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I just finished my first biplane, an Academy Sopwith Camel.
Anyone wanting to hear my tales of woe while building this thing and see more
pics can check out my entry in the aircraft section. (I did forget to note that
I was inspired by Doog’s praise of his old airbrush needle to create a very
useful gadget. I have some medical Q-tips that have tight cotton on one end of
a 6” wood handle. On the wood end I drilled a hole and inserted a healthy
needle which I kept clean with a little jar of acetone. I used the cotton end
to moisten with Zap CA “kicker” so I could dab on a very small bit of CA with
the needle and instantly apply a kick by flipping the thing around in one hand.
Then clean off the tip in the acetone. Helped a lot when rigging.) Instead of
going over kit things again, I thought I’d pass along a few observations
concerning WWI air warfare. Those with better things to do may want to skip
this.
First, any notion that aircraft were either unimportant or
ignored during the war is simply nonsense. This rubbish was peddled by airpower
enthusiasts (especially Billy Mitchell) in the interwar period who honestly
believed that bombers could replace armies and navies with the technology of
the 1930s. In reality, all armies immediately saw the incalculable value of air
reconnaissance and each had over 100 frontline craft in operation in August
1914: French flights probably saved France as their planes traced the unfolding
of the Schlieffen plan. For the next four years, attackers considered access to
the front as a necessity – without it nobody had a clue concerning the location
of enemy strong points especially artillery positions. In the event, this
knowledge was inadequate, but without it campaigns like the Somme would have
been even more grim or futile than they were. A good army could hide the exact
location of an offensive, but nobody could hide their trench line. So it was
the importance of the recon aircraft, which proliferated tremendously from day
one, that led naturally to a weapon that could shoot them down. Enter the
fighter, fist very crude, quickly very deadly. Late in the war when “strategic
bombers” and attack planes became important, the need for fighters increased.
And, in a war when “success” was largely measured by attrition, the great
pilots of the respective sides became heroes in a way that our world can barely
comprehend. The Kaiser, in a rare lucid moment, said Richthoven was worth two
divisions. When Richthoven’s body was returned for burial in Berlin in 1925 the
event was a national holiday and witnessed by tens of thousands Berliners. (The
World War I aces have not lost their allure. I doubt many Americans could
recognize the name of Richard Bong. You’d get better luck with Eddie
Rickenbacker. World War II, unlike World War I, was a general’s war: the brass
got the press.) The importance of airplanes was so obvious that the poorest
participants in the war, like Russia, Turkey or Serbia, did everything possible
to beg borrow or steal airplanes. There wasn’t a theater of war that lacked
aircraft entirely.
Fighter combat took place largely in the last year and a
half of the war. It really took two years to get proper air forces organized.
When festivities at Verdun and the Somme showed the importance of airpower,
each nation reorganized its forces and greatly increased it’s efforts. It was
in mid-1917 or later that the planes we associate with the war arrived
(Albatross V, Fokker Triplane, Fokker
D7, SE5, Sopwith Camel, Spad XIII among others.) As the numbers grew so did the
size of the combats. The “Fokker Scourge” of 1915 resulted in a few dozen
allied losses. “Bloody April” 1917 cost the RFC about 350 planes: later they
lost more every month. And the dogfights that began in 1916 with clashes
between a couple of squadrons (perhaps twenty planes) developed into some of
the most massive air battles in history in 1918 as hundreds of planes entered
and left a running battle that could last an entire day. Losses are always hard
to track, but certainly over 50% of combat losses in the west took place in the
last year of fighting. There were approximately 120,000 aircraft built during
the war – perhaps two thirds for training or secondary service. (Half of
America’s 400,000 planes built in WWII were trainers, couriers or communication
planes.) Some 80,000 were lost, most due to accidents or simple wear and tear.
Front line casualties were nevertheless very grim. The
Germans usually had the upper hand because they played defense and would rarely
engage unless in a good position to do so over their own lines. That also meant
a German pilot that survived a crash could come back to service. By and large
the French were willing to play a similar game and fought it out when
protecting their recon flights or engaging the Germans while they escorted
theirs. The RFC (late RAF) had a policy of active pursuit and engagement
whenever possible. The results were predictable: very high losses. When the
Germans went on the offensive in 1918 the shoe was on the other foot – it was
no accident that Richthoven died over allied lines during this period. Front
line loss rates were indeed very high. German losses are the best documented
and they lost 8,000 men at the front killed, missing or in accidents. (They
lost a further 1600 in training.) Yet at the end of the war, there were 2700
German aircraft ready for action. The allied air forces had equations that were
very like these. Each had lost considerably more men than there were aircraft
ready at Armistice. Anyway you cut it, being a fighter pilot was a bad career
move in that war.
Naturally everyone learned a lot from the war, much of it
wrong. (Because it was so hard to down bombers, governments worried that
bombers could not be stopped in a future war. Things developed rather
differently.) The German Army was shredded by allied fighters and attack
aircraft during their retreat in late summer 1918 – in the next war the Germans
were determined to have a powerful air arm to cause similar havoc. In this they
succeeded until the industrial might of their enemies passed them in 1942. The
Americans might have learned the most. There was Mitchell and his baloney of
course. However, the American Navy (and the RN) saw immediately that aircraft
were a “game changer” and this led to a very serious development of carrier
aviation in the 1920s. The US also had egg on its face. In 1917 American
industrialists promised Wilson and the allies that we would employ Henry Ford’s
techniques on aircraft and build a massive air force. After the big talk it
dawned on business that a WWI aircraft was largely built by craftsmen and were
very poorly suited to US style mass production. The result was that American
pilots (many very good – Rickenbacker’s “kill ratio” of victories per mission
was arguably the highest of any major ace) all flew foreign aircraft. This
humiliation led the US Army to keep modern aircraft in action throughout the
lean budget years of the 20s and 30s. It wasn’t quite enough in retrospect, but
the US had excellent aircraft by early 1943 – quite a contrast to WWI.
I’ve talked with a number of today’s fighter pilots about
WWI. Almost all of them admit that they envy their great-grandfathers. As a
honcho of the CAF told me (he owns a Triplane replica), WWI aircraft didn’t
really fly, they lumbered. This meant they could and did stay in visual contact
for much longer than was the case in WWII. A dogfight was a “mad man’s night
out” but fighter pilots are a little nuts and I know that many of them enjoyed
the experience, at least in retrospect. Mixing it up in WWI and living to tell
the tale would have taken skill and luck. You had to be close to a victim to
hit him and you had to hit him often. That meant you were always vulnerable to
attack from another quarter. It was literally true that a kind of “conga line”
of fighting aircraft formed in these huge melees with one plane following
another, following another, following another. Of course the dance never lasted
long, but tense while it lasted. And, let’s not forget, allied pilots rarely
carried parachutes and German pilots had a very unreliable variety only toward
the end. (Balloon observers had chutes attached to the basket and only wore a
harness: not a solution for a moving aircraft.) Naturally self-sealing fuel tanks
were unknown and everyone used incendiary ammo by late war. No wonder that fire
was the overriding fear of the WWI airman.
As for the Camel, it was British to the core. As is well
known, it was a tricky beast to fly because of the intense torque. That same
torque allowed it to turn on a dime as long as you were banking to the right.
It wasn’t a very good aircraft over 12,000 feet – it’s rotary just didn’t have
quite enough juice. In 1918, the Brits started flying mixed formations of SE5s
on top (or Snipes after September 1918) with the Camels down a bit. However a
big WWI dogfight was like every big dogfight. It went from high to low and from
order to chaos. So at some point German pilots were facing Camels at 5,000 feet
– not an enviable position for any aircraft wearing a black cross. If an
inherently unstable aircraft that was vicious in a dogfight reminds you of
another British plane from WWII that was inherently unstable and vicious in a
dogfight, it was not an accident.
Eric
