Fighter Aces of the Great War

By Stephen Wynn and Tanya Wynn

A look at the transformation of aerial combat during World War I and the pilots of every country who were celebrated for shooting down enemy aircraft.

By the time of the outbreak of the First World War, aviation was only eleven years old. The daddy of battlefield warfare until that point in time had been the cavalry, a position it maintained even as war was declared on the Western Front.

Aircraft were not initially seen as an offensive weapon and were instead used by both sides as observation platforms or to take aerial photographs. Even when they were eventually used in an offensive capacity, they did not have machine guns attached to them; if the crew wanted to open fire then they had to use a pistol or rifle.

As the war progressed so the use of aircraft changed from being an observational tool, to that of a fighter and bomber aircraft—something that had never been foreseen at the outbreak of the war. This book looks at the fighter aces from all sides. These were pilots who had been credited with shooting or forcing down a minimum of five enemy aircraft, of which there were hundreds. While some of these aces survived, many of them were killed. The most famous fighter ace of all is without doubt the German pilot known as the Red Baron, Manfred von Richthofen.

“It’s the legendary stuff I was brought up on, reading about first world war dogfights . . . Stephen Wynn and Tanya Wynn weave a good tale between them—absolutely enthralling.” —Books Monthly

• Language: English
• Publisher: Open Road Integrated Media
• Release date: Apr 30, 2020
• ISBN: 9781473865440

Stephen Wynn

Stephen is a retired police officer having served with Essex Police as a constable for thirty years between 1983 and 2013. He is married to Tanya and has two sons, Luke and Ross, and a daughter, Aimee. His sons served five tours of Afghanistan between 2008 and 2013 and both were injured. This led to the publication of his first book, Two Sons in a Warzone – Afghanistan: The True Story of a Father’s Conflict, published in October 2010. Both Stephen’s grandfathers served in and survived the First World War, one with the Royal Irish Rifles, the other in the Mercantile Marine, whilst his father was a member of the Royal Army Ordnance Corps during the Second World War.When not writing Stephen can be found walking his three German Shepherd dogs with his wife Tanya, at some unearthly time of the morning, when most normal people are still fast asleep.

Book preview

Introduction

This book will take a brief look at the history of flying, which at the outbreak of the First World War was still very much in its infancy. The first universally accepted instance of recorded flight by a powered aircraft had only taken place on 17 December 1903, when Orville and Wilbur Wright made history near Kitty Hawk, North Carolina in the United States.

It will also take a look at how, especially in the early years of the war, it was decided how aircraft could best be used in a military sense. Senior military personnel had not really seen a place for them in a front-line capacity; at best they were seen in an observation role that could be used to obtain information and intelligence on enemy positions and movements. Early use of aircraft didn’t even see them armed with machine guns. A dogfight at that time consisted of pilots and observers firing pistols at each other.

At the beginning of the war, cavalry charges were still seen as a sensible military tactic, despite the fact that heavy-duty machine guns, which were deployed by all sides in the war, had in essence quickly made them obsolete.

This book will look at flying aces from all the countries whose pilots took part in the First World War. It will look at what a pilot had to achieve to earn the right to be classed as an ace and why they were given this name as an accolade. Many of them were ‘lone wolves’, whose sole purpose was to go up into the skies, find an enemy aircraft and shoot it down, purely with the ambition of becoming an ace. On such occasions there was no tactical military purpose for their presence in the skies. The war in the skies during the First World War was totally different from that of the Second World War.

CHAPTER ONE

Aerial Victories

There are many things in life that don’t always add up, and what constituted an aerial victory in the First World War was certainly one of them. Not only did countries not always use the same standard, different air services within the same country didn’t always agree either. An example of different air services within a country would be the British army’s Royal Flying Corps (RFC) and the Royal Naval Air Service (RNAS), both of whom flew Sopwith Camel aircraft which were one of the most well-known and best-loved aircraft of the First World War. They had a top speed of 115 mph and throughout the war they were credited with shooting down a total of 1,294 enemy aircraft.

The notion of an aerial ‘victory’ arose from the first aerial combats, which occurred during the early days of the First World War. Unsurprisingly, different air services developed their own definitions of exactly what an aerial victory might be, as well as different methods of assessing and assigning credit for them.

Who was in possession of the terrain below where an aerial flight was taking place had its effect on verifying victory. An enemy aircraft that crashed in enemy-held territory obviously could not be verified by the victor’s ground troops. Because aerial combat commonly took place over or behind the German lines, German scores are generally considered more accurate because German aces’ victories were more easily confirmed on the ground. Additionally, the British handicap of returning home against prevailing wind on the Western Front helped to fatten German scores.

The scores that are presented in the lists cannot be wholly definitive, but are based on itemized lists that are the best available sources of information. Loss of records and the passage of time make reconstructing the actual count for all those claimed as aces an extremely difficult process. Aces are listed after verifying the date and location of combat and the enemy that was defeated for every victory accredited by an aviator’s home air service.

Remarkably there were twenty-nine separate countries that had fighter aces during the First World War. In alphabetical order they were as follows: Argentina, Australia, Austria, Austria-Hungary, Belgium, Britain, Canada, Croatia, Czechoslovakia, Ecuador, Estonia, Fiji, France, Georgia, Germany, Greece, Hungary, India, Italy, Latvia, Lithuania, New Zealand, Poland, the Russian Empire, Serbia, Slovakia, Swaziland, Switzerland and the United States.

The above list does not mean that all those countries actually took part in the war; the countries named simply relate to where the pilots were actually born. Argentina, for example, had pilots who flew in the Royal Air Force, while Austria and Croatia had pilots born in those countries who fought in the air force of Austria-Hungary.

There were possibly many more ‘aces’ than it is actually thought, mainly because a pilot of any nation only had to have scored a minimum of five confirmed kills to be officially classed as one. The term has its origins in the French word l’as which in English means ‘the ace’. It was coined by the French press after one of their pilots, Adolphe Célestin Pégoud, became the first fighter ace of the First World War and therefore in the history of aviation. He was responsible for shooting down seven German aircraft.

Pégoud had originally served in the French army between 1907 and 1913 before being honourably discharged on 13 February. Once again finding himself back in civilian life, he decided that he would train as a pilot, a skill he managed to master in just three weeks. He was awarded his pilot’s licence on 1 March 1913, a remarkable feat by any stretch of the imagination. Not satisfied with this, he then became the first-ever person to make a parachute jump from a flying aircraft, sacrificing the plane in the process. However, he didn’t waste his time during the jump; instead he put it to good use and watched the trajectory of the descending aircraft as it made its way to the ground in a loop-like manner, something he wanted to replicate in flight. He managed this on 21 September 1913, although he was not the first; that honour went to Russian officer Pyotr Nesterov, a feat he achieved on 9 September in a Nieuport IV monoplane in Kiev.

Adolphe Celestin Pegoud.

At the outbreak of the First World War, Pégoud immediately volunteered for service with the French Air Force as a pilot and was accepted. His success and fame sadly didn’t last long as he was shot down and killed on 31 August 1915, ironically by a German pilot, Unteroffizier Otto Kandulski. The irony was that Kandulski had been a student of Pégoud’s before the war. Pégoud met his death while trying to attack a German reconnaissance aircraft. Kandulski went on to survive the war, despite earlier incorrect reports that he had been killed by a French pilot.

The different nations who took part in the First World War developed their own individual systems to determine how credit was accorded to their pilots for the shooting down of enemy aircraft or other aviation machines such as zeppelins or observation balloons.

More than 100 years after the end of the First World War, it is difficult to be exact about a lot of what was claimed at the time, because many of the records that were kept regarding those shot down ߝ where and by whom ߝ have not always been preserved. There were other issues such as some nations over-claiming victories; some may have been intentional but others were not. Sometimes more than one pilot would claim the same victory; then there would be occasions when pilots would claim a victory when in fact the enemy aircraft that they claimed had actually been shot down by ground forces.

In addition, the German victory confirmation system was less effective from February 1918 as it became clear that they were not going to win the war. In essence, there were more important things for them to worry about than filling out forms and making sure that their written records were up-to-date and accurate. After August 1918 and before the signing of the Armistice, the records that did survive were at a unit level only. There were very few if any comprehensive records that were even kept, let alone survived.

In the First World War the records that were kept show that only about 5 per cent of all combat pilots from all participating nations accounted for the majority of war-related air-to-air victories.

The competing nations were the six allied countries of Belgium, France, Great Britain, Italy, the USA and Russia, who were up against the might of the Austro-Hungarian Empire and Germany. Listed below are the rules, as recorded on Wikipedia, that were used by those same nations to record aerial victories that were then credited to their nation’s pilots.

Belgium

Enemy aircraft had to fall within friendly lines in a nation partially occupied by the enemy, or be seen by friendly ground troops falling within German lines, to be counted. Confirmation by fellow friendly pilots was not allowed. This meant that unconfirmed claims far outnumbered those that were officially recorded as victories.

Although the Belgian system of recording victories supposedly mirrored the French system more than it did the British one, victory lists for Belgian aces still contain confirmed claims for ‘forced to land’ and ‘out of control’ victories. Inspection of the Belgian pilots’ victory lists also shows victories being shared without being fractionally divided. This meant that quite often one aircraft shot down by multiple pilots would count as a victory on each of the pilot’s lists.

France

French victory confirmation standards for their pilots were extremely strict. Credit was given only for the destruction of an enemy aircraft, and the destruction had to be witnessed by an independent witness such as an artillery observer, infantryman or another pilot. The victories certified generally fell into one of four categories of destruction:

1. An enemy aircraft independently witnessed falling in flames;

2. An enemy aircraft independently witnessed crashing to earth;

3. An enemy aircraft independently witnessed disintegrating while in flight;

4. An enemy aircraft falling into captivity behind the battle lines of the French or their allies.

Probable victories would not count on a pilot’s score, although they would be noted. Examples of probable victories could be enemy aircraft falling out of control but not seen to impact, or a claim lacking independent confirmation.

Observers as well as pilots could become aces. Victories could be shared and counted as an addition to the score of each ‘victor’ rather than being divided fractionally. In some cases, a single destroyed German or Austro-Hungarian aircraft could add to the scores of half a dozen or more French fliers.

Britain and the Commonwealth Nations

1. A British or Commonwealth pilot serving with either the Royal Flying Corps, the Royal Naval Air Service or the Australian Flying Corps could be credited with an aerial victory for destroying an enemy plane, for driving it down out of control, capturing it or destroying an enemy observation balloon. In the early days of the war, in 1915 and 1916, victories could also be awarded for forcing an enemy aircraft to land in either allied or enemy territory.

2. By 1917, the number of ‘out of control’, ‘driven down’ and ‘forced to land’ victories were overloading the scoring system. As the number of aerial sorties increased, British pilots might sometimes submit upwards of fifty claims in a single day, which resulted in the count system becoming overloaded. By May 1918, when the Royal Air Force came into being, they supposedly ceased reporting ‘out of control’ victories as part of pilots’ scores, but the same claim was still taken into account for the purposes of awarding pilots’ decorations for gallantry. Victories were limited to enemy aircraft destroyed, driven down out of control if they seemed so damaged that they would crash, and others captured. Squadron, brigade and wing headquarters all kept track of individual and unit scores, which was a massive undertaking.

3. The approval system that determined whether or not a pilot was credited with a victory began with a combat report from the squadron submitted to Wing HQ. They in turn passed the report on to Brigade HQ. Either wing or brigade could approve or disapprove it; sometimes one would confirm the victory while the other would not.

4. Victories were reported by the Royal Flying Corps headquarters. The deadline for these daily reports, or ‘Communiqués’, which were nicknamed ‘Comic Cuts’ by the pilots, was 1600 hours. Sometimes such reports might not be placed on the system until the following day, which sometimes led to a duplication of credited victories.

5. In cases where more than one pilot or observer was involved in a British victory, practice was particularly inconsistent. When only one enemy aircraft had been destroyed, the victory at unit level was counted as one. However, in some cases this resulted in more than one pilot receiving a full credit to his personal score as victories at this time were not divided fractionally in the way that became common practice later on in the war. An example of this was when no fewer than twelve pilots from the RFC each claimed a victory because they helped destroy a German Albatros D.III on 8 April 1917. Some squadrons only counted such victories to the unit and did not credit them to individual pilots, or counted ‘shared’ scores separately from a pilot’s ‘solo’ victories. In the case of two-seater aircraft, both pilot and observer might each receive credit for a victory. It was usual that all victories were credited to the pilot of a Sopwith 1½ Strutter or Bristol F.2 Fighter two-seater, but the observer/ gunner was only credited only if he fired his machine guns. Some squadrons kept separate lists of pilot and observer aces; some did not. As can be seen, the same rules were not applied across the board by all British units, which then leaves the figures that were produced open to interpretation regarding their accuracy.

6. Unlike other air forces of the time, British authorities did not necessarily require independent ground verification of a victory to award a credit to one of their pilots.

Italy

1. If an enemy aircraft fell in Italian-held territory and could be confirmed, or other allied powers’ pilots and/or ground observers could independently confirm an enemy’s destruction.

2. Victories could be shared, with more than one pilot and/ or gunner receiving full credit for a victory. This shows the different rules applied by different nations as to how quickly one of their pilots could become an ace.

3. The system codified by Pier Piccio, an Italian ace and by then the Inspector of Fighter Units in ‘Provisional Instruction for the Use of the Fighter Squadrons’ in June 1918, called for at least two confirmations from artillery, balloon or front-line observers.

4. In January 1919, the intelligence branch of ‘General Command of Aeronautics’ hastily drew up a list of pilots credited with any aerial victories during the war, which came to a close in November 1918. What criteria were used in this case are unknown, which in turn casts doubt on the totals produced.

The USA

Pilots from the United States had their victory totals defined in several different ways. If and when they served with British aviation, their victories were determined by the criteria used by the British. Some forty American aces only served in British units. It was exactly the same for American pilots serving in French units; their credited victories were evaluated by French standards as laid down for their own pilots.