The Struggle for Air Space

The over-arching machine that directs a war, especially the First World War, whether to feed a nation or to feed an ego, a hundred years ago understood success would be determined by the appropriate allocation of manpower available to them and, more specifically, brainpower. While training facilities churned out soldiers, factories their weapons and newspapers their messages, each with equal efficiency and effectiveness, leaders high within the ivory towers balanced the aggregated costs against anticipated profits to determine daily objectives and win in time.

During the Great War, along numerous fronts, battles were fought not only on land, sea and in the air, but also at home for precious hearts and minds augmenting the requisite bodies providing the cannon fodder in the many trenches; armed and determined men expected to walk across once fertile and now barren fields, amid continuous and devastating shelling, slowly over craters dotting No Man’s Land, through debilitating razor-sharp barbed wire fences, willingly and proudly advancing through endless streams of rifle and machine gun fire toward victory.

Recruited, enlisted, trained and shipped manpower was known to be a finite resource, as was the brainpower needed to analyse, create, shape and deliver it. Thus, battles were fought in newspapers around the world to fill the ranks and attract from among their citizens drivers and lumberjacks, dentists and doctors, miners and teachers, mechanics and artists, as well as researchers and scientists, engineers and professors, designers and writers. Fighting forces needed to be passionate and heroic but they also needed to be well-armed and coordinated.

In August 1914, when war erupted, military leaders in Europe were determined to mobilize their massed troop and artillery units rapidly across the continent and win decisively by utilizing integrated and convenient railroad systems to conquer new lands and defeat an underwhelmed enemy. Although during the previous century balloons – with men dangling in baskets – had been deployed in wars to provide nearby reconnaissance and direct movements of troops in the short-term, at the outset of World War One airplanes were not used above battlefields.

The air space above did not matter.

Once a stalemate had been achieved in the early months, motorized airships, such as Germany’s famed Zeppelins, were used to drop bombs onto factories and ports, and leaflets over cities intended to demoralize both citizens and soldiers alike, as well as (with “eyes in the sky”) to spy on identified enemy units in the field and to report on the effectiveness of their bombardments. Not content to send men into the air armed with pistols and rifles, or cameras, Fokker developed a machine gun that could fire through the propeller and hence created the world’s first fighter plane.

Aerial warfare would never be the same again. With balloons proving to be deadly for their occupants, who plummeted screaming to the ground below, airmen went sent in bi-planes to cold heights of 12,000 feet to observe (using unwieldy hand-held cameras) over enemy territory, and then to distant cities in low-flying bombers that were shot out of the sky by anti-aircraft guns awaiting their impending arrival. Throughout WWI, to disrupt production and communication, airplanes consisting of wood and stretched fabric constantly crossed enemy lines to aid the war effort.

Before the war, in 1912, only a few short years after a crossing of the English Channel had been attempted and made by Bleriot in 1909, Vickers had been commissioned to develop an airplane to accommodate both a pilot and an accompanying gunner.  The latter was placed up front, firing a heavy machine gun above the propeller, and the first test flight crashed. Within several years, observers were strapped in and stood up to shoot their guns. On October 5, 1914, the first plane (Voisin III) had shot down another (Aviatik B1). By 1915, fighter aircraft were still quite ineffective.

Eliminating the need for a two-man crew, fixed machine guns were eventually mounted atop the upper wing of British biplanes to avoid shooting the propeller, but after unloading the drum of bullets they would often overheat and, rendered useless, even after trying to manually un-jam them, pilots would be forced to fly back to their base. Sadly, senior commanders actually forbade the carrying of parachutes. So, unable to carry a parachute and fearing death by burning, one British ace Mick Mannock admitted to carrying a pistol, to use on himself if his aircraft ever caught fire.

During the Hague Peace Conference, held in 1899, it was put on record that the dropping or shooting of any projectiles or explosives from the air during a time of war was forbidden and was considered a crime of war. It was also agreed that airplanes could only be used for reconnaissance or spying missions. However, as the war progressed, the German Fokker Dr I Triplane eventually eclipsed all Allied fighters, providing for its pilots both excellent maneuverability and a fast rate of climb.

The search for a better plane continued during the war. Hence, inspired by the Sopwith Triplane, the first Fokker triplanes were delivered to von Richthofen’s Jagdgeschwader I in late August 1917 and before the war ended several hundred were built – luckily for British and French airmen – compared to thousands of Spads, Nieuports, Albatroses and Sopwith Camels.

As the war went on, many biplanes and triplanes were introduced, as designers and engineers believed more wings meant more mobility in dogfights, stability and speed for pilots to evade gunfire, to fare better in turbulence and to simply escape the enemy. Fokker’s innovative triplane featured cantilever wings, supported by single interplane struts, and only the upper wing had ailerons, but had its share of troubles initially – such as becoming un-glued and shedding the upper wing – catastrophically crashing upon being introduced, killing their young pilots.

Before the war H.G. Wells, in his 1908 book called The War In The Air, explored the idea of aerial warfare and warned future battle would eventually be conducted with planes. A year earlier Rudolph Martin had predicted that Germany’s future was not on the sea, but in the air, as he believed further developments in aviation would kill the importance of distance – toward the German unification of the world. Whereas Martin wrote for the greater glory of the Reich, Wells’ was a tale of terror – apparently for the hopeful salvation of mankind.

More than half the pilots who died in WWI were killed in training. In general, British pilots received just 15 hours of training before flying their fragile and rather unsophisticated aircraft into battle. Five enemy kills earned the pilot a nickname: Ace. Among the aces British pilots faced in the skies above the Western Front was Manfred von Richthofen or “The Red Baron.” New pilots lasted on average just 11 days from arrival on the front to death. As Lieutenant Cecil Lewis stated: ‘You sat down to dinner faced by the empty chairs of men you had laughed with at lunch.’

Baron von Richthofen eventually shot down 80 Allied airman. He was an aristocratic killer, who painted his plane bright red and decorated his walls with the serial numbers of downed British aircraft. ‘I am a hunter,’ he once said. ‘When I have shot down an Englishman, my hunting passion is satisfied… for just a quarter of an hour.’ After each kill he rewarded himself after with a hand-crafted silver cup engraved with the date and the make of the enemy’s machine – though a German silver shortage put a stop to his commemorative cups when his tally had reached 60.

Airplanes were also used on a smaller scale on the Eastern Front, in the Balkans and even briefly in the German colony of Tsingtao in China. As well, by the war’s end, Austria-Hungary, Belgium, Bulgaria, Italy, Russia and the United States had developed their own wooden air forces.  By all accounts, the most famous fighter was the Fokker Dr I, which was a revelation when it entered service.

In the skilled hands of its numerous aces the triplane proved a formidable opponent and remained in service until replaced by the superior Fokker D VII in May 1918. The war ended six months later.