A couple of factors that also weigh into the Red Baron’s intimidation factor…
The squadron he led, The Flying Circus (also known as Jasta 11), was an elite organization, made up of veteran pilots (most, if not all of them, “aces”). Tangling with them, especially if you were a rookie pilot or flying a observation plane, was dangerous even if the Baron wasn’t your specific nemesis.
Secondly, as flight itself was such a new thing in those days, the technological advances over the course of the war would give one side or the other (often the Germans) a huge advantage. The Flying Circus, being the showpiece squadron that it was, usually were the first to be fitted out with the new gear.
So what you had was an elite squadron, with a charismatic and lethal leader, equipped with the latest and best fighter planes available. Hell, I’d be intimidated.
Typically, in a fight, planes lose altitude. There is a certain amount of altitude loss just in the act of turning. Since climbing results in a loss of speed (trying to drag the weight of the plane up), and a slower plane is a better target, evenly matched planes do not attempt to climb out of a dogfight.
Richthofen and Hawker started out around 10,000 feet and neither would give up. The prevailing winds were Westerly (a condition that favored the Germans throughout the war) and the two eventually found themselves at around 2,000 feet, well behind German lines. At that point, with neither pilot able to gain an advantage on the other, Hawker realized that they would eventually be on the ground–having “run out of sky”–behind German lines. He attempted to get back toward the Allied lines and Richthofen was able to bring him down as he zig-zagged above the trenches.
I can’t make the comparison you ask for but flying a WWI airplane was a pain in the ass. They were open cockpit, so it was cold. Many of the allied planes used rotary engines so there was a large gyroscopic force every time you changed directions. I’m not sure, but I think that trim tabs were a relatively late development in the war so most of the planes had to be flown all of the time. The planes were relatively unstable so as to be more maneuverable. The pilot’s atmosphere was generally the fumes of castor oil and exhaust. This information comes from a History Channel film on WWI fighter planes.
From reading some fiction regarding ww1 air combat , as a result of the castor oil , most pilots were drinking alcohol to combat the nauseus effects of the castor vapor. Its quite possible that the amount of kills may have been due to intoxicated pilots either not being alert enough or poor reaction times.
Declan
Well, there’s also the fact that half or more of the pilots probably did not know what the hell they were doing at the time. The fundamentals of aerial combat that by WWII were taught to every new pilot were just being invented during WWI, since nobody had done it before. Remember, we are talking about an era when inventing machine guns that you could look down the sight of and not shoot your propeller off was a really marvelous invention. The planes were crude and dangerous and took effort and concentration to fly. The differences in fighter planes (“scouts,” as they were called then) changed from month to month, often conferring huge advantages from side to side.
Most of the big aces like Richtofen, Bishop and Rickenbacker earned the majority of their kills by pouncing on prey who obviously were hard pressed just to fly their planes straight. Bishop, in particular, was a NOTORIOUSLY bad pilot who, according to many of his buddies, was damned lucky to survive his own poor piloting skills. But he was an exceptional shot, and he understood the fundamentals of aerial combat; height = energy, attacking from above, and all that stuff.
So it’s not as if Richtofen won 80 dogfights against talented opposition. Like virtually all fighter pilots in the history of aerial combat, they racked of their kills by hitting enemies from behind with a well-timed burst of fire and never giving them a chance to fire back.
Quick quibble with the phrasing of the OP: “the Allies” WEREN’T all that afraid of the Red Baron. Oh, the pilots who went up against him probably were, but I strongly doubt whether David Lloyd George or Georges Clemenceau lost a lot of sleep worrying about Manfred von Richthofen, and neither did the men in the trenches.
WWI, as a whole, was messy, sloppy, bloody, and tedious. There was no way to make trench warfare glamorous or exciting. But aerial warfare, well, THAT was something very new, very exciting, AND rather glamorous.
I mean no disrespect at all to the flying skills, shooting skills and courage of the Red Baron, but in the grand scheme of things, he wasn’t of great importance, to history in general or to the outcome of the war.
Of course, part of the being “talented opposition” was the ability to know where the enemy was and to not allow yourself to be caught unaware.
I suspect that you overestimate the lack of training, and even the difficulty of flying. Certain planes were always problematic, of course. The Sopwith Camel was known as a killer of its own pilots, as its rotary engine created massive amounts of torque. On the other hand, the Camel was the victor in more air fights than any other plane in the war.
By late 1915, training–real training–was a factor in each of the air forces. (Even before the war, France had insisted that anyone who wished to pilot a plane demonstrate that he was a competent mechanic before he was accepted for training.) Nearly every biography of a WWI pilot includes a significant amount of space on his training. When the Americans first arrived in France, the French were so disdainful of the training they had received in the States that they were ordered to be retrained asa combat pilots.
The British air corps lost more men during flight training than in aerial combat, that should tell you a thing or two about the airplanes and the flight instruction of the era.
Right. Even today fighter pilots will tell you that the way to shoot down an opponent is to sneak up from behind and that you rarely see the guy who shoots you down.
Air to air combat is an awfully inefficient way to destroy an enemy air force. The best way is to shoot them up while they are still on the ground.
A recent survey of professional historians indicated the division of opinion:
45% - Roy Brown
33% - Australian anti-aircraft unit
11% - Snoopy
7% - Oswald acting alone
3% - Colonel Mustard in the Library with a Rope
1% - Smithers
I’ll have to dig out the Richard Bach (of Jonathan Livingstone Seagull fame) piece on his participating as a stunt pilot in a WWI air war movie (incidentally called Von Richthofen and Brown). He and a bunch of other pilots flew pretty accurate replicas of WWI airplanes and - much to their surprise - hated it. Quoting from memory, one of the other pilots say:
No parachutes, airplanes stressed to their limits and the entire technology of flying still in a very, very early stage. The planes, technological marvels of their time, simply were not very good aircraft.
WWI airplanes flown in movies often (usually?) have had their fixed-crank Le Rhone engines replaced by newer Wright, Jacobs, or another radial engine where the block is fixed and the crank spinbs around. This not only alleviates most the massive torque effect of the spinning mass of metal, but also allows modern pilots to enjoy much more reliable engines with longer TBO.
Not that it applies to Spiny Norman’s post, as IIRC the D.VII used an inline engine.
Parachutes came to airplanes very late in WWI. This site credits the USA, but I’ve read elsewhere that the Germans were actually using parachutes late in the war. They also used parachutes for jumping from observation balloons that were shot down.
To point out something else about the reason for the Red Baron’s notoriety, he actively encouraged it, going so far as to write a book about himself, which you can find here:
The German army cultivated his reputation as a pilot to be feared.
Last time I toured the Garber facility, our guide–most of the guides at Garber were combat veterans–mentioned that some of those fixed-crank engines would run in either direction. The plane naturally responded better when maneuvered in the direction of the torque created by the engine. So savvy pilots would fly with the engine cranking clockwise one day so that they could make a tighter right turn, then flip the prop blade over and start the engine in the other direction the next day to fake out anyone who saw him in combat the previous day. Don’t know if it’s true, but the story did come from a reputable source.
I think Richtofen gained an early notoriety for cashing in another famous flyer. Early in his career he dispatched the U.K.'s first ace, Lanoe Hawker. That made him dangerous to start with.
Thereafter, if you saw Richtofen around, you didn’t just have to be afraid of him. You had to be afraid of the other excellent pilots who flew with him. His squadron, Jasta 11, sported many of the top-scoring German pilots of the war, including Ernst Udet (who ended up #2 on the list with 62 kills), Werner Voss (#5 on the list with 48 victories), Kurt Wolff (#23 with 33), and Lothar von Richthofen (Manfred’s little brother and #12 on the list with 40). I add that up and find that those five flyers accounted for 263 downed planes during the war, many, perhaps most, while flying with Jasta 11.
Jasta 11 was incorporated into Jastageschwader 1–the “Flying Circus”–with Richtofen at the helm, which added even more talent to the pool. The collective reputation of Jasta 11 and JG 1 was probably quite enough to scare anyone.
Oops. Sorry, Werner Voss didn’t fly with Jasta 11. He did, however, fly the first Dr.1 to be used in combat.
Voss got jumped and eventually killed by seven aces of the British 56th squadron. Before going down, Voss put at least one bullet hole in each of the seven planes that attacked him. When the wreckage was examined, it was discovered that his Dr.1 was using a captured Le Rhone engine.
While rotaries, like many two-strokes, are less than picky about the direction they are turning in, props are another story, being carved like little wings. You would lose a lot of efficiency (power) flipping one and running it backwards because the trailing edge would now be the leading edge. But I could see them doing it with two props, a left-hand and a right-hand. It might work.
Sounds fishy. The propellors were fixed and wooden. When you turn one over it still pulls in the same direction only not so efficiently. An airplane propellor is a airfoil and works efficiently only when used as designed.
Of course, they could just switch to a spare propellor that is made for turning in the other direction.
I’m trying to figure out what I was thinking in my last post. If you turn the propellor around leaving the engine running in its original direction the propellor will pull the plane forward inefficiently.
If you then reverse the direction of the engine, the reversed propellor will push the plane backward, efficiently.