We all know the cultural trope of the WW1 flying ace in his biplane, engaging the enemy in a dogfight. But what was the strategic background to these fights in the wider context of the war - why would belligerents even bother building fighter planes to face the other side’s fighters? Was it to prevent those enemy fighters from intercepting your own bombers? AIUI, large-scale air-to-ground raids were a WW2 thing, and aerial bombing in WW1 was primitive and didn’t do much damage. So what was the benefit, in terms of the wider objectives of the war, that you’d get from air superiority?
Planes were used for reconnaissance and for artillery spotting. You could have a plane up in the air telling your artillerymen “you’re too far left, too close, now you’re just a bit too far right” using simple signals which would allow artillery fire beyond line of sight.
At first recon pilots would take potshots at each other with pistols or try to toss grenades into the other plane, but pretty soon they started mounting machine guns on the planes.
'Zactly.
Enemy observer planes over or near your positions were very dangerous to you, despite them having zero offensive weapons aboard. So as soon as they were invented, there was an opposing desire to stop them. Shooting at them from the ground pretty quickly proved mostly ineffective. Whole lotta ammo for not much result. So shooting at them from nearby up in the air was the next idea.
It did not take long to advance from ad hoc weapons tacked onto observation airplanes trying to plink one another to deliberately designed plane-killing airplanes. And then the tactics to use them. At first the plane killers (fighters) wanted to kill the opposition observers. But once both sides had plane killers, stopping the other guy’s plane killers from getting to your observers became a mission too. Hence fighter-to-fighter “dogfighting”.
In modern parlance, you didn’t need total air superiority. You just needed to be able to temporarily clear a small local area of a few miles extent long enough for your observers to do their thing (mostly) unmolested. So local air superiority.
Aerial bombardment was an idea from invention of the airplane itself. As you say, in WW-I it rarely amounted to more than a nuisance on the battlefield; too few planes with too little payload and range to make a material difference anywhere. But all the air forces, and all their brass and political boosters were trying hard to make it work. Bombers were the artilleryman’s dream weapon: extreme long range beyond the battlefield into the enemies’ rear areas, and able to select and kill targets in real time. It was the smart guided munition of its era. And potentially equally revolutionary. And they knew it.
The war ended before they got much more effective than pinpricks, but as we all know deep aerial bombardment really came into its own in WW-II and especially late in that war.
On the converse side, once bombers appeared in the skies over your side, why not send up some plane-killers to deal with them? Shoot them down or drive them off or … . And every pound of defensive weapons and ammo they carried in response was that much more drag and weight which further reduced their already pitiful range, performance, and bomb load.
The rest until today is just a continuous leapfrogging arms race of technology and tactics.
In addition to enemy spotter planes, there were observation balloons of various sorts used by the belligerents; these were likewise better attacked from the air, and thus would attract enemy aircraft with the intent of downing them. And, of course, you would launch you own aircraft to protect them (though they also tended to have some armaments of their own for defense).
Yeah, it’s really interesting how strategy breeds counterstrategy in warfare, so that both sides have to engage in increasingly difficult activities, not so much to get an advantage, as to avoid being put at a disadvantage
- Observation planes - yeah, better information for attacks
- Attack each other’s observation planes.
- Build better and better planes to attack each other’s attack planes, just so your observation planes get a few minutes of time to get observations
- Planes big enough to carry big bombs
- Attack planes to destroy the bombers before they get to their targets
- Increasingly advanced attack planes to shoot down the enemy attack planes that are after your bombers - or to shoot down the enemy planes that are defending their bombers.
It is said of WWI that last month’s superior plane that could sweep the skies clean is this month’s average plane, and next month’s easy target.
Second to what has already been said, there was also a romantic desire on the part of many pilots to restore the traditions of one-on-one chivalric combat. To many, the tactical and strategic goals assigned to them took second place to racking up kills and engaging in pointless aerial duels.