Marked for Death by James Hamilton-Paterson

Author:James Hamilton-Paterson [Hamilton-Paterson, James]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: History, Military, World War I, Aviation, Non-Fiction
ISBN: 9781784970390
Google: F2HOCAAAQBAJ
Amazon: 1784970395
Goodreads: 25028273
Publisher: Head of Zeus
Published: 2015-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

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For all the political rhetoric in Westminster about the ‘Fokker Scourge’ of late 1915, the skies above the battlefields of Belgium and France were often remarkably empty of aircraft for the first two years of the war. Until the first Battle of the Somme in the late summer of 1916 it was perfectly possible for a two-seater observation machine to go up for three hours over certain sectors of the front without ever seeing another aircraft, whether hostile or friendly. Obviously, most would tend to congregate in the neighbourhood of features of immediate military interest on the ground; but the vastness of the area that could usefully be overflown at heights of up to 10,000 feet further diluted the small number of aircraft in the sky at any one time.

As we know, Roland Garros’s victory on 1st April 1915 in his Morane was the first ever by an aircraft using a fixed machine-gun firing through the propeller, and the autumn and winter of that year saw the worst of the Germans’ answer: the Fokker monoplanes’ supremacy against which the British and French had no real defence for some months. The truth is, however, that the Entente’s casualty figures were by no means as enormous as the impassioned rhetoric in the debates back home suggested, and vanishingly tiny when compared to the slaughter taking place on the ground. In the sixteen months between August 1914 and December 1915 153 British aircrew are listed as being killed – a figure that includes training fatalities.121 By the end of 1915 there were some 107 Fokker and Pfalz monoplanes operating on the whole of the Western Front, and the Germans’ official published list of their victories showed a grand total of twenty-eight.122 Even had these victims all been two-seaters and their crews killed or captured, the loss of fifty-six men over five months would scarcely have constituted a ‘scourge’ at a time when the infantry might easily lose 4,000 men in a single day. The real loss to the Army was that the downing of its few observation machines effectively blinded the commanders on the ground. The rhetoric reflected an impotent anger that the RFC was not yet equipped to meet the German aircraft on an equal footing. It was crafted for public consumption and to shame the government into leaning harder on the Royal Aircraft Factory and others to come up with an appropriate answer. A new generation of French and British aircraft did indeed begin to appear in early 1916 but the German monoplanes did not disappear completely until that summer, by which time the tables were turned and they themselves had become obsolete fodder. However, their real significance in the twelve months from mid-1915 to mid-1916 was to mark the moment when the idea as well as the science of modern aerial combat was invented and certain pilots became ‘aces’: celebrities whose names are famous to this day.

The comparative lack of aircraft in the skies of that early period of the

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