What were warplanes like in 1915?

Answer 1

Ah, those magnificent men in their flying machines! In the First World War, being a pilot was a little like flying and fighting in a balsa wood and paper airplane. It’s a wonder any of them survived (and in fact their combat survivability was relatively low). The warplanes of 1915 were built of light wood frames covered with doped (lacquered) canvas. They were predominately single engined biplanes (one wing above the other). There was no armor, no protection for the pilot other than his skill and daring. They knew their survival rate was actually lower than an infantryman’s, yet they flew anyway. They were very brave, and maybe a little crazy.

Heavier than air flight was still in its infancy by 1914. The Wright brothers had made their famous 120-foot pioneering flight only in 1903, in what amounted to a powered box kite, but already by 1914 many military thinkers realized that aircraft of all types, including balloons, blimps, zeppelins (rigid dirigibles) plus heavier than air craft had enormous potential on the battlefield. In fact, the first use of a captive balloon for aerial reconnaissance dated from the American Civil War.

At first, airplanes were used almost entirely for reconnaissance over enemy lines. Reconnoitering pilots from both sides initially would salute or wave at one another as they passed, but very quickly this camaraderie of the air was replaced by throwing bricks, chains or rope (to foul enemy propellers) and shooting at one another with pistols. Pilots would also sometimes drop steel darts, bricks, and small bombs when over enemy trenches. Then someone thought of mounting a machine gun on an airplane and the air war was on.

Warfare always accelerates technology much faster than peacetime. One of the earliest German fighters was made to look like an actual bird. But it was a 1915 development by the Dutch designer Anthony Fokker that made his Fokker Eindecker (monoplane) superior to anything the Allies had: a machine gun mounted on the cowl in front of the pilot that was synchronized to fire only when the propeller blades were not in the way. The Allies hadn’t yet solved this problem, and so either they had to mount their guns out of reach on top of the upper wing of their biplanes, or they tried wrapping the propeller blades with steel guards to prevent the bullets they fired from chewing off their own propellers. Neither of these solutions was very good, however, and it was a great boon to the Allies when a German pilot got lost in a fog and landed at an Allied airdrome and was captured with his plane intact. The Allies quickly reverse-engineered Fokker’s design and were synchronizing their guns with the propellers also. Soon the “knights of the air” were engaging in spectacular single combat with one another high above the mud and the blood of the static front. When one was killed, it was not uncommon for his killer to fly over his enemy’s airdrome and drop flowers or flying gloves as a tribute to a fallen comrade, enemy or not. Considering what a bloodbath the rest of WW1 became, it was quite remarkable that this chivalric behavior of the airmen tended to continue on both sides right through the end of the war. When the German Ace of Aces, Baron Manfred von Richthofen was killed in 1918, his British enemies gave him a full military funeral with six captains as pallbearers.

In addition to the heavier than air planes, both sides used hydrogen filled lighter than air balloons and blimps, and the Germans flew the famed rigid zeppelins developed by Count von Zeppelin as early as 1900. By 1914 the zeppelins had the capacity to mount high altitude bombing attacks on British and French cities, but the zeppelin as a weapon wasn’t very successful. It was more terrifying than dangerous, and as the war raged on the Allies developed fighter planes that could climb to a zeppelin’s high altitude and shoot at it with incendiary bullets, which would ignite the hydrogen, dooming the airmen to a singularly unpleasant death.

After 1915 the pilots, while still treating each other with something like gallantry, developed the strafing run tactic for killing men on the ground which was to figure so prominently in WW2. By 1918, most of the techniques, including heavy bombing that would be seen in the vicious air war of WW2 were already in place. During the 20 years between the two world wars, all belligerents devoted themselves to building bigger, better, faster and better armed warbirds. The age of courtliness in the air was over.