WW1 POSTERS

The War in the Air

a. The Men
b. The Machines
c. Organization
d. Tactics
e. Significance of Air Warfare

The principal national contenders in the air fighting of World War I were Germany, France, and the British Empire; Italy, Austria-Hungary, the United States, and Russia played minor though not inconsequential roles. Of these powers, Germany was the best prepared for the new warfare in the skies, as she was for the traditional battles on the ground. The Germans had prepared methodically and diligently for every foreseeable aspect of war, while Britain slept, and French generals preached that victory was to be achieved by determination and bayonets. Moreover, Germany was a highly industrialized nation, possessing the seed corn needed for air armadas: aircraft factories, skilled artisans, and better aircraft and engine designs than those of her rivals.

France stood next in capacity for air warfare. Her people had shown tremendous interest in the first European flights of the Wright brothers near Paris, had reacted enthusiastically to the exploits of the Brazilian Alberto Santos-Dumont, and had taken great pride in their own air pioneers, such as Louis Bleriot and Henri Farman. Moreover, France was not far behind Germany in number of aircraft and in size and number of aircraft factories.

Great Britain had had fewer outstanding early pilots and engine builders. Her air industry was so underdeveloped that her first five air squadrons sent to France in August 1914 (all she had at the time) were equipped largely with planes and engines of French design. At the same time, she was a highly industrialized nation with large numbers of skilled workers.

The Austrian and Italian air forces were of less importance (note that Italy did not become a belligerent until May 1915), though the Italians were the first to employ airplanes in warfare, having .used them to drop a few crude bombs on Arab tribesmen during their conquest of Libya in 1912. The Russians had experimented with unusually-big airplanes but without much success, and their small air force consisted largely of French planes.

Although it had been two American citizens, Wilbur and Orville Wright, who had made the first successful heavier-than-air (airplane) flight, the United States remained surprisingly apathetic toward aviation in general and the 1914-1916 air operations in Europe in particular. Even the glaring deficiencies shown by the 1st Aero Squadron, which ( equipped with 16 training planes) had accompanied Brig. Gen. (later General of the Armies) John J. Pershing's expeditionary force into Mexico in 1916, failed to rouse either military or industrial leaders to corrective action. Consequently, when the United States finally declared war on Germany in April 1917, it did not have a single combat airplane. American aviators had to be trained in French and British schools and fly French and British aircraft.

While the major air operations of World War I took place over the battlefields of France, military aviation also played a valuable part in the operations in northern Italy. The Germans used aircraft effectively in their defeats of the Russians along the eastern front, and the employment of airpower by Gen. Sir Edmund Allenby (later 1st Viscount Allenby) against the Turks in Palestine remains a classic example of the proper use of aircraft in mobile warfare.

By the time war broke out in Europe the army had only one aero squadron consisting of 8 aircraft and 16 officers. The navy had also become interested in Glenn Curtiss' flying boat designs and Curtiss pusher designs which proved their ability to take off from a specially planked surface on the deck of a battleship. In 1914, however, the navy had only 9 planes and 21 engines for its aerial effort. A series of accidents with the Wright and Curtiss pusher designs put them into military disfavor, and the tractor design with the propeller in front became the standard just before the war.

By the end of 1915 only 100 aircraft, including both military and civil types, had been manufactured in the United States. However, in the 1913-1915 period many of the foundations were laid on which the great aeronautical development effort of the next 30 years was based. The first aeronautical engineering course was established at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology about 1912 by Jerome C. Hunsaker, then a naval officer assigned to aircraft construction. The United States Weather Bureau began publication of a daily aviation weather map in 1914. The National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics, the spearhead of United States technical progress in aviation for the next 40 years, was created by an act of Congress in 1915.

At the beginning of World War I, France had the largest air force with about 1,500 planes, followed by Germany with 1,000 military aircraft. Great Britain lagged badly with only a few hundred planes including trainers. The outbreak of war plunged aviation into a forced draft technical development that achieved more technical progress in three years than had been accomplished in the preceding decade. Aircraft speeds that were about 60 mph. at the beginning of the war, more than doubled to 145 mph. for operational fighters in 1918. Altitude ceiling increased from about 14,000 feet in 1916 to over 30,000 feet by the end of the war. From the prewar aircraft whose payload was usually only a pilot, a passenger, and gasoline, the useful load increased to more than 3,000 pounds in 1918 vintage bombers.

Aircraft manufacturing plants and pilot training centers mushroomed in all the belligerent countries to provide a reservoir of mechanical facilities and trained personnel that gave the postwar growth of aviation much of its impetus.

From the beginning of World War I there was a bitter debate over the proper military function of the airplane. Most traditional military leaders felt the airplane was primarily a scouting weapon to extend the eyes and ears of the cavalry in locating enemy forces and positions, and it was in this role that the airplane operated during the first year of the war. German and French pilots flying unarmed reconnaissance planes waved to each other as they sped across opposing lines on their missions. Aircraft spotted enemy ground forces, took pictures of the terrain, and dropped propaganda leaflets. Gradually, as the character of the war changed into the bitter trench deadlock, the combative spirit of the airmen increased. Pistols and rifles were carried aloft to take potshots at enemy fliers. Small bombs and grenades were added to aerial equipment to toss at likely targets on the ground. Despite the restrictions of the military leaders, the airmen were breaking through these artificially imposed restrictions to add the airplane to the arsenal of deadly military weapons.

By 1915 the French were experimenting with a machine gun mounted to fire forward through the propeller arc. To prevent the bullets from shattering the propeller, heavy armor plate encased the blades. While firing this arrangement against a German plane, Lieut. Roland Garros, a prewar aviation pioneer, shattered his propeller blades and was forced down behind the German lines.

The Germans quickly sensed the importance of the French development and gave Anthony H. G. Fokker, a Dutchman whose services had been rejected by Britain and France before he settled in Germany, the job of developing a machine gun synchronized to fire through the propeller arc. Fokker solved the problem with a mechanical cam that stopped the machine gun from firing each time a propeller blade was in the line of fire.

German pilots flying planes equipped with the Fokker synchronized machine gun sallied out in force driving Allied aircraft from the battle area. From this time onward, the air in wartime would be a disputed area. Control of the air became a prize in itself and a necessary requisite for successful ground or sea operations. The French soon countered with a hydraulically operated machine gun synchronizer and the air war flared into new fury.

As the war dragged on, three primary types of battle planes emerged as the primary lines of technical development. First came the scout or fighter aircraft designed to drive enemy aircraft from the sky and maintain control of the air. These were single-seater aircraft with the best performance available-starting out at about 90 mph. top speed in the early war years and pushing close to 150 mph. before the war's end. They were armed with a pair of forward-firing machine guns. It was in this type of aircraft that the great aces of World War I fought and rolled up their record of kills. Baron Manfred von Richthofen of Germany topped the list of fighter pilots with 80 victims, followed by Maj. Rene Fonck of France with 75, British Maj. Edward "Mickey" Mannock with 73, Canadian Maj. William Avery Bishop with 72, and Capt. Ernst Udet of Germany with 62, in that order. The leading United States ace was Capt. Edward V. Rickenbacker, credited with destroying 21 German aircraft and four balloons.

The fighter pilots preserved the last elements of the ancient chivalry of knights in combat during the bloody mass slaughter of trench warfare. When they were forced down behind enemy lines, the enemy air force entertained them as dinner guests before shipping them off to prison camps. When a fighter pilot was killed in enemy territory, the victors buried him with full military honors and dropped a note containing details of his demise and a photograph of his grave on his squadron aerodrome. Even in the swirling dogfights between squadrons of fighter planes, the combat usually narrowed down to individual duels.

However, a German schoolteacher named Oswald Boelcke, turned fighter pilot, changed this style of combat. Boelcke was the originator of fighter tactics that saw flights and squadrons deployed so they fought as a group rather than as individuals. Boelcke was killed after 43 victories in a mid-air collision with a wingman before he could fully apply his tactics in combat over the western front. But his leading pupil, Baron Manfred von Richthofen put them into practice with his wing of red-painted Fokker triplanes and dominated the air over northern France for months with Boelcke's tactics.

The continuing design series of Fokker dominated the German fighter planes of which the most famous were his triplane which was extremely maneuverable for dogfighting but short on range and level speed. The D-VII model which used metal tubing instead of wood, was the first cantilever wing combat plane and had outstanding performance characteristics. The D-VIII Flying Razor, the high wing monoplane with a tapered wing, of which only a few reached combat but easily outclassed the other 1918 vintage fighters over the western front in much the same futile manner that the Messerschmitt 262, the first jet plane to see combat in World War II, appeared in German skies too late to stem the Allied bomber stream.

On the Allied side, the British Sopwith Camel and SE-5 fighter planes, and the French Nieuport and Spad fighters were the cream of their crop.

As the war settled down to the grim stalemate of the trenches, both sides sought means to surmount this obstacle and strike deeper at the roots of each other's war effort. The Germans raided London and other key English towns in Zeppelins, but the giant airships soon succumbed to the twin menaces of British fighters and North Sea weather. They were supplanted by the twinengine Gotha bombers and later the giant SiemensSchuckert R-1 bombers with a wing. span of 150 feet and engines located in the fuselage where they could be repaired in flight.

The British retaliated with raids on the industrial towns of the Ruhr and Rhine valleys with Handley Page biplane bombers that could deliver a 1,650-pound bomb load, and with the shorter ranged de Havilland DH-4 bombers that operated against supply dumps, artillery concentrations, and other rear line targets. The French developed the Farman and Brequet bombers, while the Italians used the giant Caproni triplane bombers that had a wing span of 130 feet and could carry 3,000 pounds of bombs. They operated from Italian bases and penetrated deep into Austria and southern Germany on their raids.

The third specialized type was the two-seater observation plane designed to photograph enemy terrain and observe troop movements, artillery concentrations, and supply dumps. Early in the war, captive balloons were used for this purpose, but they became too vulnerable to enemy fighter aircraft and were superseded by the observation plane protected by a covey of fighter aircraft. Many of the mass fighter combats over the western front were fought to control the sky for the operations of the observation planes.

The first Americans to fight in the air over Europe were volunteers who enlisted in the French Foreign Legion and in 1915 formed the Lafayette Escadrille. Later, after the United States entered the war in April 1917, the first contingents of United States Army pilots were assigned to the Royal Flying Corps where they flew British fighters and were under the command of British and Canadian officers.

The United States air effort was dominated by the personality and ideas of Brig. Gen. William (Billy) Mitchell, who was the first American aviator to reach the western front, and who commanded the combat aviation units of the American Expeditionary Force during the final offensives of 1918. General Mitchell was a far-sighted aerial strategist who saw far beyond the capabilities of the spruce and fabric planes he had to fly during World War I. Like the German Boelcke, he concentrated on developing tactics to use aircraft in large masses to achieve major strategic aims rather than aimless dogfighting. For the American offensives at St.-Mihiel and in the Argonne in 1918 he organized all of the aviation under his command into a strategic offensive first to sweep the Germans from the sky over the battlefield to deny them observation of American troop movements, and then turned his aerial offensive against the German rear areas to destroy their supplies and artillery and prevent reserves from moving into the battle line.

The basic tactics of isolating the battlefield by aerial action developed by General Mitchell in 1918 were used effectively again in World War II and the Korean War. He also prepared to deliver a large scale attack by paratroops and airborne infantry for an offensive planned in 1919 in much the same way that Allied troops hurdled the Rhine River barrier in 1945 by airborne assault.

Out of his experience in the brief but significant aerial action of 1918, General Mitchell developed the deep-seated convictions that were to lead to his postwar crusade for the development of adequate military airpower and his courtmartial by the traditional element of military leaders who, disputing the lessons of the western front, could not envision the airplane as anything more than a scouting force.

The United States entered World War I woefully weak in the air with a strength of only 55 observation planes, 35 pilots, and 1,087 enlisted men. Initial service of the aviation section of the Signal Corps on the Mexican border in support of Gen. John J. Pershing's punitive expedition had proved it weak in maintenance and operational reliability, as well as in combat potential. Aviation missions from the Allies soon swamped United States factories with orders for aircraft and engines, but the bulk of the combat planes had to be of foreign design because there were no modern American designs. The bulk of American design skill was concentrated on training planes and the engines for them. Among the foreign designs produced in the United States were the British de Havilland DH-R bomber, the Lepere French fighter, the Italian Caproni triplane, and the French Hispano-Suiza engine. The only American-built combat planes to see use in Europe before the Armistice were a few Dayton-built DH-4S's. United States fighter squadrons flew French and British planes exclusively in combat until the war's end.

Stimulated by the huge wartime appropriations for aircraft that totaled $598,000,000 in 1917-1918, American manufacturers delivered 13,943 airplanes and 41,953 aircraft engines. United States designers produced some extremely good combat designs but they were all too late to see service. These included the Curtiss-18 fighters and the Thomas Morse MB-3, both in the 150 mph. class, and the Martin MB bomber, a twinengine giant of its era.

The first practical guided missile-the Bugwas also developed in 1918 by Elmer A. Sperry and Charles F. Kettering. It was built of papiermache with wood framework and could carry a 300-pound bomb load automatically delivered on a target 40 miles from takeoff. In concept and function it was the forerunner of the German V-1 flying bomb of 1944.