, and the R.E.8 had acquired an unenviable and deserved reputation as a 'deathtrap'. The fault really lay with the tactical employment of the type, in steady artillery-spotting work, where it was particularly vulnerable to German fighter attack.

By the 'Bloody April' of 1917 air combats had grown into massive affairs involving 100 aircraft or more, a far cry from the individual combats of 1915 and early 1916. The skies over the Western Front were now dominated by huge, swirling dogfights, impossible to follow from the ground except when a crippled machine staggered from the fray out of control, or when an airplane which had taken a bullet in the unprotected fuel system plunged down like a fiery comet, trailing flame and black oily smoke until it crashed into the ground and exploded.

The second quarter of 1917 found both sides exhausted by 'Bloody April', the only success of which had been, from the British point of view, the performance by the handful of Sopwith Triplanes, or Tripehounds' as they were nicknamed, operated by the RNAS. Although each was armed with only one machine-gun, these were clean aircraft that could combat the Albatri' by means of their remarkable rate of climb and their general agility, both functions of the large wing area contained within the small overall dimensions of a triplane layout. So impressed were the Germans that orders for triplane designs were immediately issued. The type ordered into production was the Fokker Dr I, the airplane flown by von Richthofen at the time of his death. Very manoeuverable, the Dr I in fact appeared after the effective epoch of the triplane, and lacked the performance to make it a fighter suitable for any but the most experienced of pilots.

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