The Fokker Scourge

Anton Herman Gerard Fokker

On the 28th of June, 1914, Archduke Franz Ferdinand and his wife were assassinated in Sarajevo, one month later Austria-Hungary declared war on Serbia. Less than a month and a half later, 8 September, the first aerial combat took place. Russian pilot (and aviation pioneer*) Stabskapitän Pyotr Nikolayevich Nesterov rammed, and brought down, an Austrian Albatros B.II reconnaissance aircraft flown by Franz Malina accompanied by his observer Baron Friedrich von Rosenthal.

It has been said that Captain Nesterov meant to strike the enemy aircraft a glancing blow to force it down, apparently he miscalculated. As was the custom at the time, Nesterov was not strapped into his aircraft and fell from his craft after the mid-air collision. He sustained mortal injuries and died the day after the incident. The pilot and observer of the Austrian aircraft died in the crash.

Now before you go spouting off about the Russians (yes, some of them are slightly demented, just watch their dash cam videos on YouTube, but they're not all like that - one hopes), ramming was actually a recognized tactic in a number of air forces, not just in World War One but later on as well. But for WWI we have this...

The first known instance of ramming in air warfare was made over Zhovkva by the Russian pilot Pyotr Nesterov on 8 September 1914, against an Austrian plane. That incident was fatal to both parties. The second ramming—and the first successful ramming that was not fatal to the attacker—was performed in 1915 by Alexander Kazakov, a flying ace and the most successful Russian fighter pilot of World War I. Sgt Arturo Dell'Oro of the Italian 83rd Squadron rammed a two-man Br.C.1 of Flik 45 on 1 September 1917. Wilbert Wallace White of the 147th Aero Squadron rammed a German plane on October 10, 1918; and was killed-his opponent survived. (Source)

As you can see, the Russians did it again in 1915 as did an Italian pilot in 1917. We Yanks tried it once...

Three hours later, he took off again. He had already become the 147th Aero Squadron's leading ace and had orders to return to the United States when he flew this last sortie. When he saw German ace Wilhelm Kohlbach's Fokker D.VII on the tail of an inexperienced pilot, White intervened. White's guns jammed and he was unable to fire at Kohlbach, so he rammed the German instead, to score his eighth and Kohlbach's fifth victory. While White fell to his death, Kohlbach took to his parachute in one of the first fighter pilot bailouts in history. White was posthumously recommended for the Medal of Honor, but was instead awarded an Oak Leaf Cluster to his DSC. (Source)

(You can read more about Lieutenant White at the Aerodrome.)

Anyhoo, what has all that got to do with the title of this post? (No doubt a number of you are asking at this point.)

Well, in the early stages of the war, aircraft were mostly used for observation purposes, take off, fly to the front, have a look around, then fly back and report. Opposing aircraft would occasionally see each other over the front and exchange nothing more hostile than a wave.

As an aside, I should mention that spotting another aircraft from the air is a non-trivial exercise when all you've got is the Mark One, Mod Zero eyeball with which to spot another aircraft. Try it sometime when you're up there. Ain't easy. So seeing another aircraft in the early days of the war was probably a fairly rare occurrence, until the things began to proliferate as the brass on the ground began to understand their usefulness.

After a while, the aviators started to get a bit more belligerent than making rude gestures at the enemy. Some chaps started potting at the other guys with pistols, then rifles. Not much damage was done, at least not that I've ever heard. Eventually someone had the idea to mount a machine gun on the aircraft, which must have been something considering how much those old machine guns weighed and how fragile the aircraft of the time were. But someone was determined to "blind" the enemy observation efforts and machine guns were mounted on observation aircraft...

On October 5 French pilot Sgt. Joseph Frantz and his mechanic/gunner, Louis Quénault, shot down a German biplane near Reims to record what is considered the first official aerial combat victory**.

The key difference in this encounter was the 8-millimeter Hotchkiss machine gun fixed to the front of the French Voisin biplane. Mounted guns would soon be standard equipment for WWI combat aircraft, but when the head of Frantz’s V 24 escadrille had requested them for his squadron, he was at first ridiculed for his “Jules Verne” idea.

The Hotchkiss proved its worth when Frantz got into a chase with a two-man German Aviatik biplane during a morning bombing mission near the village of Jonchery-sur-Vesle, not far from the trenches. Frantz recalled later that he saw the passenger in the enemy airplane ahead of him take out a rifle as Quénault fired a few dozen rounds, finally hitting the Aviatik’s fuel tank. The Germans went down, trailing smoke, and crashed in a swamp. The pilot, Wilhelm Schlichting, had been killed by a bullet. His observer, Fritz von Zangen, died in the crash. Frantz, who lived to the age of 89 (he died in Paris in 1979), would later recall his enemies’ deaths without satisfaction, according to Méchin. After the French pilot landed and arrived at the crash scene, souvenir hunters were already going through the wreckage, and someone handed Frantz a picture of one of the Germans. He handed it back moments later. (Source)

Voisin 3
(Source)

Sergeant Franz sounds like an honorable guy. Of course, he was a sergeant, not that I'm partial to that particular rank...

Another Frenchman, Roland Garros had an idea, what if you could fire the machine gun straight ahead, through the propeller, just point the aircraft and shoot? Attach a machine gun to the nose of a single seater aircraft, which was much more nimble than the two-seater observation aircraft of the day. But how does one avoid shooting off one's propeller? Shooting yourself down in the process.

(Source)

How to do that? Garros came up with the idea of bolting steel deflector plates to the propeller. If any bullets should hit the propeller, they should be deflected without damaging the prop. Which did work for a while, causing rather a spot of panic of the German Luftstreitkräfte***.

In the early stages of the air war in World War I the problem of mounting a forward-firing machine gun on combat aircraft was considered by a number of individuals. The so-called "interrupter gear" did not come into use until Anthony Fokker developed a synchronization device which had a large impact on air combat; however, Garros also had a significant role in the process of achieving this goal.

As a reconnaissance pilot with the Escadrille MS26, Garros visited the Morane-Saulnier Works in December 1914. Saulnier's work on metal deflector wedges attached to propeller blades was taken forward by Garros; he eventually had a workable installation fitted to his Morane-Saulnier Type L aircraft. The Aero Club of America awarded him a medal for this invention three years later. Garros achieved the first ever shooting-down of an aircraft by a fighter firing through a tractor propeller, on 1 April 1915; two more victories over German aircraft were achieved on 15 and 18 April 1915.

On 18 April 1915, either Garros's fuel line clogged or, by other accounts, his aircraft was downed by ground fire, and he glided to a landing on the German side of the lines. Garros failed to destroy his aircraft completely before being taken prisoner: most significantly, the gun and armoured propeller remained intact. (Source)

Now here's where that Dutch guy in the opening photo comes into the story. (What Dutch guy, Sarge? Tony Fokker was actually Dutch, in case you didn't know.)

Legend has it (it was written of as fact when I was nobbut a lad) that Fokker and his team got a look at Garros' primitive, but effective, method of firing through the propeller. They figured they could do better, so they went to work to come up with an "interrupter" gear to stop the machine gun(s) from firing when any blade of the propeller was in the line of fire. Less danger of shooting yourself down, though a failure of the gear did still happen, rumor has it that one German ace actually perished from an interrupter gear failure.

At any rate, the story is no doubt far more complex than I was taught as a youth, but Fokker did field an operational fighter aircraft using this interrupter gear, the Fokker Eindecker (the German word for "one wing").

Fokker E.III

Now it was the turn of the British Royal Flying Corps (RFC) and the French Aéronautique Militaire to panic.

The Fokker Scourge is usually considered to have begun on 1 August, when B.E.2c aircraft of No. 2 Squadron bombed the base of FFA 62 at 5:00 a.m., waking the German pilots, including Boelcke and Immelmann, who were quickly into the air after the raiders.[23] Boelcke suffered a jammed gun but Immelmann caught up with a B.E.2c and shot it down. This aircraft was flown as a bomber, without an observer or Lewis gun, the pilot armed only with an automatic pistol. After about ten minutes of manoeuvring (giving the lie to exaggerated accounts of the stability of B.E.2 aircraft) Immelmann had fired 450 rounds, which riddled the B.E. and wounded the pilot in the arm. By late October, towards the end of the Battle of Loos, more Fokkers (including the similar Pfalz E-type fighters, which were also called "Fokkers" by Allied airmen) were encountered by RFC pilots and by December, forty Fokkers were in service.

The new fighters could make long, steep dives and the fixed, synchronised machine gun was aimed by aiming the aircraft. The machine gun was belt-fed, unlike the drum-fed Lewis guns of their opponents, who had to change drums when in action. The Fokker pilots took to flying high and diving on their quarry, usually out of the sun, firing a long burst and continuing the dive until well out of range. If the British aircraft had not been shot down, the German pilot could climb again and repeat the process. Immelmann invented the Immelmann turn, a zoom after the dive, followed by a roll when vertical to face the opposite way, after which he could turn to attack again. (Source)

During the period of the so-called "Fokker Scourge," the RFC alone lost 120 aircraft from June of 1915 to January of 1916. The brass were getting a bit concerned as their fliers were getting a bit reluctant to, you know, actually go flying. (I can understand their reluctance.)

(I sure wish the guys who narrate these things would learn how to pronounce certain German and French words, seriously guys, "Voisin" is not pronounced the same as "poison," more like "va-wha-son." Google Translate is your friend!)

Anyhoo, the Allies eventually managed to get better machines for their pilots, which ended the dominance of the German Eindecker. Aircraft like the Nieuport 11 "Bebe," which were more maneuverable than the German aircraft started an arms race in the air which lasted until the war ended in 1918.

All of which leads me to the very famous joke, told in multiple ways by multiple writers. The following version, no doubt apocryphal, still gives me a chuckle. This version plays on the sense of humor of your typical fighter pilot.

Many of the pilots got through the ordeal (Editor's note: the Battle of Britain) with their sense of humour.

The most famous pilot of all – Douglas Bader – showed just how wicked that humour could be after the war, when he gave a talk at a posh girls’ school.

He said: “So there were two of the f***ers behind me, three f***ers to my right, another f***er on the left…”

At this point the headmistress panicked. She said: “I think you should know, girls, that the Fokker was a type of German plane.”

Bader replied: “Don’t know about that. These chaps were flying Messerschmitts.” (Source)

Heh.




* Nesterov was the first pilot to perform a loop. (Source) French pilot Adolphe Pégoud (mentioned before in these spaces, here and here) was the second, and more famous, pilot to have performed a loop.
** Perhaps the first recorded instance of "Who's Pyotr?"
*** Air Service.