End of the "Fokker Scourge"

A British chronology of the war closes under 1 April 1916 the period of German mastery of the air over the Western Front that it opened under 1 October 1915, when the “Fokker Scourge” began. Like the beginning, the end of this period has a notional date. Nothing decisive happened that day, and German superiority melted away gradually throughout the spring. According to the British official history of the air war, The War in the Air, the Fokkers kept it until about May. Some historians consider that the “scourge” proper ended as early as February, because after that the monoplane pilots claimed fewer and fewer victories.

Verdun and the French Nieuports

The first to wrest superiority from the Germans were the French, and precisely where they needed it most. When the Battle of Verdun began on 21 February 1916, German aircraft took control of the sky over the battlefield and the French artillery lost its eyes. According to an account later written down by the airman and general René Chambe, on 28 February General Philippe Pétain said to Commandant Charles de Tricornot de Rose: “Rose, sweep the sky clear for me! I am blind!” De Rose was given command of all aviation at Verdun and brought in the best fighter escadrilles, with pilots such as Jean Navarre, Charles Nungesser and Georges Guynemer. According to a French staff report, six fighter escadrilles had been assembled there by 15 March. Their pilots no longer hunted alone but patrolled the front in groups, at fixed times and according to plan.

They flew mainly Nieuport 11s, small biplanes known as “Bébé”. They had no synchroniser: the Lewis gun fired over the propeller from the upper wing. The aircraft was, however, faster and more manoeuvrable than the Fokker and climbed better. The Germans changed their methods too: they brought Fokkers in from other armies and concentrated them in two single-seat fighter groups attached to the headquarters of the Fifth Army, in which the leading figure was Oswald Boelcke. The fighting over Verdun went on throughout the spring and the balance tipped several times, but according to the British official history the French, by returning to offensive patrols, regained superiority and were once again able to carry out reconnaissance and direct artillery fire.

The British “pushers”

The Royal Flying Corps, which over the winter had had to send several escort aircraft with every reconnaissance machine, received at this time two new types of aircraft with a pusher propeller mounted behind the cockpit. As a result the gun in front could fire freely, without any synchroniser. On 23 January 1916 the first complete squadron of two-seat F.E.2bs arrived in France, and a second on 20 February. Their crews found that in close formation they could beat off Fokker attacks. On 8 February Major Lanoe Hawker’s No. 24 Squadron arrived, the first squadron of single-seat Airco DH.2 fighters. For several weeks its pilots trained on patrols north of the Somme. In March the first Nieuports also reached two British squadrons, and on 25 March the first British aircraft with a synchroniser, the single-seat Bristol Scout.

A Fokker in British hands

On 8 April 1916 a young, inexperienced German pilot took off from Valenciennes in a new Fokker E.III, number 210/16. He was to ferry it to another airfield, but he lost his way in the mist and landed at a British airfield east of Saint-Omer. He was captured before he realised his mistake and could destroy the aircraft. The British official history records that this was the first German synchroniser to fall into British hands. At Saint-Omer the captured Fokker flew in mock combats against the French Morane-Saulnier N and other Allied aircraft, and was then sent for trials at Upavon in England. It turned out that it had nothing like the great superiority attributed to it. This machine, the only surviving original Fokker monoplane, can be seen today in the Science Museum in London.

What came next

At the end of April the DH.2 pilots showed that they could outmanoeuvre the Fokker. On 25 April two of them, escorting a reconnaissance aircraft, beat off many attacks, and five days later a Fokker fleeing from a DH.2 crashed onto the roof of a house in Bapaume before the British pilot had fired a shot. On 23 May the commander of the British Fourth Army, General Henry Rawlinson, wrote that in mid-May his airmen had photographed the entire German trench system in front of the army’s front without once being attacked by Fokkers. On 18 June Max Immelmann, the most famous Fokker pilot, was killed. In the summer, during the Battle of the Somme, the Allies had clear air superiority. The Germans regained it only in the autumn of 1916, when Albatros D.I biplanes with two machine guns reached the new fighter squadrons.