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Originally Posted by steven brown
Old Man,
You mention that your knowledge is mainly general, and even if that were true, I need more insight into just that sort of thing. For example, the role or doctrine of the Jastas explains the behavior that I questioned. Again, thank you for taking the time.
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Well, I am happy to be of some help, Sir. There are few better ways to clarify one's own understanding of a matter than to try and communicate it.
There are a couple of shaping factors I think deserve remark in this sort of discussion, that are often overlooked.
One is the factor of hindsight. We look back on this question of fighter usage through the lens of mature air power, come of age as a decisive arm in the Second World War. This pretty much established the correct use of fighters is dominating the enemy's air space. It is very easy to read this back into earlier periods, with a degree of surprise that anyone ever thought anything else. But it was not so clear at the time of the Great War that this was the case. People were feeling their way towards the proper use of the new tool, and there was room for disagreement, and varying interpretations of what early experience meant. To take an analogy from the technical side: the pusher configuration proved a dead end, but this was by no means certain even by early 1916. DeHaviland's Scout was every bit as fast as the first Halberstadt and Fokker D types, put into production after it was in service. The French had a sound argument at the start of the war in preferring pusher designs to tractor biplanes and monoplanes on grounds of the superior view they gave the crew. People who continued to design such machines, and even purchase them, were not fools; they had plenty of evidence in immediate conditions and practical considerations for their decisions. Perhaps they should have given different weights to various evidences than they did, but that is not quite the same thing as being a hidebound fool, as it is popular now to regard them.
Another factor is the different situations and experiences of the various air arms from the start of the Great War. A lot of human behavior grows up without much thought or planning: you do this and that as a first resction, and these become 'how things are done' for you, and guide your future behavior and thought accordingly. Just as the strategic situation of the German armies differed greatly from that of the Allied forces from the start of the Great War, so did the situation and experience of the German air service. Early reactions and decisions, and even perhaps national proclivities, set what might be called an organizational culture in the German air services that did differ somewhat from that in the Allied forces, and particularly in the English.
It should be remembered that from the early days the observer commanded a German two-seater: he was the officer, and his pilot generally an enlisted man trained by the army to be his aerial chauffer. Even officer pilots had little scope for adventuring on their own hook. This was a very different situation from the English, where in the early days the pilot was expected to show up with a pilot's license he had paid for, which effectively meant he would be an officer and gentleman, and keenly air-minded. His 'passenger' would usually be an enlisted man, and when he was the officer pilot did most of the technical work of observation (which is one of the reasons the English so valued 'stability' in reconnaisance machines).
When 'air fighting' began, there is no doubt the Allies got the drop on the Germans aloft, with armed machines and more aggressive behavior. The general response of the commanding observers was to try and avoid these distracting encounters and get on with the work, which is what the commanders wanted done. When the harassment reached a bit above nuisance level, the German response was to revamp their observation machines into the C class, with much improved performance and with an efficient machine-gun armament for the observer. The improved performance would enable the machine to evade many of the armed Allied machines handily, and the efficient armament would enable the machine to see off those it could not evade.
The Germans stumbled into single-seat fighter operations wholly without plan. The Fokker Eindecker was an accident, quite auxiliary to the program of re-equipment the Germans were embarked on in the spring of 1915. C-type two-seaters were already going into service as 'fighters', being used to escort the slower and unarmed, but still predominant, B-type machines at the front, and being used to chase away Allied observation machines, and to engage French bombers in the Rhineland. The Fokkers were gravy, so to speak, and there was no clear idea, and certainly no planning, to guide their use. The nearest thing to a guiding principle was a resolve not to let their 'secret weapon' become available to the enemy. This is a perfectly understandable impulse, and it produced orders that Fokkers were not to be flown over Allied ground. Thus from the very start of real German air fighting, single seaters had an auxiliary character, and a geographically restricted employment.
Since the Germans commenced air fighting in a situation where Allied machines were common over the German rear, and this did benefit Allied planners, it is natural enough that the first impulse was to deploy the new armed aeroplanes to bar Allied fliers from getting across the German lines. While the Fokkers got all the publicity, most of the work was done by C-class two-seaters, grouped into Kampfstaffeln. The technique chosen was the 'barrage patrol', basically flying a beat along the lines, and the superior endurance of the two-seaters recommended them for the task. This technique is widely criticized, but it has a commonsensical air that recommends it to a methodical mind, and in the early days did have its successes. The Fokkers came to be a supplement and back-stop to these patrols, rising to engage Allied machines observed to have gotten through them. The barrage patrols also served to shield German machines on artillery spotting duties, and the faster, armed two-seat machines were mostly able to take care of themselves when required to cross the lines into Allied territory.
The barrage patrols reached their zenith at Verdun, and the French memoir 'Notes of a Lost Pilot', describing operations in a Farman escadrille during late spring and early summer there, recounts more encounters with fighting German two-seaters than with Fokkers, and expresses every bit as much fear of them as of the single-seaters. With the eclipse of the Fokker Eindeckers by Nieuports and DeHavilands, the better of the German C-type machines took on the full brunt of air fighting for the Germans during the summer of 1916.
The reassertion of the German single-seat component towards the end of the Somme, with new, much superior equipment and a more solid organizational structure, fell naturally into the earlier pattern of employment. After all, the situation echoed the earlier one: the sky above the German rear was full of English aeroplanes, used to having their own way there. Clearing them off was a natural first step to doing anything else. Since they never seemed to stop coming, the first step could never be completed. It paid great dividends in destroyed enemy machines, which it was reasonable to suppose must sooner or later have some effect on enemy behavior, and it conserved trained men and expensive material. The object lesson of many enemy machines lost through very minor damage, because of where they were when that damage was sustained, could readily be taken as a powerful argument the enemy was behaving very foolishly, and the course being pursued was clearly the proper one. And it was, after all, what had always been done, which is one of the most powerful arguments in human behavior, even if the 'time out of hand' in question is measured in mere months.