Original subtitles

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KIERAN O'BRIEN: For over a hundred years,

battles have raged in the air for command of the skies.

If you don't have air supremacy, you're in trouble.

Since its earliest beginnings in World War I,

the aeroplane is the supreme weapon of the armed forces.

This was a real battle for civilisation, for humanity.

It revolutionised battle

and changed the ways war was fought and won.

The F-117 has obviously changed

how we design aircraft and air campaigns.

War drove innovation in the skies.

What we hear from the air force is,

when the F-35 wasn't there, a lot of others died.

When F-35 was there, they reigned supreme.

Aircraft bred a new kind of hero.

The fate of entire nations

depended on the bravery of a handful of men.

An appreciation of the extent to which

young men were willing to put their lives on the line for an ideal

is something we need to remember more often than we do.

In this episode...

The Sopwith Camel becomes the most dangerous dogfighter.

Once you've mastered this plane, it's a killer.

The Germans unleash a scourge with their Fokker Eindecker.

They decimated the Royal Flying Corps at the time.

The Allies launched the Spitfire of its time, the S.E.5.

The S.E.5a was one of the most successful fighters in World War I.

Baron von Richthofen and his Flying Circus ruled the skies.

He would pick out the weakest and go off to them quite ruthlessly.

America's ace of aces, Eddie Rickenbacker...

It was an incredible feat, you know.

He was taking on seven aircraft, just one man.

..takes on the deadliest fighters of World War I.

No-one had ever seen anything like this before.

(THUNDERCLAP)

(ENGINE WHIRRING)

It was the dawn of aviation when the world went to war in 1914.

Daring young men took to the skies in flying machines

and blazed a trail for a radically new type of battle.

This is the first time men have fought in the air.

It's a new dimension of aerial warfare.

(SHOTS FIRING)

These young men had to learn this

and learn this very quickly or they wouldn't live through it.

The first combat aviators had to master

the rapidly evolving technology.

The development during the First World War in aviation was immense.

If you look at the aeroplanes that first went

to the Western Front in 1914

compared to the aeroplanes that were there in 1918,

the development on both sides is huge.

With nearly 1,300 kills to its name,

the British Sopwith Camel, introduced in 1916,

was the most successful close-range aerial combat aircraft

of the First World War.

Sopwith Camel has rightly earned the reputation

of the greatest dogfighter in the war

because of its incredible manoeuvrability,

ability to turn on a dime.

What made it special was the fact it was almost impossible to fly.

It had its own mind and the plane would do strange things.

It was very unstable and that was very handy in a dogfight.

Because you didn't know what was gonna happen

and neither did the enemy, it went all over the place.

Turning, spinning, combat arena, it's superlative.

And so, once you've mastered this plane, it's a killer.

At the dawn of aerial combat, the aviator was lionised.

There was this romantic myth of the aviator.

The aviator was in fact a new man.

He had conquered the air,

he roamed the heavens, completely free.

He would fight,

give battle at his own initiative, refuse battle.

They were pioneering, they were brave.

Er, you could argue that they were brave

and foolish at the same time,

because these machines were just held together with bits of string.

In reality, flying in an open-cockpit World War I aircraft

was brutal, harsh and deadly.

You're flying at 100 miles an hour so you got the sound of the wind,

you've got the cold, very cold.

These aeroplanes dogfighted at 17,000-18,000 feet,

with no heat, no oxygen, and they were up there 45 minutes.

Extremely cold, you had the castor oil

blowing in your face and you were ingesting castor oil.

It was a nasty business.

In Britain, among the first to be called

for the rare duty as an aviator, were former cavalry officers.

At the start of World War I,

to become a pilot in the Royal Flying Corps,

the main requisite was you rode a horse.

Many of the would-be aviators learned to fly in a Sopwith Camel.

Purposely designed with the cavalry officer in mind.

If you look in all War I aeroplanes, they all have some form of stirrup.

And then they have also a saddle,

you mount it, just like you mount your horse.

You stick your left leg in here, you swing your leg over the saddle

and you mount your steed.

They soon learned, however,

that taking hold of the reins of a World War I fighter

required a brand-new skill set.

There were no two-seat models of these aeroplanes,

so there's only one seat in it. You're your own instructor.

You have to go up in the aeroplane, figure it out yourself

cos there's nobody who can help you.

One of the things that they learned right on

is you have to keep your head moving.

And you have to look for the target all the time.

They move their necks constantly to the point

they would wear a rash in their neck.

So they put silk scarves around their necks

so their uniform wouldn't wear their neck.

The oil is splashing in their eyes all the time.

So, they would take the end of the scarf

and they would wipe the oil off their goggles.

And it can make the difference between life and death.

If you had an oil spot on your goggles,

that was blocking the enemy, you'd never see them coming.

Of the 14,000 British pilots killed in the course of the Great War,

8,000 died in training on Britain's airfields.

They often... The early pupils got into spins

and they couldn't control them.

In inexperienced hands, the immense power or torque

produced by the Camel's rotary engine often proved fatal.

The engine had a high inertia.

It had high torque, so it could throw a huge propeller

which gave a lot of thrust for a low horsepower.

The engines were between 80 horsepower and 140 horsepower.

By today's standard, that's not very powerful at all.

But if you look at the propeller that these engines swung,

they're gigantic.

Student pilots got accustomed to the sound

of one of their brethren spinning in from altitude.

They could hear him coming down and you hear

whirring, whirring, whirring. You knew what was gonna happen.

He's just gonna bury himself in the ground with the Camel

and they'd say, "There goes another one."

Getting the balance right between stability and manoeuvrability

while producing an effective combat plane

was the pre-eminent challenge for the early aircraft designers.

From the Wright Brothers on from 1903 to beginning of the war in 1914,

all designers around the world

were trying to create an aircraft that was stable.

The war comes along and the aircraft turns into a war machine.

And now you're fighting with these machines.

Well, you don't want a stable fighting machine.

You want something that's very manoeuvrable.

So, how do you make an aeroplane manoeuvrable

without making it unstable?

And they just did not know how to do it.

With the war raging between the world's great economic powers

including Britain, France and Russia on the one side,

and Germany and Austria-Hungary on the other,

there was no time to wait for the perfect aircraft design.

Would-be pilots simply had to learn to fly

highly unstable planes, or die trying.

And after about 20 hours of training, those Allied pilots that survived

were deemed ready for one of the most hazardous duties.

But at the beginning of the war in 1914,

there were very few British aircraft to speak of.

They had some 50 to 60 aeroplanes ready to serve in France,

all of very early versions of what we call the B.E.2,

which was a Royal Aircraft Factory B.E.2.

The main combat role of the B.E.2

during the First World War was observation.

It was the first purpose-designed military aeroplane

and it was designed as the eyes of the Army.

The Royal Aircraft Factory's B.E.2

had an eight-cylinder engine producing about 90 horsepower,

and a top speed of 72 miles an hour.

The primitive plane didn't win any plaudits for its raw power.

What made it a useful combat tool was that it had a range of 234 miles.

That's roughly the distance between London and Paris.

And the B.E.2 could fly as high as 10,000 feet.

The B.E.2 was actually designed to be a really stable aeroplane

and for that purpose fairly controllable,

and that made it ideal for its role in observation.

But in terms of today, it was still a very, very basic aeroplane.

Limited instruments, virtually no instruments in some cases,

and very limited controls.

They didn't even have cameras to photograph

the enemy positions they'd been sent to observe.

They would have literally drawn on a pattern paper

the German gun positions, the lines of the trenches, troop positions,

and it wasn't then until later in the war that they actually then

fixed actual cameras to the side of the aeroplane

so they could photograph the German positions.

It was only a matter of time before it is decided that,

well, they might as well arm them with bombs

and bomb the targets directly.

So, once you have these aircraft bombing over the lines,

then of course comes the need to shoot down and counter those bombers.

That led to the need for fighter aircraft.

This led to the development of an aeroplane that was capable

of shooting an aeroplane down.

As both sides ramped up production for an air war,

Germany's leading designer, Anthony Fokker,

seized the initiative and introduced

the world's first combat-ready fighter plane,

the Eindecker.

(ENGINE WHIRRING)

The Great War broke out in Europe in July 1914,

drawing in all the major European powers to the battlefront.

A year later, in 1915,

the first purpose-built combat planes took to the skies.

The German Fokker Eindecker.

The word Eindecker is German for "single wing."

It's a single-wing aircraft.

The name Fokker is associated with Anthony Fokker

who was an aircraft designer, and he designed

quite a number of German aircraft during the war.

It was the first German killing machine.

They were not necessarily faster,

but it had a very tight turn so it could turn inside the enemy aircraft.

But the real reason, of course, that it was so special,

was that Anthony Fokker, he invented what is called the interrupter gear.

In other words, machine guns that could fire through the propellers.

In effect, the interrupter gears

stopped the machine gun from firing for a fraction of a second

as the blades of the propeller swept past the machine gun barrel.

The weapon of choice was the Spandau machine gun.

With a gun platform mounted in a fixed forward position,

the aeroplane was now a game-changing offensive weapon.

The fact that the pilot could literally just point the aeroplane

and shoot the machine gun at the same time

made it an actual killing machine.

They decimated the Royal Flying Corps at the time.

A big bloodbath. The B.E.2s became known as Fokker fodder

cos they just could not get out of the way.

They weren't equipped to deal with it.

They just had no defence against them.

The Eindecker's total command of the air began in the autumn of 1916.

The massacre of the Allied aircraft and pilots that would follow

would become known as the Fokker Scourge.

They were just shooting down aircraft all over the Western Front,

and the British continued to send their observation planes

and fighter planes over German lines

and they get shot down in great numbers.

Over the course of the war,

some 1,000 British and French aircraft

were destroyed by Eindeckers.

Most went down in flames.

Life expectancy for an Allied pilot was short.

40 to 60 hours of flying time, just a few weeks at best.

The aeroplanes were made out of fabric, out of Irish linen.

They were doped with a nitrate dope that was very flammable.

So these aeroplanes would burst into flames.

Parachutes were available.

They had parachutes. They weren't allowed to wear them.

And both sides said it would be the coward's way out.

You wouldn't fight to the death if you could jump out of the aeroplane.

So, the pilots, not having any parachutes,

would dive as fast as they could

and try to get on the ground before the aeroplane burn up.

And that was called "going down in flames".

The Fokker Scourge was of course

a shock for the British and French on the Western Front.

The Fokker Eindecker managed to sweep the skies of

British and French aircraft. The Fokker Scourge marked a period

of technological advantage for the Germans and their air service.

In many respects, this was a case

of them just being ahead of the curve.

The Germans took full advantage of their technological superiority.

British and French pilots are confronted

with these men flying straight at them,

approaching from different angles

and all a sudden opening fire, and shooting them down.

It has a terrifying impact.

One of the most celebrated Fokker Eindecker pilots

was German ace Max Immelmann, also known as the Eagle of Lille.

To become an ace in the German Air Force,

you had to shoot down five aircraft or more.

Max Immelmann was one of the German fighter aces in the First World War.

Immelmann was your classic Prussian reserved gentleman.

Didn't talk to anybody, was very isolated, ice-cold.

Max Immelmann claimed his first kill in the Eindecker

shooting down a French pilot.

But the audacious way he did it

would send a chill down the spines of the Allied flyers

and further change the course of aerial combat.

Max Immelmann invented the Immelmann Turn

which was a way of having two shots at an enemy aircraft.

If you are heading towards an enemy aircraft

and you're shooting at it, he would then climb up, turn,

and then as the other aircraft had gone past,

he'd then be on the tail of the enemy aircraft

and would have another shot at it.

So, it was quite a useful manoeuvre.

Perfected in World War I,

the Immelmann Turn is still used by jet fighters today.

In all, the German ace Max Immelmann would claim 15 kills

before his luck ran out.

Initially, a British crew claimed they had shot him down.

But as it turns out,

it appears that Immelmann's synchronising gear

failed him in mid-air and he shot his own propeller off

and fell to his death.

Immelmann's demise did little to slow the Fokker Scourge.

But when a German pilot was forced to land in Allied-held territory,

the Eindecker's secrets were exposed.

By reverse engineering the captured Eindecker,

the Allies learned how to build a synchronised firing gear.

(FIRING)

So in 1916, the British produced their own fighter plane,

the Bristol F.2b.

The Bristol F.2b is the superb long-range reconnaissance fighter

that the British developed, um, at the end of 1916.

It will be perfected in 1917 and 1918.

It uses preferably a Rolls Royce 275 horsepower Falcon engine.

It's got a top speed of over 120 miles an hour.

You have a rear gunner who can keep enemy planes off your tail.

The Bristol F.2b was a two-seater.

It was armed like the Eindecker,

but the new British fighter had twice the firepower.

One of the key aspects about the Bristol Fighter was that

it combined aspects of fighters without reconnaissance aircraft.

So, for example, it mounted Vickers machine guns

through synchronised firing gear, firing through the arc of the propeller.

It also mounted a Lewis machine gun on a Scarff ring at the back.

The Fokker Eindecker had a worthy adversary at last.

What happens is there are cycles

of one side gaining dominance with a new aircraft,

and then the other side then leapfrogging that

with their own better aircraft.

And so, the ebb and flow of aerial warfare really follows

the introduction to service of progressively more effective aircraft.

But while the technology was in place,

the Allied pilots were still way behind the curve

when it came to battle tactics.

That was largely thanks to some ingenious rules of engagement

created by the German ace

with the most kills during the Fokker Scourge...

..Oswald Boelcke.

Oswald Boelcke is away from the front after Max Immelmann is shot down.

He returns with a set of handpicked pilots

which include Manfred von Richthofen,

and he comes back with what are called

the Dicta Boelcke. Boelcke's dicta.

The first is to seek the advantage,

which means you try to get behind and above,

or behind and below your opponent.

Then you press your attack.

Keep your focus on your enemy at all times.

Use the sun, and keep the sun at your back.

Now, if the sun is in your favour,

you always try to keep the sun at your back

so that the enemy has to see through the sun to see you

and you can hide in the sun.

And they had this saying back then, "Beware of the hun in the sun."

You wanna sneak up on the enemy and surprise him

and shoot him before he even knows you're there.

So, if you could get below your enemy's tail feathers,

if you could get down below him, he cannot see you.

And then get up high enough to fire.

That is the best way to attack your enemy.

Boelcke's rules also prescribe defensive tactics

that have proved effective for pilots to this day.

The other thing finally is that when you're fighting over enemy territory,

always keep your line of retreat.

Always make certain you have an escape route,

and leave if the fight turns against you.

It was the German pilots trained by Oswald Boelcke

that the newly minted British fighters had to face.

In spring 1917, on their first ever mission over enemy territory,

the British Bristol Fighters would run into

the most formidable foe imaginable.

Unfortunately, the first six plane unit

that goes out over the German lines

meets a disaster when it runs into Richthofen's unit.

Baron Manfred von Richthofen

is deemed to be the greatest ace of the First World War.

Von Richthofen, the German ace

who would soon be known infamously as the Red Baron,

would claim 80 Allied kills.

If you're a young British pilot and you turned around

and you saw three red wings coming up from behind your tail,

that was probably the last thing you were ever gonna see.

(WHIRRING)

For the first few years of World War I,

in the battle for dominance of the skies,

heavily armed German fighters had mercilessly

outgunned the Allied air force.

Then, in the spring of 1917, the British introduced their first

combat-ready fighter plane, the Bristol F.2b.

But they hadn't accounted

for running into a squadron of German aces

led by Baron von Richthofen.

What made him the number-one ace of World War I

is he was a fantastic marksman. A fantastic shot.

He loved the hunt. He loved to go out and chase ball, shoot ball,

and he took that into the skies.

He was a ruthless killer

who would wipe out anybody who came in front of him.

He would pick out the weakest aircraft in the formation

and go after them quite ruthlessly.

But von Richthofen was not infallible.

Richthofen, he's actually wounded in the head at long distance

by a British F.E. 2b gunner.

And he never really recovered, the wound never healed,

but he continued to fly and fight after a leave.

Faced with a renewed Allied threat,

the Germans raised the stakes with a new fighter plane,

the Fokker Dreidecker 1.

With a maximum speed of 103 miles an hour,

the DR.1 was slower than its contemporaries,

but what made it exceptional was its manoeuvrability.

That was down to its triple-layered wings

that were guided in flight by a reinforced lightweight rudder

and large rear elevators.

Able to roll and loop with relative ease

in the hands of a skilled pilot,

its manoeuvrability made it the aircraft of choice

for the freshly recovered Baron von Richthofen.

Assigned his own squadron,

the 25-year-old commander surrounded himself with aces.

Manfred von Richthofen is Boelcke's most apt pupil.

Richthofen himself follows Boelcke's dicta to the limit.

He collects these excellent airmen,

he continues the squadron of aces in what's called

Jasta 11 or Jagdstaffel,

which is a hunting pack, as the Germans said.

Buoyed by success, von Richthofen boldly painted his triplane,

and his defiant squadron of aces followed suit.

The Red Baron had been born.

In the skies, his fearsome force would come to be known

as von Richthofen's Flying Circus.

Richthofen's plane is bright red. They all have

these spectacularly coloured individual fighters.

The whole purpose was really, "Notice me, I'm coming."

It wasn't camouflage or anything like that.

Because they were such bright colours.

Blues and reds and all sorts of things.

And it was, "Look, I'm a part of the Flying Circus.

I'm a part of Richthofen's group. Look out."

By 1917, 1918,

there may be as many as 60 fighters stacked.

This is how they appear, and they don't come over the Allied lines.

The Germans fight on the defensive.

So, when the Allies come over in their offensives,

they will find the sky stacked to the heavens

with all these fighter planes and ready to fight.

In April 1917, the Allied army launched the Battle of Arras.

The aim was for ground troops to advance on the German defences

surrounding the small French town.

To support the British offensive,

25 squadrons and 385 aircraft flew into the fray.

For the British Royal Flying Corps, it would be known as Bloody April.

Bloody April is a period in 1917 when the Royal Flying Corps

operating over the Western Front, suffers heavy casualties,

in part due to tactics, in part due to technology.

Technology had moved on and the Germans

seemed to have better aircraft at this point in time.

The Allies lost 245 aircraft that April,

and von Richthofen's Flying Circus seemed invincible.

The seasoned flyers' personnel kill rate climbed ominously.

But as the war entered its final phase,

the Red Baron himself proved to be a mere mortal.

Richthofen, by early 1918, is practically exhausted.

He has been fighting since 1916.

The wound that he sustained in 1917

never completely healed,

but he has all the German fighter pilots

and many of the Allied fighter pilots refused to stop flying.

On the 21st of April, 1918, Baron von Richthofen took off,

flying westward along the Somme valley.

A furious dogfight raged below.

He circled, then swooped down on a lone Sopwith Camel

flown by a rookie pilot, Lieutenant Wilfrid May.

Baron Richthofen simply targeted him. And he got on his tail.

Well, May tried to do everything to shake him off.

He was tenacious. He couldn't shake him. Could not shake him.

May took evasive action,

turning and diving until he ran out of sky.

He skimmed down across the Somme Valley,

von Richthofen's guns hot on his heels.

Richthofen pursues him lower and lower over the lines,

not watching that he's coming over ground gunners,

Australian gunners on the ground.

And that he's also being pursued

by Captain Roy Brown in a Sopwith Camel.

Brown and his Camel closed in and opened fire.

The Dreidecker was hit, exploded,

and the Red Baron went down in flames.

But who actually took the fatal shot remains to this day a mystery.

There's actually some debate about

how the Red Baron actually met his end.

Some would put it down to a Canadian pilot called Brown.

But in recent years, people have generally thought

that it was actually ground fire

from Australian troops in the trenches

that actually brought down his aircraft.

He was on the ground, landed his plane,

although he shouldn't have been able to, he should've been dead.

And his final words were "kaput".

And that's it. And he died.

Manfred von Richthofen claimed 80 Allied kills,

and was immortalised as the deadliest ace of World War I.

The Red Baron may have been killed,

but the Germans still ruled the skies.

To gain air supremacy and win the war,

the Allies still needed to improve its aircraft.

Thanks to innovation and invention,

the British Royal Aircraft Factory created the best fighter yet,

the S.E.5.

The S.E.5a was one of the most successful fighters in the First World War.

With over 5,000 produced, alongside the Sopwith Camel,

it was the mainstay of the Royal Flying Corps.

First introduced in March 1917, the S.E.5 was state of the art.

Easier to fly than its contemporary, the Sopwith Camel,

the S.E.5 didn't have the fearsome rotary engine

that threatened to flip over the plane at any moment.

Equipped with an inline V8 water-cooled piston engine,

it produced 150 horsepower.

That's about the same as a midsize car today.

The S.E.5 had a top speed of 138 miles per hour.

Armed typically with a synchronised forward-firing Vickers machine gun

and a Lewis gun in the rear,

the S.E.5 was a formidable fighting machine.

Its combination of characteristics,

such as being sturdy, manoeuvrability, and good armament

made it a very good mount as an aircraft.

Of course, combined with this was the quality of the pilots

that were flying them.

Thanks to bold technical innovations,

by 1917, the Allies were finally fielding aircraft

capable of competing with the enemy.

Fighter planes like the S.E.5 and the Sopwith Camel

enabled the Allies to begin to wrest control of the skies.

With a pack of brand-new fighter aircraft

and some victories in hand,

the British finally had some aces of their own.

One of the best and most unlikely was James McCudden.

James McCudden is one of the great British aces.

McCudden is associated with the S.E.5.

That's his favourite platform.

And what McCudden likes to do is to hunt alone.

James McCudden was one of

the Royal Flying Corps' leading aces in the First World War.

He has a confirmed victory list of 57 enemy aircraft.

He became a mechanic in the Royal Flying Corps,

and then, during 1916,

he becomes an observer, and then, latterly, a pilot.

He's eventually posted to No. 56 Squadron.

Despite McCudden's success,

he wasn't fully accepted into the flying elite.

What we know now is that a number of men in 56

were really reluctant to have him as a squadron commander

because he didn't fit the notion of a public school boy.

He was not wealthy, didn't come from a very good family.

He came from a lower-middle-class military family.

First pilots were most likely to be more from moneyed backgrounds

because they would have had the money

to have indulged in aviation as a sport, before the war.

But obviously, as the war progresses and the need for more pilots arises,

you do get pilots rising through the ranks.

It's really a certain ruthlessness, more than anything else,

along with a key aptitude for flying aircraft

that makes the most successful pilot.

On the 23rd of September, 1917, McCudden and his squadron

were on a routine mission over Belgium on the Western Front,

when they encounter a formidable German ace.

James McCudden, alongside other pilots in No. 56 Squadron,

come up against one of Germany's leading aces,

Lieutenant Werner Voss, with a confirmed 48 kills.

German ace Werner Voss was a battle-hardened veteran

of von Richthofen's Flying Circus.

And he was more than ready to engage.

World War I, September the 23rd, 1917.

One of Britain's greatest aces, Captain James McCudden

and his squadron of S.E.5 fighters, are over the front lines

when they encounter German ace Werner Voss.

He was flying solo.

Werner Voss challenged six of them in the air

to a dogfight, flying a Fokker triplane.

Voss could have escaped at any time.

He put up an incredible battle.

He fired at the British planes. He damaged the British planes.

Voss successfully dodged around McCudden and his pilots

for ten minutes.

Then the German's propeller failed.

British ace Rhys Davids dropped behind Voss

and shot him down.

Jimmy McCudden said it was the greatest fight

he'd ever been involved in,

even though he didn't do the shooting down, Rhys Davids did,

but that was McCudden's greatest fight,

as he reckoned anyway.

It was teamwork between the six pilots.

James McCudden, however, would meet a cruel end.

What a number of observers thought

was that he was basically about to do a stunt.

His plane rose, they thought maybe

he was going to pull up and come over.

Nobody knows what happened,

but it seems as though the engine quit,

and he crashed.

When he went down, they found that

he'd undone his harness, his safety harness,

because he was frightened of the plane catching fire

and he had undid his harness.

If it landed, he could leap out quickly.

It didn't catch fire but it crashed much harder than he ever thought.

And he was thrown out of the aircraft,

and was found bleeding from the nose and from the mouth, fractured skull.

He was taken to a hospital. He died the following day.

With power finely balanced between Britain and Germany

in the autumn of 1917,

it was a loss the Allies could ill afford.

To beat the Germans and end the brutal war,

the Allied leaders realised they needed more than raw courage.

What they needed were sheer numbers.

Aircraft production went into overdrive.

Over 5,200 S.E.5s were built in just 18 months.

As the war continues, it becomes a mass aerial war of attrition.

And added to this, you give your opponent no mercy whatsoever.

The objective is to kill him, so that he won't kill you.

In 1918, with the Allies producing

more and more combat-ready aircraft and gaining control of the skies,

the Germans needed to regain their technological edge.

The answer would be the most feared plane of World War I,

the Fokker D.VII.

This was one of the last fighters of the war.

It was certainly the best fighter of the war.

And one of the German generals said that after this aeroplane came out,

it made aces out of novices.

And that's true.

It had incredible speed and manoeuvrability.

And there's no doubt about it.

That machine would have been the greatest machine of the war.

This aeroplane flies beautifully compared to any other

of the World War I aeroplanes that are flying.

It was most feared because when it came to the front,

no-one had ever seen anything like this before.

It was developed with new aerofoil technology.

It generated better lift, it generated better speed,

it was more manoeuvrable.

The D.VII's ingenious designer, Anthony Fokker,

had pushed the envelope.

And once again, he advanced aerodynamic technology

and raised the jeopardy for the Allied air force.

I have in my hand here a rib of a Sopwith Camel,

and one of the things that you can see right away

is how much shorter the lower wing is.

You can tell how thin this aerofoil is.

This aerofoil is much thicker as well as the one on the upper wing.

Now, what we realised in 1918 is that better aerofoils

were more curved on the upper surface and generated more lift.

And you can make a shorter wing, in chord,

that would generate the same amount of lift.

It's just very long. So, your row rate is gonna be higher

because you're not dragging this huge wing around through the air,

so that increased your manoeuvrability.

The Fokker D.VII's exceptional design allowed it to do something

that no other World War I aircraft could.

The Fokker has the ability to hang on its prop

and fire up into the underside of an aeroplane.

The Fokker, at 20,000 feet, can actually hang on engine prop

at an angle, and fire up into you,

underneath you, and you'll never see it.

The key to the D.VII's lethal edge over its adversaries

was a BMW 185 horsepower high-compression engine.

When put in the Fokker D.VII, halves its rate of climb.

In other words, it would take 30 minutes to get to altitude,

with the BMW engine, it takes 15 minutes.

Which means that all the way to the end of the war,

the Germans have an aeroplane

that can always maintain altitude advantage above them.

So it always has the advantage of attacking from above.

And if you want to follow Boelcke's dicta,

this is the perfect plane to do it in.

The sight of the Fokker D.VII's straight wings approaching

struck fear into the hearts of Allied pilots.

But one aviator famously dared to take on five Fokker D.VIIs.

Eddie Rickenbacker, America's ace of aces.

Eddie Rickenbacker seemed to be quite a vibrant character

and he's quite well-known as a racing car driver as much as a pilot.

What makes a racing driver special,

love of speed, willingness to take risks,

fine judgement. All of those things, Eddie brought to piloting.

Bear in mind, Eddie Rickenbacker, in a period of about four months,

he shot down 26 enemy aircraft.

Former American racing driver, Eddie Rickenbacker,

flew the high-performance World War I fighter,

the French SPAD Mark XIII.

The fastest planes, fighter planes to the war.

Over 135 miles an hour, speed, sturdy,

excellent gun platforms because it's so stable.

Zoom and dive. They may not be as manoeuvrable

as a Sopwith Camel or a Fokker DR.1 triplane,

but they're faster, they can attack you from above,

so they're superior machines to those.

On September the 18th, 1918,

Rickenbacker, the commander of America's 94th Squadron,

was flying alone when he ran into seven enemy fighters.

Among the pack were five of the dreaded German Fokker D.VIIs

Now that Allied pilots were also versed in Boelcke's rules,

the US aviator was more than ready to engage.

And with the sun behind, Rickenbacker dropped down

and onto the tail of the D.VII.

Came down all of a sudden,

he shot down one of the Fokkers before it knew what had hit it.

With their comrade going down in flames,

the rest of the D.VIIs scattered.

In the dogfighting melee that followed,

Rickenbacker dropped onto a slow-moving LVG.

Eddie then shot down one of the reconnaissance planes

and then headed for home.

So, it was an incredible feat, you know.

He was taking on seven aircraft, just one man.

He'd completed a textbook execution of Boelcke's rules of engagement,

and the day belonged to the American ace.

During World War I,

Eddie Rickenbacker chalked up 26 kills and was later awarded

the United States Congressional Medal of Honor for his actions.

Thanks to the courage and skill of Allied aces

and the mass mobilisation and production

of ever-improving fighter planes,

the balance of power in the air war had shifted decisively.

The turning point actually comes when the Allies,

who are going to produce far more aeroplanes than the Germans,

when they get the superior set of aeroplanes.

And it means that in 1918, they're going to be able

to overwhelm the Germans in the air.

At the end of the war,

the Germans are still technologically productive,

but it's too late by that time, they've lost the war.

The Allies have air supremacy.

The armistice agreement, signed on November the 11th, 1918,

ended the First World War.

In it, a special provision demanding

that the Germans surrender all the surviving Fokker D.VIIs.

There was something magic about this aeroplane

and we desperately wanted these aeroplanes.

We wanted to tear them apart. We wanted to reverse engineer them

and try to find out why this aeroplane was such a good aeroplane.

The only weapon that was mentioned in the armistice

was the Fokker D.VII.

In the course of the Great War from 1914 to 1918,

the aeroplane had developed from humble beginnings.

From planes built for reconnaissance with no instruments and no defences,

to becoming combat-ready fighter planes,

sophisticated war machines,

aerial warfare had come of age.

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