The invention of air forces
A joint post with son Thomas Sensing

About seven weeks ago I wrote an essay about the invention of air-to-air combat during World War One, intending to post it here. My son, Thomas, read it and mentioned that one of his class assignments was to write an essay on a historical event or development of the twentieth century. He decided to springboard off my essay, so I withheld posting it.

They turned out to be related, but with different emphases. First is Thomas' essay, then mine. A little of the material is duplicated, but not much.
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From Possibility to Necessity: Airpower of World War I

On 17 December 1903, a momentous occasion took place that proved to forever change to way the world would look at warfare: Orville and Wilbur Wright flew the first mechanical aeroplane successfully. Though the flight lasted only twelve seconds and traveled a mere 120 feet, it was an eye-opener for the world. The possibility of mastering a heavier-than-air machine might have seemed too supernatural or inconceivable to some. Yet it need not have been, given the period of huge industrial and technological advancement.

The Wright brothers could never have foreseen the uses of their radical invention in the conflict that became known as the Great War. They thought the airplane would prevent nations from warring with one another. In actuality, it only added another dimension to the battlefield. The idea of using the aeroplane for military purposes was prophetically expressed by Brigadier General Arthur Murray, chief of the Army’s coast artillery, who said, “War on land and sea will find in the aeroplane a valuable means of reconnaissance and possible carnage.” At the onset of the First World War, the belligerent nations had barely tapped into the offensive capabilities of the airplane, whereas the pressures of the war itself caused aircraft weaponry to dramatically improve, and created the opportunity for many young pilots to gain national fame.

Much to the Wright brothers’ disappointment, their invention did not take flight in any sort of government or military installation until 1907. On 1 August 1907, the Aeronautical Division of the United States Army Signal Corps was established, with the purpose of “[studying] the flying machine and the possibility of adapting it to military purposes.” Yet this almost proved to be too little too late. Europe had already jumped at the prospects of an airplane. France already had a specifically-designed military aircraft by 1908. Congress called for bidders of a flying machine with the following specifications: a minimum speed of forty mph in air, with a ten percent penalty per one mph less and a ten percent bonus for every mph over the original forty. The airplane was required to carry two passengers weighing a total of 350 pounds for 125 miles, and be able to fly nonstop for one hour.

To no one’s dismay, the Wright brothers were awarded the contract of $25,000 in February 1908, their first sale to any country. The first Wright brothers’ Army airplane weighed 1,360 pounds, had a 25-horsepower engine, and two wide-blade pusher propellers (meaning that the propellers were situated behind the pilot and therefore “pushed” the plane). It had parallel skids – no wheels – and required a 1,500 lb counterweight and launching track to lift off (Cooke 5).

The survival of the Aeronautics Division in the United States looked bleak. By the summer of 1910, it consisted of only 11 men, who at times had to pay for gasoline out of their own pockets in order to fuel their solitary airplane. The Army’s lack of enthusiasm was well be summed up by the view from Capitol Hill: “What’s all this fuss about an airplane in the army?” one Congressman reportedly grumbled. “I thought we already had one.” The United States made only marginal military use of the airplane. During the Mexican Revolution that began in 1911, the United States military stationed one plane at the border to perform reconnaissance and collect intelligence.

While the United States was retarding its efforts in the field that it had founded, European countries were charging ahead. An event in 1911 proved, even to skeptics, that the airplane was here to stay. Italy was in a war with the Turks, and for this war, it utilized the airplane. On November 1, an Italian pilot named Lt. Gavotti flew over Arab positions and dropped by hand two bombs in the world’s first-ever bombing run. Before long, Europe had far surpassed the United States in quantity and quality of aircraft. As of 1911, among the main soon-to-be belligerents of the First World War, the number of certified pilots per country was thus: France 353, England 57, Germany 46, Italy 32, Belgium 27, and the United States coming in last with 26.

In the early stages of World War I, there were no aircraft that could be considered fighter planes. Airplanes were used to fly between headquarters as couriers and to conduct reconnaissance over enemy lines. Any aerial fighting between opposing sides was accidental, since reconnaissance pilots would always try to avoid enemy contact. On 30 August 1914, a German plane dropped four bombs on Paris in the war’s first bombing raid. It was only an annoyance to the French, but served to accelerate the competition of combat aircraft among the powers. Several primitive weapons were experimented with, such as the French flechette, which was literally a dart that the pilot threw overboard by the handfuls, hoping to score a direct hit on troops or German Zeppelins or balloons. No offensive technique provided either efficiency or effectiveness, so designers looked to a new combination with the machine gun.

The race to master the skies began in earnest. Some pilots had already been taking guns with them when they flew, but their handheld firearms required both hands to shoot, as did the plane to fly. handheld firearms were never practical. A way was needed for the pilot to be able to aim the gun simply by flying the plane; yet there was also a problem with this concept. For every tractor plane (meaning that the propeller was in the front instead of the back), the propeller was directly in the pilot’s line of sight. If he were to fire a gun through his line of sight, he would hit the propellers and promptly tumble out of the sky. A Frenchman named Roland Garros attempted to solve this problem by attaching angled steel plates at all possible points of impact, so that if a bullet were to strike the propeller it would zip off at an oblique angle. Garros and his plane were later captured by the Germans, who took the plane to the war’s premiere aviation genius, the Dutchman Anton Fokker. Fokker had offered his services to the Allied powers at the start of the war, but was turned down. He then offered his mechanical brilliance to the Germans, who eagerly employed his inventive propensity. Fokker examined Garros’ plane and promptly dismissed the plated-propeller solution. As Fokker himself related:

The technical problem was to shoot between the propeller blades, which passed a given point 2400 times a minute, because the two-bladed propeller revolved 1200 times a minute. This meant that the pilot must not pull the trigger or fire the gun as long as one of the blades was directly in front of the muzzle. Once the problem was stated, its solution came to me in a flash.

Three days later, Fokker had churned out an interrupter gear, which was the key to combining the machine gun and the plane. In essence, it allowed the plane to fire the gun, for as the pilot held down the trigger, the interrupter gear stopped the gun from firing every time the propeller blades passed before it. This amazing, yet simple, invention led to the time when Germany ruled the skies and Allied planes became known as “Fokker Fodder”.

Historian Tom Pendergast wrote, “Powerful weapons like the machine gun and poisonous gas rendered individual heroics almost obsolete. But in the air, pilots of newly designed bombers and fighters became World War I’s glamorous heroes.” At the opening of World War, the term “ace” was popular to describe anyone who excelled in a given field. The French pilot Adolphe Pegoud was the first pilot to be acclaimed as a flying ace after he shot down five German planes in 1915. Garros was also acclaimed as an ace. The British, and later the Americans, adopted the usage. Lanoe Hawker gained fame in Great Britain for destroying a shed that housed German Zeppelins. In 1915, he shot down two planes and grounded a third, for which he became the first pilot to earn the Victoria Cross. In all, Hawker had seven victories, making him Great Britain’s first ace, before he was finally brought down by Manfred von Richthofen in November 1916.

Von Richthofen was better known as the Red Baron because he had painted his plane red. This served two purposes - it warded off any friendly and satisfied his ego by allowing for any observer on the ground who witnessed a victory to properly attribute it to the Red Baron. His squadron followed suit, painting their own planes various colors and earning them the nickname the “Flying Circus.” Over the course of the war, the Red Baron brought down a staggering total of 80 planes. Von Richthofen was hailed by Germany’s national and military leaders. He wrote inspirational messages to the troops at the front, and when he was finally brought down (probably by Australian ground fire) in April 1918. His enemies buried him with full honors.

The dream of flight, dating back to mythology, was realized and made possible by the invention of the Wright brothers. The possibility of flight was made a necessity by the furnace of war. For the 11 years before First World War, advancements in aviation came nowhere close to the four years of the war. Roland Garros, captured by Germany in 1915, escaped before the war ended in 1918. Still famous for his victories of 1915, he found that the airplane had changed so much that he had to be retrained in order to fly again. (Garros was killed in action in October 1918.)

The war brought all military roles of the airplane to maturity – reconnaissance, air-to-air combat, and ground attack. It also added a new and literal dimension to the battlefield that was made an equal partner to armies and navies – war on land, sea, and finally in the air. Ever since, airplanes have become commonplace and affect the everyday lives of today’s population in a way that none could have imagined in the Great War.
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Here is my text:

How air forces became necessary

The Wright brothers made air forces possible when they made and flew a powered airplane in 1903. Only five years later, the US Army's Signal Corps bought the service's first airplane, a Wright Flyer. In Europe, airplanes were being developed by such pioneers as Louis Bleriot, who flew solo from Calais to Dover in 1909. In Holland a young man named Anton Fokker turned 21 years old in 1911. He had a certain gift for airplane design, having built an plane he called the Spin I the year before. He built a small airplane factory in Wiesbaden, Germany, in 1912.

Spin I and Spin II were unsuccessful designs; Spin I never flew more than 100 meters at a time. Spin II flew quite well but no buyers were interested. Spin III in 1913 impressed the Germans enough to make inquiries but nothing came of them.

When World War I erupted in August 1914, Fokker offered his services to both sides at the same time (rather mercenary of him, literally). France and England declined, but the Germans snapped him up. Fokker started selling airplanes to the Kaiser?s government. In short order he took German citizenship.

The two sides began using aircraft for reconnaissance right away. By September 1914, British and French forces had been pushed to south of the Marne river in France. German commander Alexander von Kluck was ordered to encircle Paris from the east. French aerial recon sorties spotted German formations making this movement. The flyers' report reached the French commander, Gen. Joseph Joffre, who sent forces to attack the Germans. The result was the First Battle of the Marne, which marked the end of mobile warfare in the west until summer 1918, after the Americans arrived. (Year before last I posted a thought experiment of what our world would be like today if the Germans had won) the battle.

By 1915, a French flyer named Roland Garros became determined to shoot down German recon planes photographing French positions. For a long time pilots on both sides had been taking pot shots at each other with pistols and rifles, but such shooting was symbolic rather than lethal. Garros wanted to shoot at German planes from the air lethally.

Garros had come to flying by chance. He had been studying to be a concert pianist until he went to the Reims air show of 1909, where he became a total convert to aviation as his vocation. He flew from Tunisia to France in 1913 (about 500 miles) and was ironically teaching military aviation in Germany when the war broke out. He flew a plane at night to Switzerland and then made his way to France, where he joined a military squadron.

Garros knew that to bring down German recon planes required machine-gun fire that was both aimed and sustained. Both sides possessed two-seat aircraft in which the rear crewman manned a machine gun that could be fired across an arc toward the rear. But aerial victories using such guns were unobtainable. It was impossible to maneuver a plane to get in front of an enemy plane, much less long enough to shoot several hundred rounds at him. Nor would the enemy pilot cooperate by flying straight and level, of course.

Garros decided that the attacking plane had to approach the target plane from the rear by stealth. He mounted a machine gun in front of his plane's cockpit. To avoid shooting the propeller, Garros angled the gun upward. But he found that he could not effectively aim the gun and determined that the pilot's line of sight had to be parallel to the gun's line of fire. Aiming the gun would thus be done by flying the plane, simplifying the pilot's work load.

Because Garros was flying a monoplane, the gun would have to be mounted directly in front of him, where he would use its sights and could reach its trigger. The problem was that now the propeller was in the line of fire. Garros knew that because both the gun and propeller operated at high speed, most bullets by far would miss the propeller. But only one bullet could shatter the propeller, permanently ending Garros' project. In fact, it would permanently end Garros himself. So Garros decided to take advantage of the propeller's curved shape. He affixed steel plates to the propeller's rear surface, facing the gun. The plates would shield the prop from the bullets and deflect them away from the plane.

Perfecting the idea through ground testing, Garros finally developed the right thickness and shape of the deflecting plates. He took to the air. In only two weeks in March 1915, Garros gunned five German planes from the air.

Needless to say, German fliers were less thrilled than the Parisian press with Garros' new capabilities. But Garros' run of success didn't last long. Just the next month Garros' plane's fuel line was severed by German antiaircraft fire. Garros was forced to glide to land behind German lines. The Germans captured him and his plane before Garros could destroy it.

Re-enter Anton Fokker. Garros's plane was turned over to him with orders to duplicate the deflector plates for mass installation on German planes. Fokker examined the plates closely and immediately rejected the whole notion. He knew that plates or no, the wooden propellers then used would eventually shatter from repeated bullet strikes.

In only 48 hours Fokker devised and installed on a Fokker E-1 plane (the Eindecker monoplane) a simple, cam-driven mechanism that linked the propeller shaft to the trigger mechanism of a Parabellum machine gun Fokker mounted on the plane. The gun would fire as long as the pilot was pulling the trigger. But every time the propeller passed in front of the gun, the cam would interrupt the firing. Once the prop passed, so did the cam and the gun resumed firing. The pilot would never know the difference.

Ironically, the French airplane designer Raymond Saulnier had been working on a similar design before the war. Garros consulted him before using the deflector plates. Saulnier, however, had abandoned his research chiefly because the Hotchkiss guns the French used fired too erratically to be practical or safe for aerial use. Saulnier assisted Garros in developing the deflector plates together.

The German Parabellum gun Fokker used for his proof-of-concept design proved unsuitable for mass modification to the design, but it did prove Fokker's design of an interrupter gear would work. The proof, however, was made only with difficulty to skeptical German officers. They told Fokker that he would have to shoot down a French plane with the Eindecker. Fokker took off and found a lumbering French observation plane. But in disgust he turned away, landed, and told the Germans to shoot down a plane themselves.

On Aug. 1, 1915, Lieutenant Oswald Boelcke shot down a plane using the Eindecker Fokker had modified. At that, the German air force placed orders for many Eindeckers equipped with Fokker?s interrupter gear. When the aircraft began flying combat missions they were so successful in shooting down British and French aircraft that the next several months became known as the Fokker Scourge. In fact, though, the Eindecker was not a very good airplane. Fokker had actually designed it by copying the French Morane-Saulnier plane, but the French plane was still much better. Fokker's interrupter gear was far from perfect, too. Oswald Boelcke's gun actually did shatter his propeller during a fight; he lived to fly another day.

The allied air forces reacted quickly. The Eindecker's demise as the king of air combat was brought about by four allied planes. Three were British "pushers," with rear-mounted engines; their props pushed rather than pulled the planes. This design completely eliminated the problem the interrupter gear solved because the propeller was behind both gun and pilot. The fourth plane was the French Nieuport 11 biplane. It carried a gun mounted on its top wing, firing over the propeller.

Air-to-air combat was thus born. Later the allied air forces perfected an interrupter gear themselves and true fighter aircraft dominated the skies. The invention of the airplane made air forces possible, but the invention of the interrupter gear made them compulsory. It was air-ro-air combat that defined the air forces' missions and budgets during the war, even though ATA combat was (and remains) a secondary mission of supporting aerial reconnaissance and ground attack.

by Donald Sensing, 2/28/2005 08:13:00 PM. Permalink |