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Fokker Scourge
The Fokker Scourge was a term coined by the British press in the summer of 1915 during World War I. It applied to a period of time (roughly, August 1915 to March 1916) when the Fokker E.I became operational — this was the first type of aircraft to enter service with a "synchronization gear" (often referred to mistakenly as an "interrupter gear"), which enabled a machine gun to fire through the arc of the propeller without striking its blades. This constituted an important advantage over other contemporary fighter aircraft, which tended to either be very slow, or ineffectually armed, and a large number of Allied aircraft were quickly shot down. By late 1915 the German Luftstreitkräfte had air superiority, making Allied access to vital intelligence derived from continual aerial reconnaissance much more dangerous to acquire. This created a major scandal in Britain.
This aircraft - also commonly known as the Eindecker (German for "Monoplane") was in fact the first real fighter aircraft to be developed for the German air force.
Fortunately for the Allies, two new British fighters were already in production which were a technical match for the Fokker, the F.E.2b and the D.H.2. These were both "pushers" and could fire forwards without gun synchronisation. The F.E.2b reached the front in September 1915, and the D.H.2 in the following February. On the French front, the tiny Nieuport 11, a tractor biplane with a forward firing gun mounted outside the arc of the propeller (on the top wing) also proved more than a match for the German fighter when it entered service in January 1916. With these new types the Allies re-established air superiority in time for the Battle of the Somme, and the "Fokker Scourge" was over.
Synchronised guns nonetheless quickly became the norm - and later versions of the Nieuport, as well as most new British fighters, were to be fitted with them for the rest of the war.
Like the Fokker scourge, the period of Allied air superiority which followed it was brief. By August 1916 the fighters in the Luftstreitkräfte had been grouped into specialist fighter squadrons, the Jagdstaffeln, and these units were receiving the first of the new Albatros fighters. These were once more able to turn the tables - and by the spring of 1917 were causing very high casualties in the R.F.C. — culminating in the rout of "Bloody April" (April 1917).
In the following two years, Allied aviation became overwhelming in both quality and quantity, with the result that the Germans were only able to maintain limited control over a small area of the front at any time. When even this seemed threatened, they started a crash programme to develop a new aircraft. The result was the famous Fokker D.VII, leading to a short but notable second "Fokker Scourge". The Fokker D.VII was so effective that Germany was required to surrender all of them to the victorious allies as a condition of the Treaty of Versailles.
References
See also
cs:Fokker Scourge ja:フォッカーの懲罰 ru:Бич Фоккера
| This article is licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License. It uses material from the Wikipedia article "Fokker Scourge". |
