War and Game

Germany - Fokker D.VII Unit: Geschwader 2 Serial: 5125/18 Pilot - CO of 1 Geschwader Herman Goring. October or November 1918. The last personal Fokker D.VII of Herman Goring. It was built especially for him and painted in personal white color of Goring

As 1916 drew to a close, Germany was clearly in danger of being overwhelmed on the Western Front if the Allies could translate this industrial superiority into aerial mastery. The airplane had now become indispensable to the conduct of hostilities, and the rapidly growing war of attrition in the air, like the one on land, would be determined by the combatants’ success in mobilization. The French and British were already pursuing the aerial offensive, while the Germans husbanded their slender resources, fought defensively, and concentrated their aerial forces to seek an occasional mastery limited in time and space over the battlefield.

For example, the Germans focused on the British at the Battle of Arras in April 1917. Outnumbered two to one in fighter strength and three to one in total aircraft strength over the battlefield, German fighter forces, led by ace Manfred von Richthofen, countered by shooting down 151 planes while losing 66 of their own during “Bloody April.” The British official history later concluded that German dominance demonstrated the importance of aircraft performance in gaining aerial superiority and that an air offensive would not necessarily ensure local superiority against a determined and skillful enemy that was numerically weaker but better equipped. Unfortunately for the Germans, the War Ministry’s inspectorate contented itself with procuring slightly improved versions of the Albatros, which the new British fighters outclassed. The new Fokker triplane, whose exceptional maneuverability made it a deadly weapon in the hands of such superior pilots as Richthofen and Werner Voss, proved susceptible to wing failure and shoddy construction and consequently spent much of its short career grounded.

The Germans also introduced “infantry fliers,” ground attack squadrons equipped with highly maneuverable and well-armed two-seat biplanes and armored monoplanes, including the nearly indestructible Junkers J1 “furniture vans” (Möbelwagen), which served effectively in offensive and defensive capacities to assist German infantry. Finally, German long-range reconnaissance crews, who flew alone over the lines, received such superior aircraft as the Rumpler C7, whose six-cylinder, 240-horsepower, high-compression engine enabled it to fly at altitudes of 20,000 feet, above Allied interceptors. Although heavy losses in planes and crews in the 1917 war of attrition forced the air arm to send aviators to the front with less training, and shortages were affecting the quality of materials used in airplanes and engines, the best and most experienced crews and their airplanes remained highly effective.

Now the Germans were waging two uncoordinated strategic campaigns against Britain—the army with giant airplanes (the Grossflugzeuge and Riesenflugzeuge), and the navy with its monstrous zeppelins. The twin-engine G-planes, with their 78-foot wingspans; the four-engine R-planes, with their 138-foot wingspans; and the six-engine, 2 million cubic foot zeppelins represented incredible expenditures of money and materials for no decisive success.

The general German mobilization of the Hindenburg Program actually exacerbated Germany’s shortage of raw materials and transportation delays, and it did nothing to reduce the barriers among the German states to the most efficient allocation of skilled labor. The War Ministry’s inspectorate increased standardization, licensed production, drew automotive firms to engine production, and prioritized the allocation of materials to favor more productive companies. As raw material prices skyrocketed and workers began to strike, the aviation firms resisted rationing, hoarding gasoline, spare parts, and materials by late fall 1917. Meanwhile, the air service’s fuel allotment, instead of doubling during the year to 12,000 tons, plummeted to 1,000 tons in November as the war severed Germany from its sources of oil.

Although the German engine industry never moved beyond the six-cylinder in-line and a few rotary engines, most of which copied French designs, at least the high-compression six-cylinder engines of the Maybach firm and of a new firm, BMW (Bayerische Motorenwerke, or Bavarian Motor Works), promised high output at high altitude. The German military-industrial complex in aviation fell far short of the optimistic production goal set by the Hindenburg Program in 1916: 1,000 airplanes a month by spring 1917. Extant documents indicate that the industry, dogged by shortages of material and labor, attained that level of production only once in 1917. Consequently, when military chief Ludendorff proclaimed an Amerika-Programme in June 1917 stipulating monthly production of 2,000 airplanes and 2,500 engines by January 1918, its fulfillment seemed highly unlikely.

Austro-Hungarian aircraft and engine deliveries to the military remained abysmally low in 1917 and did not exceed a total of 1,300 for the entire year. Inadequate worker exemptions and raw material shortages caused these low production figures, but a desperate Austro-Hungarian army high command, quite out of touch with reality, stipulated in the fall that production should rise to 750 planes and 1,000 engines a month in 1918, including giant and armored planes.

French aviation in 1917 experienced a difficult and tumultuous year on the fighting and home fronts. Delays in the introduction of new aircraft and higher-powered engines left its aircrews, particularly reconnaissance and bomber squadrons, equipped largely with obsolete aircraft. At home, constant bureaucratic changes and vitriolic political clashes contrasted negatively with the relative stability of military control in Germany. Amid this bureaucratic instability and labor unrest, the French aviation industry still managed to produce 14,915 airplanes and 23,092 engines in 1917. The military increasingly concentrated production on Spad fighters and their Hispano-Suiza engines and on Breguet 14 reconnaissance-bombers and their Renault power plants, in preparation for the military campaign of 1918. The key to success in both combinations was the perfection of the engines, which would determine the performance of the aircraft.

British fighter pilots had begun 1917 badly against their German opponents, being rushed to the front with inadequate training to replace high losses, but as the year continued, the new fighters improved their ability to execute long-distance patrols over German airspace. The Hispano-Suiza–equipped SE-5, the Sopwith Camel equipped with Clerget and then improved Bentley rotary engines, and the Bristol fighter with the Rolls-Royce Falcon would serve effectively to the end of the war, although the Camel was increasingly relegated to low-altitude ground attack operations. Bomber and reconnaissance crews, like their French counterparts, made do with inferior aircraft that offered easy prey to German fighters.

At home, the Royal Flying Corps found itself the subject of an increasing determination to combine it with the Royal Naval Air Service and create a separate air force, but the key to the air arm’s future performance in the war lay primarily in the hands of two men—Secretary of State for Air William Weir and Minister of Munitions Winston Churchill—who were determined to rationalize aircraft production and field “clouds of aeroplanes.” They also dramatically expanded the labor force at aviation factories by employing women and boys, and by November 1917, the British aviation industry was the world’s largest. The aircraft firms increased their deliveries from 6,633 in 1916 to 14,382 in 1917. However, British engine deliveries lagged more than 3,000 units behind airframes in 1917, and domestic copies of the Hispano-Suiza were markedly inferior to the original, forcing the importation of nearly 5,000 engines, primarily from France.

Italy, the least of the Allied powers, delivered 3,861 airplanes and 6,276 engines in 1917 through a well-organized system of production and development that focused on 300-horsepower Fiat six-cylinder inline engines to power a variety of reconnaissance-bombers and flying boats. Bringing up the Allied rear, the United States—the new associate power that had entered the war in April 1917—was undertaking a confused and chaotic mobilization to fulfill grandiose expectations. It would best be counted on to supply pilots and spruce for aircraft construction.

In 1917 the German approach of developing specialized types of aircraft and appropriately training for specific operations, such as ground attack, proved more effective and efficient than the British method of simply throwing untrained Camel pilots into ground attack. Certainly, the military control of production and the use of airplanes was more unified and less politically unstable than in Britain or France—and it needed to be, given the shortages of materials and manpower in Germany.

Everywhere, however, the evolution of airpower demonstrated the signal importance of aero engines. The engine was the heart of the airplane. The crisis in aviation in France and Britain was fundamentally one of engine production, as both relied on increased engine power rather than aircraft design to provide the essential margin of difference for aerial superiority. Britain’s magnificent Rolls-Royces, however, proved too complex for mass production. France displayed the best combination of quality and quantity. Germany, mired in material shortages, could neither move beyond the six-cylinder in-line nor increase its production sufficiently, no matter how reliable and durable its engines proved to be. The air war itself had become a full-scale war of attrition; consequently, the mass production and training of aircrews would prove decisive in 1918, the final year of the great conflict.

At the beginning of 1918, as the German air arm prepared for the March offensive on the Western Front, the army and navy continued their airplane and zeppelin raids, respectively, on England. By the end of May, both strategic campaigns had ended: the navy’s, with the death of the airship commander and the end of airship production; the army’s, with its commitment of all remaining bombers to provide support at the front. The strategic air campaign had failed in its first and most grandiose aim—to drive Britain from the war. The giant plane raids had caused the diversion of significant British fighter forces to home defense, and the tons of bombs they had dropped on Britain had caused death and destruction but only a limited disruption of production.

On the battlefront, the inadequate replacement of personnel and materiel limited the effectiveness of the German air force. The limited supply of materiel could be offset only by a marked qualitative ascendancy. Fortunately for German aircrews, some of the planes they flew in 1918—such as the high-altitude Rumpler C7 reconnaissance plane equipped with a 260-horsepower, high-compression Maybach engine, and the Fokker D7 fighter equipped with a BMW 185-horsepower engine—were superlative, their performance unequaled by their Allied opposition. Yet the fundamental problem remained: the aircrew training schools and the aviation industry could no longer meet the needs of the front. Some German fighter units continued to inflict higher losses on the enemy than they incurred up to the end of the war. Nevertheless, suffering irreplaceable losses of personnel and materiel, and dogged by stringent fuel rationing and the lack of material even for aircraft repairs, they neared exhaustion as the war drew to a close.

Ultimately, Germany’s manpower reserves fell far short of the Allies’, as did production and supply, the other key factors in a war of attrition. Deliveries of airplanes and engines fluctuated wildly, but neither attained the goals stipulated in the mobilization programs, and neither exceeded 1,500 units a month. Industry, beset by shortages of metals, fabrics, precision machines, tools, and coal and disrupted by transportation crises and labor unrest, had no prospect of dramatically increasing production. Production proved to be the Achilles’ heel of the German air effort. Shortages had halved production during the winter of 1916–1917; now a near-total collapse of aviation production loomed in the winter of 1918–1919 owing to coal, material, and food shortages, had the war continued. Austro-Hungarian aviation merits only a footnote, as its total production for the ten wartime months of 1918 was only 1,989 planes and 1,750 engines—barely enough to keep pace with attrition. Its aviators paid for this inadequacy with their lives.

The German air force, although it fought to the end, was overwhelmed in the air; it had lost the war of aerial attrition to the French and British, aided by their lesser aerial allies. The French aviation industry produced 24,652 airplanes and 44,563 engines in 1918, overwhelming both its opponents and allies. The French air arm emphasized the employment of aviation in 1918 and trained increasing numbers of aircrews to man its fighter and bomber squadrons. This concentration on tactical aviation, and on the continued improvement of a limited number of fighter and bomber types and their engines, enabled both relatively high production at home and effectiveness over the front. In air strength, the French possessed the world’s largest air force in 1918, and had the war continued into 1919, its new fighter aircraft and engine types would have portended increased difficulty for the German air arm.

The British aircraft industry delivered some 32,000 airframes but only 22,000 engines in 1918, requiring the importation of some 9,000 engines, primarily from France. The Royal Air Force, which attempted strategic bombing beyond the tactical air war on the Western Front, was widely dispersed on all the imperial fronts. The Italian aviation industry manufactured 6,488 airplanes and 14,840 engines in 1918, powering the Italian military and naval air arms to success against their dwindling Austro-Hungarian opponents. The United States’ air service and aircraft industry would have offered the Allies a powerful air weapon had the war continued into 1919 and 1920. But the German army high command could read the handwriting on the wall in October 1918; they had lost the war, on the ground and in the air.