043 Anthony Fokker and the nightmare of aeronautics

Anthony Fokker

The airplane breaks through as air weapon 

It is Sunday 18 April 1915. It is the 43rd week after the shooting at Sarajevo.

The war produces a technological tour de force: two Brits hang above the Dardanelles in a hot air balloon. They are observing a Turkish camp, pass on its position by telephone to the ship they are attached to with a cable. The ship telegraphs the information to a cruiser that in its turn bombards the Turkish camp from behind the horizon with grenades.

Meanwhile on both sides of the Dardanelles the Turkish troops under the command of the German general Liman von Sanders prepare for an allied invasion.

On his way to Gallipoli the English poet Rubert Brooke dies of blood poisoning on a French hospital ship as a result of a mosquito bite.

At Zillebeke in Flanders the Germans make frantic attempts to recapture Hill 60.

The German government apologizes to the neutral Netherlands for sinking cargoship SS Katwijk.

In the Second Battle of Ypres the Germans fail to make optimal use of the chaos they caused with chlorine gas on the side of the allies.

And the French aviator Roland Garros reveals his secret to the Germans, after which there is a lot of work to be done for Dutch aviation pioneer Anthony Fokker.

Plagiarism is not the biggest crime of the First World War, but it was certainly widespread. Eagle-eyed they stared at each other’s war activities. What is the enemy capable of? Or rather, are we capable of that, too? Can we possibly do even better.

Take the story of the French pilot Roland Garros, after whom in later years a tennis tournament in Paris will be named. On 19 April 1915 he crashes near Ingelmunster, occupied territory in Flanders. Garros survives the crash, also sets fire to his plane, but cannot prevent that the Germans secure the wreck. Now they are going to figure out how that darn Frenchman succeeded in taking down five German planes in three weeks’ time.

Well, Roland Garros was the first fighter pilot who literally went straight for his target. Thanks to a technical gimmick he could fire a machine gun through his propellers. If a bullet struck the blade of a propeller, it would ricochet on a wedge-shaped metal plate. It was far from ideal, as the propeller could become unbalanced.

The Germans immediately started to copy the mechanism which they had got their hands on. However, it appeared that it was quite suitable for the French copper bullets but not for the German steel ones. Now it was time to contact a 25-year-old Dutchman, Anthony Fokker. In no time flat Fokker succeeded in reconciling a machine gun with a propeller. Via a cam, pushrods and rocker arms the machine gun stopped firing at the exact moment when one of the propeller blades passed. Fokker had done it: safe firing through the arc of the spinning propellers.

The synchronized machine gun with which Fokker started equipping his E.III planes, was the beginning of German superiority in the air. In the summer of 1915 the English newspapers started to write moody stories about the Fokker Scourge. Fokker Fodder, they sneered about their own planes.

Anthony Fokker can be called a controversial figure. Some consider him a war criminal, who shamelessly made money from the horrors of the war. For others he is a genius, who combined the entrepreneur, the inventor and the adventurer.

Soon it appeared that young Fokker was not born for teaching. Tinkering with model trains and fiddling with paper airplanes he got a grip on engineering. Tony was a do-it-yourselfer. When he was seventeen he produced a solid tyre as the solution for flat tyres that haunted motorists. Alas, apparently the patent for that had been granted earlier in France.

In 1911, on Queen’s Day, he made a name for himself by going around in circles a few times over the Dutch city of Haarlem in a plane which he had designed himself. It was called The Fokker Spin (Spin being Dutch for Spider). As a member of the local Orange committee, which organized all sorts of festivities for Queen’s Day, his father had inspired him. Fokker junior had every reason to please his dad. After all, he ivested huge sums of money in his son’s aeronautics, money he had earned as a coffee grower in the Dutch East Indies. For a long time there had been no immediate prospect of a return on the investments in the passion of his son, but for the time being dad Fokker could strut around the streets of Haarlem like a peacock.

Aeronautics in the first decade of the twentieth century is a phenomenon which only few people take seriously. That had also been the experience of bicycle mechanics Orville and Wilbur Wright, when they tried to get the American army interested in their flying machines. It is all very well, was the army’s answer to the two brothers, as long as it does not cost us any money.

In 1903 the Wright brothers had succeeded in keeping a plane in the air for the first time. Six years later the Frenchman Louis Blériot flew across the Channel. And another year later Anthony Fokker built his Spin in Germany. Its pilot seemed caught in a web of metal wires that held cockpit and wings together.

‘When I was a boy of sixteen and heard about flying machines for the first time, my only goal was to become an airman. They were the new heroes in those days. Perhaps that was what attracted me: to become a hero’, Fokker said in his autobiography, which he entitled ‘The Flying Dutchman’.

On the eve of the Great War Fokker leaves for Germany and starts building airplanes and giving flying lessons at the same time. In 1913 he is the first to imitate Frenchman Adolphe Pegoud’s looping. During the war he will also give demonstrations behind the front of new types of airplanes. ‘Fokker surprised us by his skill’, writes Max Immelmann, one of Germany’s flying aces, after Fokker showed in June 1915 how his new Eindecker should be flown. Immelmann will, incidentally, lose his life when his Fokker E.III breaks apart. It must have been a technical defect.

Fokker was on good working terms with the airmen. Not only Immelmann and Oswald Boelcke, but also Manfred von Richthofen, the Red Baron, and Hermann Goering belonged to his circle of close friends. Behind these friendly relations also lay an economic incentive, as was often the case with Fokker. As a born Dutchman he could not rely on contacts in the highest German circles. With special thanks to the pilots on the ‘shop floor’ he kept the order books of his Fokker Flugzeugwerke filled. Between 1914 and 1918 over 7,600 Fokker airplanes left the factory.

Initially in the Great War pilots take over the role which for centuries had been assigned to the cavalry: finding and exploring hostile troop concentrations. In 1911 the Italians were the first to do so over Tripoli during their war with the Ottomans. That took some getting used to. ‘The noise those damned things make frightens our horses’, grumbles a British cavalry officer in an official protest during the First World War.

It soon became apparent that planes could also shed bombs and attack ground targets. The sky then turns into the backdrop for spectacular aerial combats, which are observed by Private Snuffy from his trench with amazement. In 1917 Orville Wright writes: ‘We thought we gave the world an invention that made war imposssible. What a dream it was. What a nightmare it has become.’

It will not have troubled Fokker during the war. The Fokker D-VII is his latest masterpiece in 1918. The German pilots love it. Its reputation is so great that a special clause for the Fokker D-VII is laid down in the armistice agreement later that year: all planes of this type should be handed over to the allies. Fokker will, however, deceive his way out of this. He succeeds in transporting hundreds of engines and dismantled parts of his D-VII to Holland, where he begins the Nederlandse Vliegtuigenfabriek. This is followed in the United States by the Fokker Aircraft Corporation. It will be clear that Anthony Fokker is a man of the world.

His Dutch biographer Marc Dierikx has revealed how Fokker managed to change nationality three times. In 1914 he becomes a naturalized German for obvious reasons. After the war he succeeds in again acquiring Dutch citizenship with the help of his friend Prince Hendrik, husband of the Dutch Queen Wilhelmina. And in 1922 he reports to the Immigration Office in order to become an American.

Faithfulness is also in his love life not a key principle for Anthony Fokker. In 1919 he gets married for the first time, but this marriage already runs aground after four years. In 1927 Violet Austman is the bride. Her death, two years later, shows a grim side of the man behind the entrepreneur Anthony Fokker. When she is allowed to go home after a long hospitalisation because of a nervous breakdown, Fokker is nowhere to be found. He has sent a driver to pick up his wife. When he finally arrives home at night, he does not even give her a glance. Violet recognizes her sad fate and steps out of the window on the fifteenth floor of her New York apartment. She is stone dead.

Also as an employer Fokker repeatedly shows his relentless side. He gives employees the sack before Christmas and takes them on again after the end of the year in order to economize on their days off. In 1931 he even disposes of Reinhold Platz, the man who put Fokker’s revolutionary ideas in practice even before the war. Platz turned the rough sketch Fokker made into an airplane, after which Fokker himself corrected the flaws of the design during trial flights. They were a golden duo, but not for eternity.

Let us just say openly that Fokker was a moron. His biographer Dierikx has explained his ruthlessness as follows: ‘In his early childhood he was the little coffee-grower’s boy who was superior to the kampong children with whom he played. This is reflected in the way he treats his nearest staff, in the fact that he does not succeed in shaping his personal life, his relation to women. The little boy in the kampong becomes the creative kid in the attic in Haarlem, but with only a handful of friends.’

1929 is the year that Fokker sees his wife seeking escape in death. It is also the year when he suffered as a merchant. The crisis hits him hard. He no longer appears to be the innovative business man of old. He is not bold enough to change to completely metal planes. However, Fokker gets back on his feet when he can buy the licence rights of American planes for Europe for next to nothing.

His life story ends prematurely. In 1939 he needs an operation on his sinuses. This rather mild intervention has fatal consequences. Anthony Fokker dies at the age of 49, an age that most pilots in the First World War have not reached.

Next week: Mustafa Kemal.

Tom Tacken (translation Peter Veltman)

030 Samuel Smith and death coming from above

Samuel Smith

Zeppelins make England tremble

It is Sunday 17 January 1915. It is the 30th  week after the shooting at Sarajevo.

The fighting between the French and the Germans in the Bois-le-Prêtre, in the Argonne, goes back and forth.

They are also fighting very hard about the Hartmannswillerkopf, a mountain top in the Vosges.

Dunkirk is shelled from the air by the Germans and Zeebrugge by the British.

In East Africa a British-Indian force has to lower the flag at Jasin.

The Russians succeed in occupying the town of Skempe in northwest Poland.

The Turks have to continue their drawback in Armenia.

Adolf Wild von Hohenborn is appointed Germany’s minister of war, as successor of Erich von Falkenhayn, who remains chief of staff at the front.

British plantations in Nyasaland, present-day Malawi, are attacked by African nationalists under the command of John Chilembwe.

During this rebellion, which was not very successful, the grandson of the legendary David Livingstone is decapitated, because he is said to have oppressed Africans.

In the Bukovina the Austrians succeed in recapturing within a week the mountain pass of Carlibaba, or Ludwigsdorf, from the Russians.

And two German zeppelins drop bombs over England, killing four people, among whom Samuel Smith.

On the night of 19 January 1915 Samuel Smith, a 53-year-old cobbler, goes into the street to see what is going on. Loud bangs lured him away from his workshop. They are explosions of primitive bombs which were dropped from the German zeppelin L-3 across Samuel Smith’s dwelling-place, Great Yarmouth. This seaside town in the county of Norfolk harbours a naval base. When one of the bombs drops on a house, Samuel Smith is hit by shrapnel. He dies on the spot. That day Smith and three other civilians are the very first British victims of an air raid.

Samuel Smith’s fate marks the beginning of perhaps the most gruesome part of twentieth century warfare, demoralizing the enemy by bombing its civilians. Rotterdam, Warsaw, London, Dresden, Hiroshima and Nagasaki will be introduced to these ruthless tactics. Coventry in the heart of England, though,  lent its name in the Second World War to the German verb meaning bombing complete districts: coventrieren. The English call this nightly shower of bombs ‘The Blitz’, referring to the absolute arbitrariness of fate.

Samuel Smith, who provided for his mother and the two orphans she had taken into her home, cannot have been aware of what happened to him that night. The English were totally unprepared for air raids. No sirens went off. No air defence aiming at the skies. No airplanes storming at the bombers. Never before had death come from above.

Hans Fritz, captain of the crew of fifteen of the L3 zeppelin, could freely throw his explosive cargo overboard for ten minutes. At eleven o’clock in the morning he had taken off from home base Fuhlsbüttel near Hamburg together with the L4. At half past one in the afternoon the two airships had been spotted over the Dutch coast, after which the L3 started its mission of terror over Great Yarmouth at eight twenty-five at night, English time. Somewhat at random, for navigation did not amount to much in those days.

The L4 had veered northward to dispose of its bombs over King’s Lynn, which is still Norfolk. The four casualties of that day were shared equally by the two airships. Afterwards they quietly floated back to Germany. The next morning Fritz and his men could disembark again at Fuhlsbüttel. But they could not enjoy their freedom very long. When the L3 returns from a new raid on England on 17 February 1915, it is having engine problems when flying over Denmark. An emergency landing on Danish soil follows.The crew escape with their bare lives. Following orders captain Hans Fritz destroys his confidential documents after which he also sets fire to the damaged ship. He and his men are detained by neutral Denmark for the rest of the war.

Great Yarmouth and King’s Lynn were the first to withstand the zeppelin attacks, but it was not the first time that an airship carried out a military task. Already on 6 August 1914, when the war has been on for two days, a zeppelin takes part in the attack on the Liège belt of fortresses. The Belgian defenders open fire at the airship. The Z-6 manages to escape, but once on the ground the airship is a total loss. Antwerp also becomes the target of a zeppelin raid. At the end of August a missile from a zeppelin hits a hospital. Twelve people are killed.

What would the very old count Ferdinand von Zeppelin have thought of the fact that his invention had been given a new life as ‘instrument of murder from the air’? Von Zeppelin lived to see the first three years of the First World War. The count was struck down by pneumonia in 1917. In the 1870-1871 war he had witnessed how the French used air-balloons for observation and communication. Some had even managed to escape from Paris in the basket underneath such an air-balloon. This made Von Zeppelin think. And in 1895 he was ready to obtain a patent for an airship that was to bear his name.

Its special feature was its rigidity. A zeppelin consists of a lightweight aluminium structure which does not expand, but contains a number of gas-filled bags. Underneath it the gondolas and engines with propellers are suspended. The development of the airship was accompanied  by numerous design faults. The military took their time in realizing the strategic use of airships. Quite a few pleasure trips were already undertaken with zeppelins, when the German army ordered ten of them. They seemed especially suitable for reconnaissance purposes and escorting ships.

There were other countries that possessed airships, but these did not have the same quality as the German zeppelins. Peter Strasser was the biggest advocate in military circles. He was the commanding officer of the airship section which was the responsibility of the navy. He was convinced that using zeppelins as bombers could make a difference in the war. It was the emperor himself who did not want to accept bombardments of English towns for a long time. After all he still had relatives over there. Impressed, however, by the allied air raids on German targets, he would cast this hesitation from him. Already in September 1914 the British had started their first air raid. The zeppelin shelters at Düsseldorf and Cologne were the first target.

In the course of the war the Germans improve their zeppelins. They become bigger, faster and more aerodynamic. The carrying capacity increases, as does the height they can climb to, though the latter achievement produces its own problems. The thin air and extreme cold demand the utmost of the men, high up in their gondolas. Meanwhile the British increasingly get a hold on the deadly airships. With searchlights and tracers they scan the skies. London is protected by a ‘ring of steel’, the first air defence system in history. Fighter planes begin to climb just as high as the zeppelins. And the new incendiary bullet which does not ignite until it has hit its target, proves fatal to the majestic hydrogen-filled cigars.

The zeppelin crew are not to be envied. They are not allowed to carry parachutes: too heavy. So the crew members know that at a given moment they may face the choice, jump overboard or be burned alive. When the most notorious zeppelin commander, Heinrich Mathy, was presented with this dilemma, he answered that he would not find out until the supreme moment. And that moment arrived.

Mathy is the man responsible for the most horrendous zeppelin attack in the war. On 8 September 1915 London mourns the death of 22 people and a million and a half pounds worth of damage because of Mathy’s L13. But to Mathy himself in his latest airship L31, things do not look too good on 1 October 1916. Over London his ship is caught in beams of light, after which second lieutenant William Tempest climbs higher and higher and fires away in his fighter plane until L31 burns ‘like a Chinese lantern’, as Tempest will testify later.

It cannot have come as a surprise to Mathy, who was an ace among zeppelin commanders. Those who maintained not to be haunted by nightmare visions of burning airships, were braggarts, according to Mathy’s account. What tension it must have been to fear that one single moment, high in the sky, where it is terribly cold and mouse-still, the moment that an enemy pilot comes alongside. In October 1916 Mathy made his choice. He jumped over Hertfordshire. There is this famous photograph showing uniformed Brits looking at the contours Mathy’s body made when it hit the ground. He is said to have lived a couple of minutes on that spot.

By then the zeppelin had had its day as a bomber, so much is clear. Peter Strasser will, however, not give up and on behalf of the navy direct his latest zeppelins to perfidious Albion well into 1918. On 5 August 1918 Strasser himself is on board L70, when high over Norfolk it is shot out of the sky.

In the second half of the war it was mainly airplanes, Gothas, which were to cause death and destruction over British towns. The bomb which was dropped on a kindergarten classroom of a school in Upper North Street in London in 1917 left the deepest scar. On a London memorial one can still read the names of the eighteen dead Gotha children, aged five.

There is no memorial for Samuel Smith, though a documentary in the BBC series Timewatch paid attention to him in 2007. A camera crew joined a grandniece and her son to Great Yarmouth cemetery, where their great-uncle was buried. The voice-over says that until recently the relatives did not even know this. In the documentary mother and son first visit the simple grave of Samuel Smith and then the street where he died.

The impact the zeppelins had on the British people can hardly be exaggerated. The British were horrified and indignant, while German children merrily sang: ‘Zeppelin, flieg, Hilf uns im Krieg, Fliege nach Engeland, Engeland wird abgebrannt, Zeppelin flieg!’

But perhaps the morale of the British homefront became indeed stronger because of the German airforce, just as in the next world war the bomb carpets on Dresden and other German towns for which Arthur ‘Bomber’ Harris was responsible also seemed to have had the same effect. A British poster from the Great War shows a zeppelin above the silhouettes of Big Ben, Tower Bridge and St Paul’s Cathedral. Underneath it says: ‘It is far better to face the bullets than to be killed at home  by a bomb. Join the army at once and help to stop an air raid. God save the King.’

When the war is over, the Germans are forbidden in Versailles to build any more zeppelins. But already in 1922 the production of zeppelins in Germany starts again, with the American army as a customer. In the interbellum the beau monde chooses zeppelins as their luxurious means of transportation, until the Hindenburg, the biggest airship ever built, crashed in the United States in 1937. The Nazis then see no point in zeppelins any more. Once feared as deadly weapons, they have turned into a historic curiosity.

During World War One the Germans made a total of 159 zeppelin flights that cost 557 lives. One of these was an unmarried cobbler,  of whom we know little more than that one day in January 1915 he wondered what caused the hellish noise out there.

Next week: Franz Hipper

Translation: Peter Veltman