All language subtitles for Wings.Of.War.S01E03.Fight.For.The.Skies.1080p.AMZN.WEB-DL.DDP2.0.H.264-RAWR_track4_[eng]

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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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