Wikipedia:WikiProject Military history/News/August 2016/Op-ed


 * By TomStar81

In late 1903 Orville and Wilbur Wright made what many credit as the first powered flight by a human outside of Kitty Hawk, North Carolina. With this flight, humanity passed through the gates of science fiction and fantasy and entered the world of modern marvels, heroes, and mavericks who live on the edge of reality and the precipice of life and death. It was men like these who had built America at the turn of the last century, men whose names - John D. Rockefeller, J. P. Morgan Jr., George Washington Vanderbilt II, Andrew Carnegie - still resound with the public of the United States for the empires they built. In an age of pushing the boundaries of science and achieving the impossible, many looked up to and admired the achievements of these self-made titans even as they deplored the tactics that these men employed to protect their fiefdoms from external and internal threats.

Not quite 10 years later the primitive but effective airplanes of the day began being used for basic military operations - by which governments meant employing a limited number of these strange machines for airborne surveillance and other matters of interest. As World War I began, zeppelins loaded with artillery shells began bombing operations, which marked the birth of the first strategic bombing operations. By 1916, those bombers had been joined in the air by their lighter, faster, and more agile sisters: fighter aircraft whose purpose in military operations was to engage others of their type in an attempt to keep the skies under the control of their associated nation or military faction. By 1915, the primitive fighter aircraft pilots began to distinguish themselves in combat operations against enemy forces wielding fighter aircraft of their own. As the fighter pilots of the day began to rack up kill counts both governments and the public began taking note of the accomplishments of these pilots in this newest theater of war. Initially, there was no official nickname for the men who took to the air to shoot down enemy fighter planes, nor were there any established criteria for how pilots should be distinguished in this new realm of combat operations. French newspapers described Adolphe Pégoud, as l'As (French for "Ace") after he became the first pilot to down five German aircraft. The British initially used the term "star-turns" (a show business term), while the Germans described their elite fighter pilots as Überkanonen (which roughly translates to "top gun").

By 1916 and the battles of both Verdun and the Somme, fighter aircraft had become an important part of the battlefield armament, and those whose lives depended on combat pilots had come to appreciate the necessity for these new machines and the men who worked them. Yet despite the firmly established need for the pilots and their aircraft, these brave men had to fight a multi-front war to do their jobs. To begin with, they were at constant odds with mother nature. In a day and age before cockpits were enclosed, fighter pilots braving the skies had to contend with rain, wind, freezing temperatures, and cloud cover; the first three of which had a nasty habit of being the underlying cause for hypothermia in humans, while the last-mentioned made an already risky occupation even riskier by forcing pilots to fly ridiculously low to attack enemy targets, making it all the easier for hostile fire to bring down these planes. Altitude was also an issue; above 26,000ft the air becomes so thin that humans cannot survive without an independent source of oxygen, however oxygen tanks and masks had not yet been developed for pilots. Fighting therefore had to occur below this death line, problematic in that land is inherently above sea level, making 26,000 ft an optimistic assessment of how high off the ground a plane could get without risking death by suffocation to the pilot. Then there was issue of armor on the planes: while the men working on the ground could rely to some extent on steel and stone to protect against enemy fire, those flying high had no such assistance. No countermeasures such as we understand them today existed for the men piloting these planes, and the planes themselves had very little in the way or armor to protect a pilot against gunfire - or worse, artillery fire that could shred both the pilot and the plane to pieces in seconds. On top of these disadvantages, the early propeller-driven planes of the day had forward-mounted machine-guns for aerial combat, but the guns mounted on the planes fired through the forward propeller and in the early days the bullets from these gun mounts had a nasty tendency to ricochet off the propeller blades, which could result in damage to the aircraft and injury or death to the pilot in a so called "friendly fire" incident.

Then there was the trouble with bailing out of a disabled or destroyed fighter plane. Unlike our modern jet-powered fighter aircraft, the seats in these planes did not eject, and pilots whose aircraft had been disabled or destroyed had to either risk serious injury or death by attempting to crash land their plane or physically jump out of their plane and entrust their life to early parachutes. Parachutes had been proved to work well, but were not routinely issued to flyers for several reasons, including a belief that pilots would attempt to bail out at the first hint of trouble as opposed to working a problem to see if an aircraft could be saved, and parachute design was not necessarily intended to withstand the forces of jumping from a fixed-wing aircraft as opposed to a stationary craft such as a surveillance balloon. On top of all of this the parachutes of the day were not always worn by the pilot but stowed in his plane, which could require him to waste precious seconds to grab and attach the chute before jumping out of his plane. Lastly, the terrain the pilot was forced to bail out over could adversely affect his chance of survival if he was unfortunate enough to land in the no-man's zone or the forests, rivers, or other natural hazards over the battlefields that pilots flew to conduct combat operations.

Overcoming these challenges required creative thinking by both engineers and pilots. For their part, pilots who were prepping for air combat operations would do their best to protect against the freezing temperatures and other adverse elements mother nature could cook up by wearing heavy clothing to insulate against the cold and rain. Goggles were also used in an attempt to shield the eyes from the wind and rain, which allowed for better (if primitive) optical abilities in combat operations which in turn improved the ability of pilots to fight with any degree of accuracy in the sky. In 1916 the aircraft working the Allied side would also begin the first crude attempts at supporting ground forces by strafing runs against enemy troop concentrations in their own trench-lines, thus marking the birth of what we would today call close air support: the practice of using aircraft with specialty ammunition weapons (such as cluster munitions and/or napalm) to strike against enemy forces in support of ground forces.

The use of fighter aircraft in World War I would lay the groundwork for the successful aerial combat operations in World War II - including the yet-to-be introduced aircraft carrier operations - which would prove beyond any doubt the importance of fighter aircraft on the battlefield. Forward thinking generals such as George S. Patton would use fighter aircraft in a close air support role to devastating effect during that war, and this in turn would help establish aircraft as a vital part of the battlefield through the Cold War and into the 21st century. Meanwhile, the training of pilots in combat schools like the United States Navy Strike Fighter Tactics Instructor program (better known as "Top Gun") would result in an elite group of combat veterans trained to exploit every ounce of their aircraft in battle against an enemy air or ground force.