Fokker plague
The Fokker-Plage ( English Fokker Scourge ) refers to a period from August 1915 until the beginning of the year 1916 in the air war of World War I , when the new breaker gear equipped Fokker monoplane with solidly built machine gun , a period of air superiority for German air forces of the British Royal Flying Corps and the French Aéronautique Militaire . This period ended when newer Allied aircraft such as the Nieuport 11 and Airco DH.2 became available to take on the Fokker.
The term was coined in the summer of 1916 by the British press, only played as the Fokker on the German side a marginal role and already by more modern D types , ie biplane - fighters was replaced. The background to this was the endeavor of interested circles to induce the government to give up its dependence on the state-run Royal Aircraft Factory and to award contracts to the private sector.
background
Military aviation, which was still in its infancy when the war began, made rapid progress thanks to the war around 1915. In the beginning the Allies had the better fighters like the Vickers FB5 and the Morane-Saulnier L , but this changed with the introduction of the Fokker EI in the summer of 1915. Before that, the test aircraft of the French ace Roland Garros had been captured by the Germans, through which they got to know the bullet deflectors on the propellers developed by the allies. Various German manufacturers, including Anton Fokker , were invited to examine the aircraft and were commissioned to replicate the machine. However, due to the penetration power of the German steel jacketed bullets, the bullet deflectors proved unsuitable, which is why Fokker designed an interrupter gear with the help of his engineers .
The advantage of the interrupter gear was that the pilot no longer had to operate his independently mounted machine gun to control the aircraft, but could do both by aligning the aircraft's nose with the target and only had to pull the trigger as soon as the enemy aircraft was in the crosshairs . Previous attempts to achieve this had included reinforcing the propeller with metal plates so that balls accidentally hitting the propeller were deflected sideways. Another variant was to mount the MG on the upper edge of the upper wing (on biplanes) so that it did not shoot through the propeller circle. The replica of the gearbox is attributed to the Fokker engineer Heinrich Lübbe , who is said to have accomplished this in a few days.
The model of the Fokker A type , an unarmed two-seat reconnaissance aircraft, was selected as the carrier of the new weapon system . The single-seater Fokker EI, which reached the front in June 1915, resulted from modifications. They were assigned to the military aviation departments of that time individually or in pairs. The first partly pre-series models were equipped with the Parabellum MG 14 and still had teething problems with the interrupter gearbox. The Parabellum was later replaced by the IMG 08 and a more reliable mechanism was developed for the series models.
course
The first aerial victory with the Fokker monoplane was presumably achieved by Kurt Wintgens around July 1, 1915 over Lorraine against a French Morane L. Later aces like Oswald Boelcke and Max Immelmann achieved their first aerial victories in August / September 1915.
August 1, 1915, when British Royal Aircraft Factory BE2 aircraft flew a morning attack on the airfield of Feldfliegerabteilung 62, is generally regarded as the beginning of the “Fokker Plage” . The Boelcke and Immelmann stationed here started to pursue and Immelmann was able to shoot down an airplane. Boelcke, who had to struggle with a jam , came away empty-handed.
At the time of the Battle of Loos in autumn 1915, there were already double-digit numbers of monoplane fighter planes in use on the German side, including models of the Pfalz EI type , which the British also called Fokkers . In December the number of such planes rose to 40. These planes could attack from steep angles and from an elevated position. They had an advantage, as most of the opposing aircraft still had two crews to carry and thus gained altitude more slowly. The machine guns used were reloaded using cartridge belts , which was a further advantage over the British Lewis machine guns equipped with drum magazines , which had to be replaced by the pilots in flight.
The German monoplane pilots, relatively safe from Allied resistance, developed new tactics and aerial combat maneuvers during this time . The attack from an elevated position, often with the sun behind you, and the steep ascent for a new attack were part of the standard repertoire. Immelmann developed the Immelmann roll , a half loop followed by a side roll to get back into position. The other German aces of this time included Hans-Joachim Buddecke , Ernst von Althaus and Rudolf Berthold .
The naming "Fokker-Plage", however, disguises the fact that the successes of the German pilots were still relatively insignificant in the overall context. At that time, many of the aerial victories were still attributable to the C-aircraft (without rigid MGs). The “official” number of Fokker aerial victories for the second half of the year is 28 enemy aircraft. Besides Immelmann and Boelcke, only seven German Fokker pilots were able to record kills during this time. In January 1916 the number of kills rose to 13 and in February to 21. The primary effect was psychological, as the Allied pilots often turned away when German single-seaters appeared to avoid a fight.
The RFC responded with an instruction dated January 14, 1916 that reconnaissance aircraft were only allowed to take off with an escort of three fighters each. If contact with the escort was lost, the mission had to be aborted. Operations of the two-seater, in which no observer / machine gunner flew, became rather the exception. The need to use more aircraft than before for a mission led to a decrease in the number of missions flown. The Allies now mostly flew in larger formations of several swarms at once, which flew laterally and vertically offset. This turned out to be an effective means of containing the losses. The German pilots were also forbidden to fly too far into enemy territory, in order to avoid the Allies falling into the hands of a model with an interrupter gearbox. This limited the degree of air superiority that the Germans could achieve.
End of the "plague"
The beginning of the end of German air superiority came in February 1916 when the Germans opened the Battle of Verdun . In the course of the battle, more and more modern French Nieuport 11 machines were used, which were superior to the German single-seaters in almost all respects. These were organized in escadrilles de chasse , specialized hunting squadrons that flew in larger formations than the German singles, who often still fly individually or in pairs. The French achieved superiority in the air space around Verdun relatively quickly. The Germans reacted by setting up " Combat Operations Commands " and (later) their own fighter squadrons. The first of these, Jagdstaffel 2 (also Jagdstaffel Boelcke ), was first used in September 1916 during the Battle of the Somme .
On the British side came increasingly pusher propeller aircraft for the introduction at the front, including the two-seat reconnaissance FE2b in January 1916, the single-seater fighter Airco DH.2 in February. These aircraft were able to hold their own against the German single-seaters better than their predecessors. The DH.2 was significantly more agile than the Fokker and quickly achieved success. What these guys lacked was enough speed to chase the light German machines. In April 1916, the British introduced the Nieuport 16 in two squadrons, which was finally superior to the German models.
In March 1916, the "plague" was as good as over and in April a German Fokker E.III accidentally landed on a British airfield, whereby the British came into possession of the interrupter gear. The aircraft was thoroughly examined and found that it did not possess the superior characteristics often claimed. Soon the first British aircraft with an interrupter gearbox appeared with the Bristol Scout , followed by the Sopwith 1½ Strutter .
The success of the Allied double-decker types, especially the Nieuports, was so great that some German pilots started flying captured specimens. The Air Force Inspectorate (Idflieg) immediately wrote out biplane types for series production, the new D types . Among the first of these new models to hit the front in bulk were the Euler DI and the Siemens-Schuckert DI . Other D-models, some of which had been in testing since the end of 1915, such as the Fokker D-types and the Halberstadt D-types , were now moved to the front and the monoplane gradually decommissioned.
Aftermath
Among the British journalists and politicians who cannibalized the "Fokker Plague" for their own purposes and exaggerated it grotesquely were journalist CG Gray and MP Noel Pemberton-Billing . Their goal was to get orders for the free economy, since the British aviation industry was dominated by the state Royal Aircraft Establishment until then .
Pemberton said on one occasion:
"[...] hundreds, no thousands of machines have been ordered, which our pilots refer to as ' Fokker Fodder ' [...] I would say that a not inconsiderable number of our brave officers in the Royal Flying Corps would rather murdered than were killed. "
The period in which the Allies enjoyed air superiority after the Fokker Plague was relatively short. In the middle of September 1916 the first Albatros DI arrived at the front, equipped with a double MG as standard. The turnaround achieved by these and later aircraft culminated in bloody April 1917 during the Battle of Arras . The Allies were only able to end this phase with the introduction of their own equivalent models and due to their high numerical superiority. In the period that followed, up to the end of the war, the Germans were only able to establish temporary local superiority over parts of the Western Front by establishing priorities. Towards the end of the war, in the summer of 1918, there was a sometimes called “2nd Fokker-Plage ”, due to the introduction of the Fokker D.VII . However, this had no lasting effect on the course of the war, which was decided on the ground.
literature
- Norman Franks: Sharks Among Minnows: Germany's First Fighter Pilots and the Fokker Eindecker Period, July 1915 to September 1916. Grub Street Publishing, London 2001, ISBN 978-1-90230-492-2 .
- Lee Kennett: The First Air War: 1914-1918. Simon & Schuster, New York 1991, ISBN 978-0-02-917301-5 .
Web links
- The War in the Air - Fighters: The Fokker Scourge on firstworldwar.com
- The Fokker scourge on century-of-flight.net