Audio by NMUSAF PA | National Museum of the U.S. Air Force | 05.23.2013
Strategic bombing became a reality in World War I with both Zeppelin and fixed-wing crews attacking infrastructure targets and even civilian populations. Fiorello La Guardia, congressman from New York and future mayor of New York City, led about 100 Americans that flew Italian-built Caproni bombers for the Italian Air Force. While he used his political influence in ways few U.S. Army captains......
Audio by NMUSAF PA | National Museum of the U.S. Air Force | 05.23.2013
The U.S. developed an aircraft-mounted radiotelephone near the end of the war known as the SCR-68 (Set, Complete, Radio). This DH-4 has one, indicated by the generator on the wheel strut. That generator is a good example of linking a modification to a new capability: voice communication instead of telegraphy. The U.S. Army Signal Corps discovered many problems with it, primarily its inability......
Audio by NMUSAF PA | National Museum of the U.S. Air Force | 05.23.2013
The Fokker D.VII was arguably the best fighter aircraft of World War I. As a part of the Armistice Agreement, the U.S. received 142 Fokker D.VII aircraft as war reparation payment. Eleven of them came here to Dayton, Ohio, to the Engineering Division at McCook Field. There, engineers made extensive modifications to their powerplants by installing Liberty and Packard engines. They also gave......
Audio by NMUSAF PA | National Museum of the U.S. Air Force | 05.23.2013
The German fighters of World War I inflicted tremendous losses on the opposing photo-reconnaissance sorties. To counter those losses, France began configuring single seat fighters, such as this SPAD XIII for high-speed reconnaissance. The mission did not call for extreme fighter-like maneuvering, but very fast, level flight, at high-altitude. The 94th Aero Squadron had one aircraft configured......
Audio by NMUSAF PA | National Museum of the U.S. Air Force | 05.23.2013
The stationary observation balloon, or aerostat, had an advantage over aircraft in that it had a direct telephone line to the artillery battery, giving near real-time reconnaissance feedback during an attack. The armies deployed them no closer than three miles from the front, and two observers normally ascended to 3,600 feet. While fixed-wing aircraft used square maps, the balloon used......
Audio by NMUSAF PA | National Museum of the U.S. Air Force | 05.23.2013
Although the museum’s German Halberstadt CL IV is technically an attack aircraft, it looks like the standard observation aircraft of the First World War, with pilot in front and armed observer in back. Early in the war, it became obvious that the aircraft and the artillery battery required the same map to be successful. The British developed a pair of maps with numbered and lettered 400-yard......
Audio by NMUSAF PA | National Museum of the U.S. Air Force | 05.23.2013
One Foreign Materiel Exploitation (FME) story during the war involved the synchronized machine gun. French pilot Roland Garros and his mechanic armored his prop with steel plates to enable a machine gun fire through it. He said about one in 10 bullets would ricochet. Garros downed several German aircraft with it before going down behind enemy lines. The Germans tried to copy his design with......
Audio by NMUSAF PA | National Museum of the U.S. Air Force | 05.23.2013
The Germans used basically the same rotary aircraft engine as the French and the British, because they licensed it before the war. As the Fokker Triplane’s Oberursel engine became harder to replace later in the conflict, the German ace Josef Jacobs used Foreign Materiel Acquisition (FMA) to solve the problem. He offered a case of champagne to any soldiers that brought him an allied rotary......
