Lords of the Sky: Fighter Pilots and Air Combat, From the Red Baron to the F-16 (5 page)

As in England, younger sons who could not inherit frequently became career soldiers, and men from this background undoubtedly colored the German officer corps. However, things were changing, and by 1914 many officers hailed from the middle class. The Imperial German Air Service attracted many such bourgeois men, perhaps due to its technical nature or because it offered advancement in a new branch of the military. Family connections can’t help you fly and being a pilot is an unforgiving equalizer; either you can do it or you cannot.

BOTH THE BRITISH
and German militaries realized that just because a man could be an officer didn’t mean he could be a
flying
officer. What, officials wondered, were the traits that made the difference?

“Guts,” “fitness,” and the ability to “make quick decisions” were the most frequently listed traits from a 1918
Lancet
study titled “The Essential Characteristics of Successful and Unsuccessful Aviators.” Sixty-one pilots turned in questionnaires that sought to identify commonalities. The pilots came from all walks of life and, by 1918, also from the middle “artisan” classes of society. The results, correlated by an RAF medical doctor (T. S. Rippon) and an experienced pilot (E. G. Manuel), were illuminating but not surprising.

The picture that emerges is of a young man under twenty-five (the average age was twenty-three), high-spirited, and in excellent health, with superb eyesight and coordination. Only a third were married—thirty-six of the sixty-one pilots considered marriage a handicap! Occupations had generally been technical (engineers, architects, and accountants) but there were also farmers, students, and lawyers. Nearly all enjoyed “motoring,” and the majority surveyed listed “horseback riding” as a favored pastime. “Sports” and “women” were also frequent amusements, and “it appears necessary for the well-being of the average pilot that he should indulge in a really riotous evening at least once or twice a month.”
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Natural history, the theater, and music were listed as pastimes as well, while one pilot mentioned “killing Huns and dancing” as his primary interests. Having good “hands” was another recurring requirement. This quality goes beyond the ability to simply fly in the mechanical sense. Gifted pilots can truly feel their aircraft, and they control it through a light, supremely confident touch. You’re thinking ahead of the plane, and your desires are almost unconsciously transmitted through your hands to the controls.

“Hands appear to be congenital and cannot be acquired, although they may be improved,” Rippon and Manuel concluded, adding that a man with good hands is “invariably a graceful flyer, and never unconsciously throws an undue strain on the machine, just as a good riding man will never make a horse’s mouth bleed.” People can be taught to fly, but you can’t teach “hands,” and having that gift is a defining characteristic of a fighter pilot over other types of aviators. It would become strikingly obvious when men began shooting at each other in the air. Flying is one thing; fighting while flying is something altogether different.

The other fundamental trait, a “fighting spirit,” was more elusive to isolate. It is a combination of aggressiveness, confidence, and attitude that transcends one’s background or training. Crossing nationalities and enduring, as we shall see, down through the generations, this fighting spirit also cannot be taught. But it
can
be developed and, above all, encouraged. According to the report, “Anyone who has lived with pilots for any length of time cannot fail to notice that they possess in a very high degree a fund of animal spirits and excessive vitality.” Fighter pilots
are
different, truly a breed apart.

The life expectancy of a frontline pilot during the Great War was about two weeks, and anywhere from 15 to 25 percent of Allied and German pilots were killed during the war. This casualty rate was generally higher than that seen in infantry units. Added to the daily stress of possibly dying in flames or a crash was the normal pressure of flying. It was, and remains, an extremely taxing combination of physical and mental strains.

Aircraft flown during the Great War all had open cockpits, exposing the pilots and observers to all types of weather; wind, rain, and sleet were normal and the air temperatures usually below freezing. There were no autopilots, and trim tabs, if they existed at all, were primitive. So the pilot had to be constantly focused on flying the aircraft from takeoff to landing, without a break. Rotary engines were particularly fatiguing, as the motor itself was spinning and considerable strength was required to counter this force.

The transition from unarmed reconnaissance pilot to fighter pilot or armed scout is best personified by Germany’s Oswald Boelcke. Called the “Father of Fighter Aviation,” Boelcke was brave, chivalrous, and admired equally by both friend and foe. His star pupil, Manfred von Richthofen, said of him, “It is remarkable that everyone who knew Boelcke imagined himself to be his one and only friend. . . . He was equally amiable to everyone and neither more nor less to anyone.”

Boelcke was twenty-three years old when the war began, the son of a middle-class schoolmaster, and had always been expected to follow his father’s path. Yet in addition to his natural studiousness with a talent for physics and mathematics, the boy loved sports and adventure. Short but very strong, Boelcke was a superb gymnast and an accomplished swimmer. Utterly determined to succeed but short on funds, he wrote a letter to the Kaiser in 1911 asking for an appointment to the cadet corps. The appointment arrived with the amused reply, “You will, of course, complete your grammar school subjects before you report.”

Finishing his officer’s courses at the War School in Metz, Boelcke was accepted into flight training and was a certified pilot by October 1914. Initially posted to Fliegerabteilungen (FA) 32 as a reconnaissance pilot, he was flying LVG C-1s with FA 62 by early 1915. The “C machine,” as it was called, was an armed two-seater LVG biplane.

On July 4, 1915, near Valenciennes, Boelcke and his observer engaged a French Parasol that had been spotting for the artillery. Their victim hit the trees near Marchiennes, and Boelcke landed to arrange for the funeral of the two Frenchmen. Ironically, the dead pilot happened to be Comte de Beauvicourt, who owned the very estate upon which the Parasol crashed. This was also Boelcke’s last combat mission in a two-seater, since Anthony Fokker had left his armed Eindecker, complete with the new interrupter gear, for the young flyer’s use.

The period immediately following the introduction of the monoplane and its line-of-sight-aimed, forward-firing machine gun was called the “Fokker Scourge.” Early Fokkers could manage about 90 knots and climb to nearly 12,000 feet. This gave advantages in both speed and ceiling over most of the Allied opposition. Nieuports, Avros, Voisins, and BE-2s ranged from 65 to 97 knots and had a variety of combat ceilings. In any event, the Fokker’s forward-firing Spandau overcame any shortfall in performance.

During this time the relative air superiority enjoyed by the British and French had been overturned by this new weapon, yet the Germans were cautious in exploiting it. Scout missions had been one of escort and close protection until now, and there were standing orders forbidding flights beyond the German lines. It would take men such as Boelcke, Wintgens, and Immelmann to demonstrate the lethality of the new aircraft and devise suitable tactics for its employment. All told, the Germans destroyed one hundred Allied planes in air combat during the year of the Scourge, and so the technical advance could hardly be ignored.

Oswald Boelcke was in the thick of things. Despite abysmal weather and mechanical growing pains with aircraft and weapons, he’d scored eight more kills by January 1916. Sitting down for dinner on the night of January 15, Boelcke was told that he’d been awarded the Pour le Mérite by the Kaiser himself.
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Nicknamed the “Blue Max,” it was Germany’s highest combat award, and he and Immelmann were the first aviators to receive it.

On March 13, Boelcke attacked a formation of French Voisins, putting a long burst into a straggler. The plane stalled, then spun into a cloud deck. Following it down, Boelcke was astonished to see that the gunner had climbed out onto the wing to try to keep the aircraft level. It would have been an easy kill, but Boelcke was close enough to see the terror in the man’s eyes and didn’t fire. Suddenly the Voisin’s left wing cracked apart and the plane flipped over, tossing the gunner out into space, his arms and legs flailing.
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By the time Max Immelmann died in June, Boelcke had increased his score to eighteen and was the top-scoring
kanone
, or German ace. Like the French, the Germans had seen the propaganda value associated with the new breed of warriors—readymade heroes fighting a “noble” war. Somehow an air war seemed cleaner and more honorable than machine-gunning each other in muddy, rat-infested trenches. The French called a man who scored five aerial victories
un as
(an ace; a term used for sportsmen, or for any spectacular feat of skill). The Germans eventually settled on ten victories as the initial requirement to be a
kanone
, and twenty kills to earn the Blue Max.

With Immelmann gone, both the chief of the air service and the Kaiser feared losing Boelcke, too. So he was ordered to the rear, ostensibly to form a special
Staffel
(squadron) of Fokkers at Charleville. Being involuntarily removed from combat provoked a typical response from a fighting man such as Boelcke, who said, “I cursed the adjutant and other pen pushers in a most offensive fashion.”

Unable to get the decision reversed, he personally telephoned the Kaiser and asked to do an inspection tour of the Eastern Front. Happy to oblige a national hero, Wilhelm officially ordered him to Turkey. While the details for his trip were being arranged, Boelcke spent some days with the Air Service staff formally compiling the very first principles of aerial combat. These were hard-won truths distilled from the initial year of air fighting. They became known as the “Dicta Boelcke.”

1.  Try to secure advantages before attacking. If possible, keep the sun behind you.

2.  Always carry through an attack when you have started it.

3.  Fire only at close range and only when your opponent is properly in your sights.

4.  Always keep your eyes on your opponent, and never let yourself be deceived by ruses.

5.  In any form of attack it is essential to assail your opponent from behind.

6.  If your opponent dives on you, do not try to avoid his onslaught, but fly to meet it.

7.  When over the enemy’s lines, never forget your own line of retreat.

8.  For the
Staffel:
Attack on principle in groups of four or six. When the fight breaks up into a series of single combats, take care that several do not go for one opponent.

Simple though they may be, Boelcke’s dicta were remarkable in that they represented the first codified thoughts on an emerging tactical subject. By formalizing these basic principles, the Germans were also acknowledging the seriousness with which they viewed this form of fighting. In this they were well ahead of their opponents, and this mind-set paid enormous dividends in the months to come.

Boelcke departed for the east on July 10, 1916, and for the next six weeks he got his first and last opportunity to live as a young man should. Traveling through Vienna, he was wined and dined while surveying the Austrian front. Then from Budapest he took a mail steamer to Constantinople. Entertained by diplomats and royalty of all types, Boelcke even wrangled a trip onto another of Germany’s technologically advanced weapons, U-38 (a U-boat—
Unterseeboot
or submarine).

After boating on the Dardanelles, he traveled south, ending up on the beach in Smyrna. Hans-Joachim Buddecke, another German flyer from the Western Front, had been assigned to Turkey and was traveling with Boelcke. Much of the strain slipped away as they went yachting during the day (always in the company of ladies) and entertained nightly.

But the news from home wasn’t good. At 6:50 a.m. on July 1, a British engineer detonated 40,000 pounds of high explosives under Hawthorne Ridge on the German front lines. This heralded the beginning of the Somme Offensive, an enormous Allied push to recapture occupied territories east of the Somme River. It forever prevented the Germans from reaching the Channel coast.

Eleven divisions of the French Sixth Army and thirteen British divisions went “over the top” across no-man’s-land and straight into the German guns. The British alone suffered 60,000 casualties on the first day and, all told, more than a million men would die during the next four months.

In the air, Britain’s Royal Flying Corps conducted line patrols and offensive sweeps to destroy reconnaissance aircraft or spot for artillery. They went into the battle with numerical superiority (185 RFC aircraft vs. 129 German planes) and a technological advantage with Sopwith 1½ Strutters and the Nieuport 11. Losing the air superiority they’d enjoyed since April 1915, the Germans were now hard-pressed on the ground and in the air. Col. Hermann von der Leith-Thomsen, chief of the Imperial Air Service, cut Boelcke’s trip short with a request that he return as soon as possible.

Departing Constantinople on August 1, Boelcke was visiting his brother Wilhelm, also a fighter pilot, near Kovel in occupied Russia. He received a telegram from Thomsen that ended with, “Return to west front as quickly as possible to organize and lead Jagdstaffel 2 on the Somme front.”

During Boelcke’s absence the old Imperial German Aviation Service had been reorganized, on paper at least. Aircraft would no longer be grouped into small special units, or
Feldfliegerabteilungen
, and subordinated to army units. Brought about largely by Boelcke’s theories and his combat successes, the new Deutschen Luftstreitkräfte (German Air Force) became official on October 8, 1916. This very significantly grouped fighter aircraft into specially formed
Jagdstaffeln
, or “hunting squadrons,” called
Jastas
for short. Boelcke was to command the first operational fighter squadron, and he was allowed to select the pilots. Right there in Kovel, with his brother’s help, he picked Erwin Böhme and a young cavalry officer turned flyer named Manfred von Richthofen. Jagdstaffel 2 was formally assembled by August 27 at the Bertincourt aerodrome outside Calais in northern France.