Aircraft had been around for just over a decade at the start of World War I, but both sides in the conflict quickly recognized the benefits of creating flying war machines and worked tirelessly throughout the war to develop faster, bigger and deadlier fighters and bombers. The concept of “air superiority” was unknown before 1914, but winning the war in the sky became a tactical necessity at the end of the Great War.
The first war planes were intended for reconnaissance
A two-seat reconnaissance/combat aircraft photographed on a German naval airfield as the air gunner checks the machine gun.
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The primary military role of planes in World War I was reconnaissance, says Jon Guttman, a military aviation historian who is the author of more than a dozen books on First World War planes and fighter pilots. World War. 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 fixed-wing aircraft of World War I were able to fly far behind enemy lines. to track troop movements and map the terrain.
“They were two-seater planes with a pilot to fly and an observer in the front to operate the binoculars and take notes,” Guttman explains.
Handwritten drawings and on-the-fly observations were not always accurate, but proved essential in some early operations. In 1914, for example, British reconnaissance planes from the Royal Flying Corps alerted British and French commanders that German troops were preparing for a siege of Paris via Belgium. The Allied armies were able to outflank the Germans, resulting in the Battle of the Marnes, a critical first victory.
It wasn’t long before cameras were mounted on reconnaissance planes, taking dozens of aerial photos that would be developed and stitched together to create panoramic maps of the battlefield. These increasingly sharp and magnified images gave commanders in the field unprecedented intelligence to position artillery and plan troop movements.
Early Dogfights and Flying Aces
Drivers in German Fokker Eindecker Monoplane attack airmen in a French Voisin biplane, c. 1915 in this illustration.
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At the start of the First World War, reconnaissance aircraft were such a novelty that enemy pilots waved to each other as they cruised the front lines. But it wasn’t long before the strategic importance of spy planes set in, and with it a burning desire to shoot enemy planes from the skies.
“There were no fighter planes until 1915,” says Guttman. “But after the Marne, the military commanders started to take the idea of eliminating the other guy seriously.”
In early skirmishes, slow reconnaissance aircraft fired at each other with service pistols and rifles. Ground crews began mounting machine guns in front of the spotter’s position, but they had difficulty aiming around the propeller, wings, and struts.
The revolutionary invention was the “interrupt gear” or “sync gear”, which allowed a forward-mounted machine gun to fire a continuous barrage of bullets safely through the rotating propeller blades of the machine. ‘airplane. All the pilots had to do was point the nose of the plane at the enemy and fire.
Dutch-born engineer Anthony Fokker is credited with developing the first synchronized equipment for the German military which he fitted to the single-seat Fokker E-1 in 1915. The light aircraft was so agile and deadly that the Allies nicknamed him the “Fokker Scourge”. .”
For the first time, planes took off for the express purpose of air-to-air combat, and the French began to call any pilot who shot down five or more enemy planes an “l’ace” or an As. While these Aces did not were not lacking in talent and daring, the winners of most of the first “air combats” were the pilots using the best technology.
“From the moment fighters became practical, it was the real start of an arms race for air superiority,” says Guttman. “An aircraft’s performance, its ease of handling, its armament, its rate of climb – all of these became factors in a constant struggle to find something better than what the enemy had.”
Allied engineers responded with their own single-seat fighters like the British-made Sopwith Camel, named for the hump-like bulge in its fuselage to accommodate two forward-mounted synchronized machine guns.
When Sopwith introduced a three-winged “triplane”, the Germans responded with the Fokker DR-1, none other than Manfred von Richthofen’s favorite, the fearsome “Red Baron”, which was credited with 80 official victories before his red, three-winged fighter was finally shot down in 1918.
Nazi Zeppelin airships bomb civilian targets
A United States government poster showing examples of British and German airships and aircraft so the public can take cover if they see enemy aircraft, c. 1915.
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We usually associate aerial bombardment with Nazi Germany’s Blitzkrieg tactics of World War II, but the first targeted bombing campaign was in 1915, when Germany sent high-altitude Zeppelin airships in night bombing raids. of civilian targets in London and Edinburgh.
Hydrogen-filled Zeppelins, initially used for reconnaissance, cruised at 11,000 feet and could shut down their engines to perform surprise attacks. The British public decried the “baby killers” and the military eventually deployed fighter jets armed with incendiary bullets to set the massive Zeppelins on fire.
The first bombers began their careers as reconnaissance aircraft increasingly loaded with weapons as they had to fight their way behind enemy lines. Guttman says larger reconnaissance aircraft, such as the four-engined Russian giant known as Ilya Muramets, began carrying bombs to drop on the enemy “as a final insult”.
The Germans took a page from the Russian playbook and built their own massive bomber called the Zeppelin Staaken R.VI, a biplane with a wingspan of over 138 feet that carried up to nine crew. The fearsome German bomber traveled to London and Paris, dropping bombs weighing over 2,200 pounds, including a direct hit on London’s Royal Hospital Chelsea.
The stage is set for aviation’s great role in WWII
By the end of World War I, it was “indisputable,” says Guttman, that airplanes were the weapon of the future. By 1918, Allied bombers were already flying in groups to attack German munitions factories along the French border, and German fighters were deployed in force to fight epic air battles.
The stage was set for the Second World War, when air superiority was one of the decisive factors for the Allies in the theaters of Europe and the Pacific.
