Aerial Warfare - World War I

World War I

Initially during that war both sides made use of tethered balloons and airplanes for observation purposes, both for information gathering and directing of artillery fire. A desire to prevent enemy observation led to airplane pilots attacking other airplanes and balloons, initially with small arms carried in the cockpit, but initially pilots couldn't have forward-facing machine guns.

Although the addition of deflector plates to the back of propellers by French pilot Roland Garros and designer Raymond Saulnier in the Morane-Saulnier monoplane was the first example of an aircraft able to fire through its propeller, it wasn't until the Dutch aircraft designer Anthony Fokker developed the gun synchronizer in 1915 that it became possible to aim the gun and the airplane at the same time, resulting in German Leutnant Kurt Wintgens scoring the first known victory for a synchronized gun-equipped fighter aircraft, on July 1, 1915.

The Allies were able to capture a Fokker Eindecker with a Fokker-designed Stangensteuerung synchronizer mechanism intact and reverse engineer it, leading to the birth of aerial combat, more commonly known as the dogfight. Tactics for dogfighting evolved by trial and error. The German ace Oswald Boelcke created eight essential rules of dogfighting, the Dicta Boelcke.

Both sides also made use of aircraft for bombing, strafing, sea reconnaissance, antisubmarine warfare, and dropping of propaganda. The German military made use of Zeppelins and, later on, bombers such as the Gotha, to drop bombs on Britain. By the end of the war airplanes had become specialized into bombers, fighters, and observation (reconnaissance) aircraft.

By the end of World War I, aerial combat had progressed to the point where dogfighting tactics based on such doctrine as the Dicta Boelcke had progressed to the point that air supremacy could be achieved; the earliest example is the Italian air offensive against the Austro-Hungarians just before the end of World War I.