Although airplanes were a relatively new invention in 1914, the race for air superiority started during the First World War. The airplane had existed for little more than a decade by the outbreak of the conflict, but both sides in the war quickly recognized the advantages of creating flying war machines and worked tirelessly throughout the war to develop faster and deadlier fighters and bombers. The concept of “air superiority” was unheard of prior to 1914, but winning the war in the skies became a tactical necessity for both the Allies and the Central Powers by the end of the Great War.
The main military role of aircraft in World War I was reconnaissance, according to Jon Guttman, a military aviation historian who’s authored more than a dozen books about the war’s aircraft and fighter pilots. Hot air balloons had been deployed by the military for more than a century to get a “bird’s eye view” of the battlefield, including during the American Civil War, but the fixed-wing airplanes of World War I were able to fly deep behind enemy lines to track troop movements and map terrain. “These were two-seater aircraft with a pilot to do the flying and an observer up front to man the binoculars and take notes,” observed Guttman.
The handwritten drawings and on-the-fly observations weren’t always accurate, but proved critical in some early operations. In 1914, for example, British reconnaissance planes with the Royal Flying Corps alerted British and French commanders to German troops preparing for a siege of Paris through Belgium. The Allied armies were able to outflank the Germans, resulting in the Battle of the Marnes, a critical early victory. It wasn’t long before cameras were mounted onto reconnaissance planes taking dozens of aerial photos that would be developed and stitched together to create panoramic battlefield maps. Those increasingly sharp and zoom-in images gave field commanders unprecedented intelligence for positioning artillery and planning troop movements. At the start of the war, these reconnaissance planes were such a novelty that enemy pilots would wave at each other as they crisscrossed the font lines But, it wasn’t long before the strategic importance of spy planes sank in and with it, a burning desire to shoot the enemy’s aircraft out of the sky.
There was no such thing as a fighter plane until 1915,” claims Jon Guttman. “But, after the Marne, military commanders began to take seriously the idea of eliminating the other guy.” In early skirmishes, slow-moving reconnaissance planes would take pot shots at each other with service pistols and rifles. Ground crews started mounting machine guns in front of the observer’s position, but they were hard to aim around the propellor, wings and struts. The breakthrough invention was the “interrupter gear” or “synchronization gear,” which allowed a front-mounted machine gun to fire a continuous barrage of bullets safely through the plane’s rotating propellor blades. All pilots had to do was aim the nose of the plane at the enemy and fire. Dutch-born engineer Anthony Fokker is credited with developing the first synchronized gear for the German army which he mounted on the single-seat Fokker E-1 in 1915. The lightweight plane was so nimble and deadly that the Allies nicknamed it the “Fokker Scourge."
For the first time, planes to the air with the express purpose of air-to-air combat, and the French began calling any pilot who shot down five or more enemy planes as l’As (the Ace). While these Aces had no shortage of skill or daring, the winners of most early “dogfights” were the pilots flying the better technology. Allied engineers responded to the Fokkers with their own single-seat fighters like the British-made Sopwith Camel, named for the hump shaped bulge in its fuselage to fit two front-mounted synchronized machine guns. When Sopwith introduced a three-engine triplane,” the Germans answered with the Fokker Dr.1, the favorite of none other than Manfred von Richthofen, the dreaded “Red Baron,” who was credited with 80 official kills before his red, three-winged fighter was finally shot down over Vaux-sur-Somme in northern France.in 1918.
We normally associate aerial bombings with Nazi Germany’s Blitzkrieg tactics of World War II, but the first targeted bombing campaign occurred in 1915 when Germany sent high-altitude Zeppelin airships on nighttime bombing raids of civilian targets in London and Edinburgh. The hydrogen-filled Zeppelins, initially used for reconnaissance, cruised at 11,000 feet and could cut their engines to carry out surprise attacks. The British public decried the “baby killers” and the military finally deployed fighter planes with incendiary bullets to torch the massive Zeppelins. The first bomber planes began their careers as reconnaissance aircraft that were loaded with more and more weaponry as they had to fight their way back from behind enemy lines. Guttman says the biggest reconnaissance planes, like the four-engine Russian giant known as the Ilya Muramet, started carrying bombs to drop on the enemy “as a final insult.” The Germans took a page from the Russian handbook and built their own massive bomber called the Zeppelin Staaken R.VI, a biplane with a wingspan of more that 138 feet across that carried up to nine crew members. The feared German bomber made runs over London and Paris, dropping bombs weighing more than 2,200 pounds including a direct hit on London’s Royal Hospital Chelsea.
At the close of World War I, it was indisputable that airplanes were the weapon of the future. By 1918, Allied bombers were already flying in group formations to attack German munitions factories along the French border, and German fighters were deployed in force to wage epic air battles. Two-weeks before the Armistice, Britain, France, Italy and the US formed an Inter-Allied Independent Air Force to coordinate bombing Germany into submission. The Treaty of Versailles placed a limit on the German army at 100,000 men. Conscription was forbidden. The treaty restricted the Navy to six vessels under 10,000 tons, with a ban on the acquisition or maintenance of a submarine fleet. Germany was forbidden to maintain an air force, but the stage was set for World War II, when air superiority was one of the deciding factors for the Allies in both the European and Pacific theaters.
Until next time...safe travels.
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