Wings.Of.War.S01E03.Fight.For.The.Skies
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00:00For over a hundred years, battles have raged in the air for command of the skies.
00:09If you don't have air supremacy, you're in trouble.
00:13Since its earliest beginnings in World War I, the airplane is the supreme weapon of the
00:18armed forces.
00:20This was a real battle for civilization, for humanity.
00:23It revolutionized battle and changed the ways war was fought and won.
00:28The F-117 has obviously changed how we design aircraft and air campaigns.
00:34War drove innovation in the skies.
00:36What we hear from the Air Force is, when the F-35 wasn't there, all others died.
00:40When the F-35 was there, they reigned supreme.
00:44Aircraft bred a new kind of hero.
00:46The fate of entire nations depended on the bravery of a handful of men.
00:51An appreciation of the extent to which young men were willing to put their lives on the
00:55line for an ideal is something we need to remember more often than we do.
01:00In this episode, the Sopwith Camel becomes the most dangerous dogfighter.
01:06Once you've mastered this plane, it's a killer.
01:10The Germans unleash a scourge with their Focke-Eindecker.
01:14They decimated the Royal Flying Corps at the time.
01:17The Allies launched a spitfire of its time, the SE-5.
01:21The SE-5A was one of the most successful fighters in the First World War.
01:25Baron von Richthofen and his Flying Circus ruled the skies.
01:29He would pick out the weakest and go after them quite ruthlessly.
01:33America's Ace of Aces, Eddie Rickenbacker.
01:36It was an incredible feat, you know.
01:38He was taking on seven aircraft, just one man.
01:41Takes on the deadliest fighters of World War I.
01:44No one had ever seen anything like this before.
01:55It was the dawn of aviation when the world went to war in 1914.
02:19Daring young men took to the skies in flying machines and blazed a trail for a radically
02:25new type of battle.
02:28This is the first time men have fought in the air.
02:33It's a new dimension of aerial warfare.
02:36These young men had to learn this and learn this very quickly or they wouldn't live through
02:41it.
02:42The first combat aviators had to master the rapidly evolving technology.
02:48The development during the First World War in aviation was immense.
02:51If you look at the airplanes that first went to the Western Front in 1914 compared to the
02:56airplanes that were there in 1918, the development on both sides is huge.
03:06With nearly 1,300 kills to its name, the British Sopwith Camel, introduced in 1916, was the
03:13most successful close-range aerial combat aircraft of the First World War.
03:20The Sopwith Camel has rightly earned the reputation of the greatest dogfighter in the war because
03:25of its incredible maneuverability, the ability to turn on a dime.
03:30What made it special was the fact that it was almost impossible to fly.
03:34It had its own mind and the plane would do strange things.
03:38It was very unstable and that was very handy in a dogfight because you didn't know what
03:43was going to happen and neither did the enemy.
03:45It went all over the place.
03:49It's a spinning, spinning combat arena.
03:52It's superlative.
03:53And so once you've mastered this plane, it's a killer.
04:00At the dawn of aerial combat, the aviator was lionized.
04:04There was this romantic myth of the aviator.
04:09The aviator was in fact a new man.
04:12He had conquered the air.
04:14He roamed the heavens completely free.
04:19He could fight, give battle at his own initiative, refuse battle.
04:25They were pioneering.
04:27They were brave.
04:30You could argue that they were brave and foolish at the same time because these machines were
04:34just held together with bits of string.
04:37In reality, flying in an open cockpit World War I aircraft was brutal, harsh and deadly.
04:45You're flying at 100 miles an hour, so you've got the sound of the wind.
04:48You've got the cold, very cold.
04:50These airplanes dogfighted at 17,000, 18,000 feet with no heat and no oxygen.
04:55And they were up there 45 minutes.
04:58Extremely cold.
04:59You had the castor oil boiling in your face and you were ingesting castor oil.
05:02It was a nasty business.
05:06In Britain, among the first to be called for the rare duty as an aviator were former cavalry
05:12officers.
05:13The start of the First World War, to become a pilot in the Royal Flying Corps, the main
05:18requisite was you rode a horse.
05:21Many of the would-be aviators learned to fly in a Sopwith Camel, purposely designed with
05:26the cavalry officer in mind.
05:29If you look at all World War I airplanes, they all have some form of stirrup.
05:34And then they have also a saddle.
05:37You mount it just like you mount your horse.
05:39You stick your left leg in here, you swing your leg over the saddle and you mount your
05:43steed.
05:45They soon learned, however, that taking hold of the reins of a World War I fighter required
05:51a brand new skill set.
05:53There were no two-seat models of these airplanes.
05:57So there's only one seat in it.
05:59You're your own instructor.
06:00You have to go up in the airplane and you have to figure it out yourself because there's
06:03nobody that can help you.
06:05One of the things that they learned right on is you have to keep your head moving.
06:10And you have to look for the target all the time.
06:13They move their necks constantly to the point where it would wear a rash in their neck.
06:18So they put scarves around their necks so the uniform wouldn't wear on their neck.
06:22The oil is splashing in their eyes all the time.
06:25So they would take the end of the scarf and they would wipe the oil off their goggles.
06:30And it can make the difference between life and death.
06:32If you had an oil spot on your goggle that was blocking the enemy, you'd never see him
06:38coming.
06:39With 14,000 British pilots killed in the course of the Great War, 8,000 died in training on
06:45Britain's airfields.
06:47They often, the early pupils, got into spins and they couldn't control them.
06:53In inexperienced hands, the immense power or torque produced by the Camel's rotary engine
06:59often proved fatal.
07:03The engine had high inertia.
07:04It had high torque so it could throw a huge propeller, which gave a lot of thrust for
07:10a low horsepower.
07:11The engines were between 80 horsepower and 140 horsepower.
07:14By today's standard, that's not very powerful at all.
07:17But if you look at the propeller that these engines swung, they're gigantic.
07:23Student pilots got accustomed to the sound of one of their brethren spinning in from
07:29altitude.
07:30They could hear him coming down and you'd hear whirring, whirring, whirring, and you
07:33knew what was going to happen.
07:34He was going to bury himself in the ground with the Camel and they'd say, there goes
07:37another one.
07:43Getting the balance right between stability and manoeuvrability while producing an effective
07:48combat plane was the preeminent challenge for the early aircraft designers.
07:54From the Wright brothers on, from 1903 to the beginning of the war in 1914, all designers
08:01around the world were trying to create an aircraft that was stable.
08:05The war comes along and the aircraft turns into a war machine and now you're fighting
08:10with these machines.
08:11Well, you don't want a stable fighting machine.
08:13You want something that's very maneuverable.
08:16So how do you make an airplane maneuverable without making it unstable?
08:20And they just did not know how to do it.
08:23With the war raging between the world's great economic powers, including Britain, France
08:29and Russia on the one side and Germany and Austria-Hungary on the other, there was no
08:34time to wait for the perfect aircraft design.
08:39Would-be pilots simply had to learn to fly highly unstable planes or die trying.
08:45And after about 20 hours of training, those Allied pilots that survived were deemed ready
08:50for one of the most hazardous duties.
08:54But at the beginning of the war in 1914, there were very few British aircraft to speak of.
09:01They had some 50 to 60 airplanes ready to serve in France, all of the very early versions
09:09of what we call the BE-2, which was the Royal Aircraft Factory BE-2.
09:14The main combat role in the BE-2 during the First World War was observation.
09:25It was a first-purpose design military airplane and it was designed as the eyes of the army.
09:31The Royal Aircraft Factory's BE-2 had an eight-cylinder engine producing about 90 horsepower and a
09:37top speed of 72 miles an hour.
09:41The primitive plane didn't win any plaudits for its raw power.
09:45What made it a useful combat tool was that it had a range of 234 miles.
09:51That's roughly the distance between London and Paris, and the BE-2 could fly as high
09:57as 10,000 feet.
09:58The BE-2 was actually designed to be a very stable airplane and for that purpose fairly
10:05controllable and that made it ideal for its role in observation.
10:09In terms of today, it was still a very, very basic airplane.
10:12Limited instruments, virtually no instruments in some cases, and very limited controls.
10:18They didn't even have cameras to photograph the enemy positions they'd been sent to observe.
10:25They would have literally drawn on a pad and paper the German gun positions, the lines
10:29of the trenches, troop positions, and it wasn't then until later in the war that they actually
10:35then fixed actual cameras to the side of the airplane so they could photograph the
10:39German positions.
10:41It was only a matter of time before it was decided that, well, they might as well arm
10:45them with bombs and bomb the targets directly.
10:52So once you have these aircraft bombing over the lines, then of course comes the need to
10:57shoot down and counter those bombers.
11:00That led to the need for fighter aircraft.
11:03This led to the development of an airplane that was capable of shooting an airplane down.
11:09As both sides ramped up production for an air war, Germany's leading designer, Antony
11:14Fokker, seized the initiative and introduced the world's first combat-ready fighter plane,
11:21the Eindecker.
11:33The Great War broke out in Europe in July 1914, drawing in all the major European powers
11:39to the battlefront.
11:42A year later, in 1915, the first purpose-built combat plane took to the skies, the German
11:50Fokker Eindecker.
11:51The word Eindecker is German for single wing, it's a single wing aircraft.
11:56The name Fokker is associated with Antony Fokker who was an aircraft designer and he
12:01designed quite a number of German aircraft during the war.
12:05It was the first German killing machine.
12:07It was not necessarily faster, but it had a very tight turn, so it could turn inside
12:13the enemy aircraft.
12:15But the real reason, of course, that it was so special was that Antony Fokker, he invented
12:20what is called the interrupter gear, in other words, machine guns that could fire through
12:25the propellers.
12:27In effect, the interrupter gear stopped the machine gun from firing for a fraction of
12:32a second as the blades of the propeller swept past the machine gun barrel.
12:38The weapon of choice was the Spandau machine gun.
12:43With a gun platform mounted in a fixed forward position, the airplane was now a game-changing
12:49offensive weapon.
12:53The fact that the pilot could literally just point the airplane and shoot the machine gun
12:57at the same time made it an actual killing machine.
13:03They decimated the Royal Flying Corps at the time.
13:06A big bloodbath, the B.E.2s, just became known as Fokker Fodder because they just could not
13:10get out of the way.
13:11They weren't equipped to deal with it.
13:13They just had no defense against them.
13:17The Eindecker's total command of the air began in the autumn of 1916.
13:23The massacre of the Allied aircraft and pilots that would follow would become known as the
13:28Fokker Scourge.
13:29They were just shooting down aircraft all over the western front, and the British continued
13:36to send their observation planes and their fighter planes over German lines, and they
13:41get shot down in great numbers.
13:47Over the course of the war, some 1,000 British and French aircraft were destroyed by Eindeckers.
13:53Most went down in flames.
13:59Life expectancy for an Allied pilot was short, 40 to 60 hours of flying time, just a few
14:06weeks at best.
14:09The airplanes were made out of fabric, out of Irish linen.
14:13They were doped with a nitrate dope that was very flammable, so these airplanes would burst
14:17into flames.
14:21Parachutes were available.
14:23They had parachutes.
14:24They weren't allowed to wear them, and both sides said it would be the coward's way out.
14:28You wouldn't fight to the death if you could jump out of the airplane, so the pilots not
14:33having any parachutes would dive as fast as they could and try to get on the ground before
14:37the airplane burned up, and that was called going down in flames.
14:44The Fokker Scourge was, of course, a shock for the British and French on the western
14:48front.
14:49The Fokker Eindecker managed to sweep the skies of British and French aircraft.
14:54The Fokker Scourge marked a period of technological advantage for the Germans and their air service.
15:00In many respects, this was a case of them just being ahead of the curve.
15:04The Germans took full advantage of their technological superiority.
15:10British and French pilots are confronted with these men flying straight at them, approaching
15:18them from different angles, and all of a sudden opening fire and shooting them down.
15:22It has a terrifying impact.
15:28One of the most celebrated Fokker Eindecker pilots was German ace Max Immelmann, also
15:34known as the Eagle of Lille.
15:36To become an ace in the German air force, you had to shoot down five aircraft or more.
15:41Max Immelmann was one of the German fighter aces in the First World War.
15:46Immelmann was your classic Prussian reserved gentleman, didn't talk to anybody, he was
15:52very isolated, ice cold.
15:55Max Immelmann claimed his first kill in the Eindecker, shooting down a French pilot.
16:01But the audacious way he did it would send a chill down the spines of the Allied flyers
16:06and further change the course of aerial combat.
16:10Max Immelmann, he invented the Immelmann turn, which was a way of having two shots at an
16:14enemy aircraft.
16:16If you were heading towards an enemy aircraft and you were shooting at it, he would then
16:20climb up, turn, and then as the other aircraft had gone past, he'd then be on the tail of
16:25the enemy aircraft and would have another shot at it, so it was quite a useful manoeuvre.
16:33Perfected in World War I, the Immelmann turn is still used by jet fighters today.
16:41In all, the German ace Max Immelmann would claim 15 kills before his luck ran out.
16:47Initially a British crew claimed they had shot him down, but as it turns out, it appears
16:53that Immelmann's synchronising gear failed him in mid-air and he shot his own propeller
16:59off and fell to his death.
17:04Immelmann's demise did little to slow the Fokker Skirge.
17:09But when a German pilot was forced to land in Allied held territory, the Eindecker's
17:13secrets were exposed.
17:16The German army forbid that a pilot flies into foreign countries.
17:22One pilot was landing in France and one week later the success of the development was gone.
17:29By reverse engineering the captured Eindecker, the Allies learnt how to build a synchronised
17:34firing gear.
17:39So in 1916, the British produced their own fighter plane, the Bristol F2B.
17:47The Bristol F2B is the superb long-range reconnaissance fighter that the British developed at the
17:57end of 1916.
17:59It will be perfected in 1917 and 1918.
18:04It uses preferably a Rolls Royce 275 horsepower Falcon engine.
18:10It's got a top speed of over 120 miles an hour.
18:13You have a rear gunner who can keep enemy planes off your tail.
18:20The Bristol F2B was a two-seater.
18:22It was armed like the Eindecker, but the new British fighter had twice the firepower.
18:28One of the key aspects about the Bristol fighter was that it combined aspects of fighters with
18:34that of reconnaissance aircraft.
18:36So for example, it mounted Vickers machine guns through synchronised firing gear, firing
18:40through the arc of the propeller.
18:42It also mounted a Lewis machine gun on a scarf ring at the back.
18:46The Fokker Eindecker had a worthy adversary at last.
18:50What happens is there are cycles of one side gaining dominance with a new aircraft and
18:56then the other side then leapfrogging that with their own better aircraft.
19:01And so the ebb and flow of aerial warfare really follows the introduction into service
19:07of progressively more effective aircraft.
19:10But while the technology was in place, the Allied pilots were still way behind the curve
19:18when it came to battle tactics.
19:22That was largely thanks to some ingenious rules of engagement created by the German
19:27ace with the most kills during the Fokker scourge, Oswald Belke.
19:35Oswald Belke is away from the front after Max Immelmann is shot down.
19:39He returns with a set of hand-picked pilots, include Manfred von Richthofen.
19:46And he comes back with what are called the Dichter-Belke, Belke's Dichter.
19:52First is to seek the advantage, which means you try to get behind and above or behind
19:58and below your opponent.
20:02Then you press your attack, keep your focus on your enemy at all times.
20:08Use the sun and keep the sun at your back.
20:13If the sun is in your favor, you always try to keep the sun at your back so that the enemy
20:18has to see through the sun to see you, and you can hide in the sun.
20:22And they had this saying back then, beware of the hunt in the sun.
20:27You want to sneak up on the enemy and surprise him and shoot him before he even knows you're
20:33there.
20:34So if you could get below your enemy's tail feathers, if you could get down below him,
20:38he cannot see you.
20:40And then get up high enough to fire.
20:42That is the best way to attack your enemy.
20:47Belke's rules also prescribed defensive tactics that have proved effective for pilots to this
20:53day.
20:54The other thing finally is that when you're fighting over enemy territory, always keep
21:00your line of retreat.
21:01Always make certain you have an escape route and leave if the fight turns against you.
21:13It was the German pilots trained by Oswald Belke that the newly minted British fighters
21:19had to face.
21:20In spring 1917, on their first ever mission over enemy territory, the British Bristol
21:26fighters would run into the most formidable foe imaginable.
21:30Unfortunately, the first six plane unit that goes out over the German lines meets a disaster
21:37when it runs into Richthofen's unit.
21:41Baron Manfred von Richthofen is deemed to be the greatest ace of the First World War.
21:46Von Richthofen, the German ace, who would soon be known infamously as the Red Baron,
21:52would claim 80 Allied kills.
21:54If you're a young British pilot and you turned around and you saw three red wings coming
22:00up from behind your tail, that was probably the last thing you were ever going to see.
22:12For the first few years of World War I, in the battle for dominance of the skies, heavily
22:21armed German fighters had mercilessly outgunned the Allied air force.
22:25Then, in the spring of 1917, the British introduced their first combat-ready fighter plane, the
22:33Bristol F2B.
22:36But they hadn't accounted for running into a squadron of German aces, led by Baron von
22:42Richthofen.
22:43What made him the number one ace of World War I is he was a fantastic marksman, a fantastic
22:50shot.
22:51He loved the hunt.
22:52He loved to go out and chase boar, shoot boar, and he took that into the skies.
22:57He was a ruthless killer who would wipe out anybody who came in front of him.
23:04He would pick out the weakest aircraft in the formation and go after them quite ruthlessly.
23:11But von Richthofen was not infallible.
23:15Richthofen, he's actually wounded in the head at long distance by a British F2B gunner,
23:23and he never really recovered.
23:24The wound never healed, but he continued to fly and fight after a leave.
23:33Faced with a renewed Allied threat, the Germans raised the stakes with a new fighter plane,
23:39the Fokker Dreidecker I.
23:42With a maximum speed of 103 miles an hour, the DR1 was slower than its contemporaries.
23:48But what made it exceptional was its maneuverability.
23:53That was down to its triple-layered wings that were guided in flight by a reinforced
23:57lightweight rudder and large rear elevators.
24:02Able to roll and loop with relative ease in the hands of a skilled pilot, its maneuverability
24:07made it the aircraft of choice for the freshly recovered Baron von Richthofen.
24:13This is the Fokker DR1, the Red Baron.
24:16He flew this DR1.
24:18He flew very small circles, and that's why it was a very successful encounter.
24:25Assigned his own squadron, the 25-year-old commander surrounded himself with aces.
24:31Manfred von Richthofen is Boelcke's most apt pupil.
24:37Richthofen himself follows Boelcke's dicta to the limit.
24:43He collects these excellent airmen.
24:46He continues this squadron of aces in what's called Jasta 11, or Jagdstaffel, which is
24:52a hunting pack, as the Germans say.
24:54Buoyed by success, von Richthofen boldly painted his triplane, and his defiant squadron of
25:00aces followed suit.
25:03The Red Baron had been born.
25:06In the skies, his fearsome force would come to be known as von Richthofen's Flying Circus.
25:14Richthofen's plane is bright red.
25:16They all have these spectacularly colored individual fighters.
25:20The whole purpose was really, notice me, I'm coming.
25:25It wasn't camouflage or anything like that, because there were such bright colors, blues
25:30and reds and all sorts of things.
25:32And it was, look, I'm a part of the Flying Circus.
25:34I'm a part of Richthofen's group.
25:37Look at it.
25:39By 1917, 1918, there may be as many as 60 fighters stacked, and this is how they appear.
25:47And they don't come over the Allied lines.
25:49The Germans fight on the defensive.
25:51So when the Allies come over in their offensives, they will find the sky stacked to the heavens
25:59with all these fighter planes and ready to fight.
26:03In April 1917, the Allied Army launched the Battle of Arras.
26:08The aim was for ground troops to advance on the German defenses surrounding the small
26:12French town.
26:14To support the British offensive, 25 squadrons and 385 aircraft flew into the fray.
26:21For the British Royal Flying Corps, it would be known as Bloody April.
26:26Bloody April is a period in 1917 when the Royal Flying Corps operating over the Western
26:31Front suffers heavy casualties, in part due to tactics, in part due to technology.
26:37Technology has moved on and the Germans seem to have better aircraft at this point in time.
26:41The Allies lost 245 aircraft that April, and von Richthofen's Flying Circus seemed invincible.
26:51The seasoned flyer's personal kill rate climbed ominously.
26:55But as the war entered its final phase, the Red Baron himself proved to be a mere mortal.
27:02Richthofen by early 1918 is practically exhausted.
27:07He's been fighting since 1916.
27:11The wound that he sustained in 1917 never completely healed, but he, as all the German
27:19fighter pilots and many of the Allied fighter pilots, refused to stop flying.
27:27On the 21st of April 1918, Baron von Richthofen took off flying westward along the Somme Valley.
27:35A furious dogfight raged below.
27:38He circled, then swooped down on a lone Sopwith camel, flown by a rookie pilot, Lieutenant
27:44Wilfrid May.
27:46Baron Richthofen simply targeted him and he got on his tail.
27:50Well, May tried to do everything to shake him off.
27:53He was tenacious.
27:54He couldn't shake him.
27:55He could not shake him.
27:57May took evasive action, turning and diving until he ran out of sky.
28:02He skimmed down across the Somme Valley, von Richthofen's guns hot on his heels.
28:08Richthofen pursues him lower and lower over the lines, not watching that he's coming over
28:16ground gunners, Australian gunners on the ground, and that he's also being pursued by
28:22Captain Roy Brown in a Sopwith camel.
28:26Brown and his camel closed in and opened fire.
28:30The Dreidecker was hit, exploded, and the Red Baron went down in flames.
28:38Who actually took the fatal shot remains to this day a mystery.
28:43There's actually some debate about how the Red Baron actually met his end.
28:49Some would put it down to a Canadian pilot called Brown, but in recent years, people
28:55have generally thought that it was actually ground fire from Australian troops in the
29:00trenches that actually brought down his aircraft.
29:02He was on the ground, landed his plane, although he shouldn't have been able to, he should
29:06have been dead, and his final words were, kaput, and that's it, and he died.
29:12Manfred von Richthofen claimed 80 Allied kills and was immortalised as the deadliest ace
29:18of World War I.
29:22The Red Baron may have been killed, but the Germans still ruled the skies.
29:28To gain air supremacy and win the war, the Allies still needed to improve its aircraft.
29:34Thanks to innovation and invention, the British Royal Aircraft Factory created the best fighter
29:40yet, the SE-5.
29:43The SE-5A was one of the most successful fighters of the First World War, with over 5,000 produced
29:48alongside the Sopwith Camel, it was the mainstay of the Royal Flying Corps.
29:53First introduced in March 1917, the SE-5 was state-of-the-art.
29:59Easier to fly than its contemporary, the Sopwith Camel, the SE-5 didn't have the fearsome
30:05rotary engine that threatened to flip over the plane at any moment.
30:10Equipped with an inline V-8 water-cooled piston engine, it produced 150 horsepower.
30:17That's about the same as a mid-size car today.
30:21The SE-5 had a top speed of 138 miles per hour.
30:27Armed typically with a synchronized forward-firing Vickers machine gun and a Lewis gun in the rear,
30:33the SE-5 was a formidable fighting machine.
30:37Its combination of characteristics such as being sturdy, maneuverability and good armament
30:44made it a very good mount as an aircraft.
30:46Of course, combined with this was the quality of the pilots that were flying it.
30:52Thanks to bold technical innovations, by 1917 the Allies were finally fielding aircraft
30:59capable of competing with the enemy.
31:04Fighter planes like the SE-5 and the Sopwith Camel enabled the Allies to begin to wrest
31:09control of the skies.
31:12With a pack of brand new fighter aircraft and some victories in hand, the British finally
31:17had some aces of their own.
31:19One of the best, and most unlikely, was James McCudden.
31:23James McCudden is one of the great British aces.
31:27McCudden is associated with the SE-5, that's his favorite platform, and what McCudden likes
31:33to do is to hunt alone.
31:37James McCudden was one of the Royal Flying Corps' leading aces in the First World War.
31:42He has a confirmed victory list of 57 enemy aircraft.
31:46He became a mechanic in the Royal Flying Corps, and then during 1916 he becomes an
31:51observer and then latterly a pilot, and he's eventually posted to No. 56 Squadron.
31:56Despite McCudden's success, he wasn't fully accepted into the flying elite.
32:02What we know now is that a number of men in 56 were really reluctant to have him as a
32:10squadron commander because he didn't fit the notion of a public school boy, you know,
32:17he was not wealthy, he didn't come from a very good family, he came from a lower middle
32:22class military family.
32:26First pilots were most likely to be more from moneyed backgrounds because they would have
32:32had the money to have indulged in aviation as a sport before the war.
32:36But obviously as the war progresses and the need for more pilots arises, you do get pilots
32:42rising through the ranks, and it's really a certain ruthlessness more than anything
32:47else along with a key aptitude for flying aircraft that makes the most successful pilots.
32:54On the 23rd of September 1917, McCudden and his squadron were on a routine mission over
33:00Belgium on the Western Front when they encounter a formidable German ace.
33:06James McCudden, alongside other pilots in the number 56 squadron, come up against one
33:11of Germany's leading aces, Lieutenant Werner Vos with a confirmed 48 kills.
33:17German ace Werner Vos was a battle-hardened veteran of von Richthofen's Flying Circus,
33:23and he was more than ready to engage.
33:33World War I, September the 23rd, 1917.
33:37One of Britain's greatest aces, Captain James McCudden and his squadron of SE-5 fighters
33:43are over the front lines when they encounter German ace Werner Vos.
33:49He was flying solo.
33:50Werner Vos challenged six of them in the air to a dogfight flying a Fokker triplane.
33:58Vos could have escaped at any time.
34:01He put up an incredible battle.
34:03He fired at the British planes, he damaged the British planes.
34:08Vos successfully dodged around McCudden and his pilots for ten minutes.
34:13Then the German's propeller failed.
34:17British ace Rhys Davids dropped behind Vos and shot him down.
34:26Jimmy McCudden said it was the greatest fight he'd ever been involved in.
34:30Even though he didn't do the shooting down, Rhys Davids did.
34:32But that was McCudden's greatest fighters, as he reckoned anyway.
34:36It was teamwork between the six pilots.
34:40James McCudden, however, would meet a cruel end.
34:44What a number of observers thought was that he was basically about to do a stunt.
34:48His plane rose, they thought maybe he was going to pull up and come over.
34:53Nobody knows what happened, but it seems as though the engine quit and he crashed.
35:00When he went down, they found that he'd undone his harness, his safety harness,
35:05because he was frightened of the plane catching fire,
35:08and he had undone his harness so that if it landed, he could leap out quickly.
35:12It didn't catch fire, but it crashed much harder than he ever thought,
35:16and he was thrown out of the aircraft
35:18and was found bleeding from the nose and from the mouth, a fractured skull.
35:24He was taken to hospital and died the following day.
35:30With power finally balanced between Britain and Germany in the autumn of 1917,
35:35it was a loss the Allies could ill afford.
35:39To beat the Germans and end the brutal war,
35:42the Allied leaders realised they needed more than raw courage.
35:46What they needed were sheer numbers.
35:49Aircraft production went into overdrive.
35:52Over 5,200 SE-5s were built in just 18 months.
35:58As the war continues, it becomes a mass aerial war of attrition,
36:03and the attitude is, you give your opponent no mercy whatsoever.
36:07The objective is to kill him so that he won't kill you.
36:13In 1918, with the Allies producing more and more combat-ready aircraft
36:18and gaining control of the skies,
36:20the Germans needed to regain the technological edge.
36:24The answer would be the most feared plane of World War I, the Fokker D.VII.
36:31This was one of the last fighters of the war,
36:34and it was certainly the best fighter of the war.
36:36And one of the German generals said that after this airplane came out,
36:40it made aces out of novices, and that's true.
36:45It had incredible speed and manoeuvrability,
36:48and there's no doubt about it,
36:50that machine would have been the greatest machine of the war.
36:54This airplane flies beautifully compared to any other of the World War I airplanes that I've flown.
37:00It was most feared because when it came to the front,
37:03no one had ever seen anything like this before.
37:06It was developed with new airfoil technology,
37:09it generated better lift, it generated better speed,
37:12it was more manoeuvrable.
37:14The D.VII's ingenious designer, Anthony Fokker, had pushed the envelope,
37:19and once again, he advanced aerodynamic technology
37:23and raised the jeopardy for the Allied air force.
37:27I have in my hand here a rib of a Soffwith camel,
37:32and one of the things that you can see right away is how much shorter the lower wing is.
37:39You can tell how thin this airfoil is.
37:43This airfoil is much thicker, as well as the one on the upper wing.
37:47Now, what we realized in 1918 is that better airfoils were more curved on the upper surface,
37:54and they generated more lift,
37:56and you can make a shorter wing in cord that would generate the same amount of lift at this very long...
38:03So your roll rate is going to be higher because you're not dragging this huge wing around through the air,
38:09so that increased your manoeuvrability.
38:13The Fokker D.VII's exceptional design allowed it to do something that no other World War I aircraft could.
38:20The Fokker has the ability to hang on its prop and fire up into the underside of an airplane.
38:29The Fokker, at 20,000 feet, can actually hang on the engine prop at an angle,
38:37and fire up into you, underneath you, and you'll never see it.
38:43Key to the D.VII's lethal edge over its adversaries was a BMW 185 horsepower high-compression engine.
38:53When put in, the Fokker D.VII halves its rate of climb.
38:58In other words, to altitude, it would take 30 minutes to get to altitude.
39:02With BMW engine, it takes 15 minutes, which means that all the way to the end of the war,
39:09the Germans have an airplane that can always maintain altitude advantage above them,
39:15so it always has the advantage of attacking from above.
39:18And if you want to follow Berkey's dicta, this is the perfect plane to do it in.
39:24The sight of the Fokker D.VII's straight wings approaching struck fear into the hearts of Allied pilots.
39:31But one aviator famously dared to take on five Fokker D.VII's.
39:36Eddie Rickenbacker, America's Ace of Aces.
39:40Eddie Rickenbacker seemed to be quite a vibrant character,
39:44and he's quite well known as a racing car driver as much as a pilot.
39:49What makes a racing driver special?
39:52Love of speed, willingness to take risks, fine judgment.
39:58All of those things, Eddie brought to piloting.
40:01Bear in mind, Eddie Rickenbacker, in a period of about four months, he shot down 26 enemy aircraft.
40:07Former American racing driver, Eddie Rickenbacker,
40:10flew the high-performance World War I fighter, the French SPAD Mark VIII.
40:16They're the fastest fighter planes of the war at over 135 miles an hour.
40:22Speed is sturdy, excellent gun platforms because they're so stable.
40:27They can zoom and dive.
40:29They may not be as maneuverable as a Sopwith Camel or a Fokker D.R.
40:34One triplane, but they're faster, they can attack you from above,
40:38so they're superior machines to those.
40:42On September 18, 1918,
40:45Rickenbacker, the commander of America's 94th Squadron,
40:49was flying alone when he ran into seven enemy fighters.
40:53Among the pack were five of the dreaded German Fokker D.VII's.
40:59Now that Allied pilots were also versed in Belka's rules,
41:02the US aviator was more than ready to engage.
41:06And with the sun behind, Rickenbacker dropped down and onto the tail of the D.VII.
41:12Came down out of the sun, he shot down one of the Fokkers before it knew what it hit.
41:22With their comrade going down in flames, the rest of the D.VII's scattered.
41:28In the dogfighting melee that followed, Rickenbacker dropped onto a slow-moving LVG.
41:34And he then shot down one of the reconnaissance planes and then headed for home.
41:39So it was an incredible feat, you know.
41:41He was taking on seven aircraft, just one man.
41:46It completed a textbook execution of Belka's rules of engagement.
41:51And the day belonged to the American ace.
41:58During World War I, Eddie Rickenbacker chalked up 26 kills
42:02and was later awarded the United States Congressional Medal of Honor for his actions.
42:10Thanks to the courage and skill of Allied aces
42:13and the mass mobilization and production of ever-improving fighter planes,
42:18the balance of power in the air war had shifted decisively.
42:22The turning point actually comes when the Allies,
42:25who are going to produce far more airplanes than the Germans,
42:28when they get the superior set of airplanes, and it means that 1918,
42:32they're going to be able to overwhelm the Germans in the air.
42:35At the end of the war, the Germans are still technologically productive,
42:40but it's too late by that time.
42:42They've lost the war. The Allies have air supremacy.
42:45The Armistice Agreement, signed on November 11th, 1918, ended the First World War.
42:52In it, a special provision,
42:54demanding that the Germans surrender all the surviving Fokker D-7s.
43:00There was something magic about this airplane,
43:02and we desperately wanted these airplanes.
43:04We wanted to tear them apart, we wanted to reverse-engineer them,
43:07and try to find out why this airplane was such a good airplane.
43:10The only weapon that was mentioned in the Armistice was the Fokker D-7.
43:14In the course of the Great War, from 1914 to 1918,
43:18the airplane had developed from humble beginnings.
43:22From planes built for reconnaissance with no instruments and no defenses,
43:27to becoming combat-ready fighter planes, sophisticated war machines.
43:33Aerial warfare had come of age.
44:03The Fokker D-7 Aircraft Carrier