“There was no such thing as a fighter plane until 1915,” says Guttman. But it wasn’t long before the strategic importance of spy planes sunk in, and with it a burning desire to shoot the enemy’s aircraft out of the sky. 1915 in this illustration.Īt the start of World War I, reconnaissance planes were such a novelty that enemy pilots would wave at each other as they crisscrossed the front lines.
Pilots in a German Fokker Eindecker monoplane attack aviators in a French Voisin biplane, c. Those increasingly sharp and zoom-in images gave field commanders unprecedented intelligence for positioning artillery and planning troop movements. It wasn’t long before cameras were mounted to reconnaissance planes, taking dozens of aerial photos that would be developed and stitched together to create panoramic battlefield maps. The Allied armies were able to outflank the Germans, resulting in the Battle of the Marnes, a critical early victory. In 1914, for example, British reconnaissance planes with the Royal Flying Corps alerted British and French commanders to German troops preparing for a siege of Paris through Belgium. The handwritten drawings and on-the-fly observations weren’t always accurate but proved critical in some early operations. “These were two-seater aircraft with a pilot to do the flying and an observer up front to man the binoculars and take notes,” says Guttman. Civil War, but the fixed-wing airplanes of World War I were able to fly deep behind enemy lines to track troops movements and map terrain. Hot air balloons had been deployed by the military for more than a century to get a bird’s-eye view of the battlefield, including during the U.S. The main military role of aircraft in World War I was reconnaissance, says Jon Guttman, a historian of military aviation who’s authored more than a dozen books about World War I aircraft and fighter pilots. A reconnaissance aircraft/combat two-seater pictured on a German naval airfield as an aerial gunner checks the machine gun.
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