Fokker Scourge The Fokker Scourge ( also sometimes called the Fokker Scare ) was the period during which the Fokker Eindecker monoplane fighter aircraft of the Imperial German " Fliegertruppen " , with their synchronised machine - gun armament , exerted an ascendency over the poorly armed Allied aircraft then in service . Significant as the technical advantage of the new fighter was , the psychological effect of its unheralded introduction was also a major factor . The period is usually considered to have begun in July / August 1915 and ended in early 1916 , with the arrival in numbers of the Allied Nieuport 11 and DH . 2 fighters ; less accurately , it is sometimes extended to the whole period of service of the Fokker monoplanes on the Western Front – from the arrival of the first two Fokker E . I fighters at FA62 in June 1915 , until the final disappearance of the last Eindeckers from the early " Jagdstaffeln " in August / September 1916 . The term " Fokker Scourge " was coined in retrospect by the British press in mid - 1916 , after the German monoplane fighters had been largely neutralised by the new Allied types . This was not unconnected with the political campaign launched by ( among others ) the pioneering aviation journalist C . G . Grey and Noel Pemberton Billing M . P . , the founder of the Supermarine company and a great enthusiast of aerial warfare – the main object of which was to end a perceived dominance of the Royal Aircraft Factory in the supply of aircraft to the Royal Flying Corps . Background . In early 1915 , the Allies ( especially the French ) were leading the Germans in the fitting of machine guns to aircraft , as the fledgling aerial warfare arena began to develop . The first aircraft actually used with some success as fighters included the British Vickers F . B . 5 , and the French Morane - Saulnier L and N . At this time , the total numbers of aircraft in front line service were very small , and the development of air - to - air combat tactics was at a very primitive stage , but the German High Command was already very concerned about the situation , and were pursuing several different lines in developing machine gun - armed aircraft to counter those of the Allies , including the aggressive employment of their new armed two - seaters ( the " C " types ) , and " fighter " uses for twin engined aircraft such as the AEG G . II . The situation came to a head on 18 April 1915 with the capture of the Morane - Saulnier L of Roland Garros . Garros had destroyed three German aircraft since 1 April using this machine , which featured a machine gun firing forward through the arc of the spinning propeller . Bullets that would otherwise have damaged the propeller were deflected by small wedge - like blades attached to the vulnerable points on each propeller blade . Although Garros attempted to burn his aircraft after force - landing behind German lines , this was not sufficient to conceal the nature of the device . The significance of the deflector blades was immediately appreciated by the German authorities , who quickly requested several aircraft manufacturers , including Anthony Fokker , to produce a copy . Fokker ' s answer was a genuine synchronisation gear , known in German as the " Stangensteuerung " ( push rod controller ) , using impulses from a cam on the aircraft ' s motor to control the firing of the machine gun so that it did not ( so long as the gear functioned properly ) hit the propeller at all . This was not the first such gear proposed – but it was the first one to be actually fitted to an aircraft and proved in flight . Fokker later claimed , in a postwar biography , that he designed and built the gear himself in a concerted 48 - hour effort – this has been largely discounted , and it is believed that the gear ( possibly based on a pre - war patent by Franz Schneider , a Swiss engineer who had worked for Nieuport as well as the German LVG company ) was in fact already in existence , and was most probably the work of Fokker Flugzeugbau corporate engineer Heinrich Lübbe . In any case , it was rapidly fitted to the most suitable existing Fokker type , the M . 5K , ( military designation A . III ) , of which Otto Parschau ' s " A . 16 / 15 " example became , in essence , the prototype of the E . I . Antony Fokker himself demonstrated Parschau ' s newly armed aircraft to the first few German fighter pilots in May and June 1915 . The Fokker , with its " Morane " controls , including the oversensitive balanced elevator and problematic lateral control , was difficult to fly , and Otto Parschau , who was already an experienced pilot on Fokker A types , demonstrated and instructed the first German fighter pilots , including Kurt Wintgens , Oswald Boelcke and Max Immelmann , in the use of the new fighter . At this stage , the early Eindeckers were supplied in ones and twos to the normal " Feldflieger Abteilung " to protect their reconnaissance aircraft from Allied machine gun - armed aircraft . Front line service of the Eindecker fighters . The E . I reaches the front . The Fokker Eindecker ( specifically E . 5 / 15 , the last of the pre - production series ) was first blooded by Kurt Wintgens , while flying with FFA 6 , when on two separate occasions ( July 1 and July 4 , 1915 ) he shot down a French Morane L " Parasol " ; each time well over the French lines . Wintgens ' accounts of the fights were modestly equivocal about the actual destruction of the Moranes – and these victories were never officially confirmed , although the initial one of 1 July 1915 near Lunéville has been " confirmed " by French records as having been forced down with a wounded crew and heavily damaged engine . By 15 July , Wintgens ( and his Fokker ) were at FFA 48 – and on this date , Wintgens scored his first recognised victory , yet another Morane L . Otto Parschau had received E . 1 / 15 to replace the older A . 16 / 15 machine , which became the prototype for the entire Fokker Eindecker line of aircraft when it was returned to the Fokker Flugzeugbau factory in Schwerin / Gorries for further development of the design . By the end of July 1915 about 15 Eindeckers were operational with various units . , including the five M . 5K / MGs and about ten early production E . I airframes . Their pilots at first flew their new aircraft as " extra - curricular " activity – being not , as yet , excused their normal duties in their units ' two - seater reconnaissance aircraft . Oswald Boelcke was serving at this time with FFA 62 ; he scored his first victory in an Albatros C . I on 4 July . The first Eindecker assigned to the unit arrived shortly after this : the M . 5K / MG prototype airframe E . 3 / 15 – armed with the Parabellum MG14 gun , synchronized by the troublesome first version of the Fokker gear ; at first it was jointly allocated to him and to Max Immelmann , who was also with FFA 62 . This machine was flown by both pilots when their " official " duties permitted , allowing them to master the type ' s difficult handling characteristics , and to practice shooting at ground targets . In a while Immelmann was allocated his own machine : a very early production Fokker E . I , serialled " E . 13 / 15 " , one of the first armed with an lMG 08 " Spandau " machine gun using the more reliable production version of the Fokker gear . What is usually counted as the first day of the Fokker Scourge proper is 1 August , when at 5 AM , the B . E . 2c aircraft of No . 2 Squadron RFC bombed the base of FFA 62 , waking the sleeping German pilots . Boelcke was quickly in the air after the raiders ; Immelmann soon followed . Boelcke suffered a gun jam , but Immelmann caught one of the raiders and succeeded in shooting him down . His victory was over an unarmed B . E . 2c - no observer was carried in order to give the underpowered British machine a respectable bomb load , and the pilot answered Immelmann ' s machine gun fire with his automatic pistol . The " fight " took about 10 minutes of manoeuvring ( giving the lie to exaggerated accounts of the B . E . ' s stability ) and Immelmann fired 450 rounds , riddling his opponent ' s machine , and wounding him in the arm . Air superiority . Boelcke and Immelmann continued to score – as did Hans Joachim Buddecke , Ernst von Althaus and Rudolph Berthold , all from FFA 23 , and Kurt von Crailshein of FFA 53 . In spite of this , the " official " list of victories over Allied aircraft ( many of them French ) claimed by Fokker pilots for the whole second half of 1915 was 28 ; 13 of these belonged to either Immelmann or Boelcke ; the total number of victorious Fokker pilots being just nine . January 1916 brought another further 13 claimed victories , most of them French ; February , and the last month when German air superiority was more or less unchallenged , brought fewer than 20 more . Most victories still belonged to the established aces ; few of the newer pilots flying the increased number of Fokkers were scoring . Although these casualties were very low by later standards , the fact that the Germans were fighting back in the air , and that they possessed a new , supposedly invincible aircraft ( whose capabilities were often exaggerated ) caused considerable consternation among the Allied commanders , as well as problems in the morale of Allied airmen . The situation from the British side is summed up by Cecil Lewis in " Sagittarius Rising " , British tactics were changed – the hapless B . E . types , as well as the newer F . E . 2b pushers increasingly flew in formation , rather than singly – and the custom of sending the B . E . 2c into action without an observer armed with a machine gun became far less prevalent . Both the British and ( especially ) the French , on whom the brunt of the new German air superiority still fell , had to accept that it had become more difficult , and dangerous , to acquire the vital aerial photographs that had by now become an essential military resource , and to provide ranging for Allied artillery . The German Command was concerned that their invention would be discovered , and German fighters were forbidden to fly over Allied lines . This policy was generally continued , for various reasons , until the end of the war . While there were a number of tactical advantages in this approach , the effect of German air superiority was often blunted by the fact that German fighters were rarely encountered on the Allied side of the lines . The Fokkers mastered . The beginning of the end of the Fokker Scourge proper was the Battle of Verdun . At the time of the start of the battle on 21 February 1916 , the German air superiority created by the Fokkers meant that the preparations for the launching of the initial German offensive were largely concealed from French aerial reconnaissance , with the use of a systematic blockade on the French air squadrons called " Luftsperre " , relying as much on chasing their opponents away as actually shooting them down . However during the course of the battle , the new French fighter , the Nieuport 11 was assigned to this sector in increasing quantities . The Nieuports were not only superior to the Eindeckers in almost every aspect of performance and combat effectiveness , they greatly outnumbered them , as they arrived at the front in specialist fighter squadrons ( " escadrilles de chasse " ) – enabling formations larger than the singletons or pairs normally flown by the Fokkers . Before the end of the Battle , air superiority had been effectively reversed , the French now having the upper hand . On the British front – the changes in tactics , by which British aircraft no longer dispensed with gun armament in order to carry more fuel or bombs , and generally flew in threes or fours , made the task of the Fokkers much harder , especially in the case of the F . E . 2b . Individually , the British type was a fair match for the Eindecker , but in formation , with the gunners covering each other , it became a very difficult opponent . In February 1916 , the first complete DH . 2 squadron , No . 24 arrived at the front and quickly established an ascendancy over the Fokkers . A pusher type , with a single forward firing Lewis gun , it was , like the Nieuport , superior to the Fokker in almost every respect . Other DH . 2 squadrons followed , until there were seven of them altogether . Nieuport single seaters were also acquired by the British . By March 1916 , although combats with Fokkers were still frequent and several of the top German Eindecker aces were still scoring , the Fokker Scourge as a period of German air superiority was drawing to a close . The bogie of the Fokker Eindecker as a fighter was finally laid in April , when an E . III landed by mistake on a British aerodrome and was evaluated against contemporary Allied types , first in the field , and later , officially in England . It was found to be very much less than the redoubtable enemy it had been supposed to be . End of the Eindecker . The impact of the new Allied types , especially the Nieuport , was of considerable concern to the Fokker pilots . New light single seat biplane fighters ( " D " types ) from Fokker and Halberstadt had been under test and evaluation since late 1915 , and by mid - 1916 , the replacement of the monoplanes with these types was well underway . In the interim , some Fokker pilots even took to flying captured Nieuports in combat , and the German High Command was sufficiently desperate to order the building of Nieuport copies by its own industry . In order to match the larger Allied fighter formations , the fighters belonging to several reconnaissance units took to operating together – soon being informally amalgamated into " Kampfeinsitzer Kommando " or " KeK " ( informal units , whose members generally continued to officially belong to their reconnaissance squadrons ) – and by the time the " Fliegertruppen " officially became known as the " Luftstreitkräfte " in October 1916 , the first of the famous " Jagdstaffeln " had already emerged as fully fledged , specialist fighter squadrons . The last Eindeckers had been retired from the " Jagdstaffeln " by September 1916 – it is reported that they continued in service in second line roles , but they were by this time hopelessly outmoded as front line fighters . Aftermath . Like the Fokker Scourge , the period of Allied air superiority that followed was brief . By August 1916 , the " Jagdstaffeln " were already receiving the first of the new Albatros fighters . These were once more able to turn the tables on the Allies , and were soon inflicting heavy casualties on the Royal Flying Corps , culminating in the " Bloody April " of 1917 . In the following two years , Allied air forces became overwhelming in both quality and quantity , and the German forces were only able to maintain limited control over a small area of the front at any time . When even this strategy seemed threatened , they started a crash programme to develop a new aircraft . The main result was the Fokker D . VII , leading to a short but notable second " Fokker Scourge " in the summer of 1918 . The Fokker D . VII was so effective that Germany was required to surrender all of them to the victorious Allies as a condition of the Armistice of Compiègne . In British politics and aviation history . Among other British politicians and journalists who grossly exaggerated the material effects of the " Scourge " were the eminent pioneering aviation journalist , C . G . Grey , founder of one of the first aviation magazines , " The Aeroplane " , and Noel Pemberton Billing M . P . , formerly a notably unsuccessful aircraft designer and manufacturer . Their professed object was the replacement of the B . E . 2c with later , more combat - worthy aircraft . In practice , it took the form of an attack on both the Royal Flying Corps high command , and more specifically , the Royal Aircraft Factory . As has been comprehensively documented by Paul Hare – C . G . Grey had long run a concerted campaign against the Royal Aircraft Factory in the pages of " The Aeroplane " , going back to its period as the Balloon Factory , and well before it had produced any heavier - than - air aircraft . Before the admitted unsuitability of the B . E . 2c in air - to - air combat was exposed by the first Fokker aces , this attack was not primarily aimed at the technical quality of the Factory ' s products , but on the very fact that a government body was competing with the " trade " ( that is , the private aviation industry ) in Great Britain . When the news of the Fokker monoplane fighters reached him in late 1915 , Grey was quick to blame the problems faced by the RFC on past orders , for equipment that the latest developments had rendered obsolete , without suggesting what aircraft might have been ordered instead , even supposing that the rapidity of the development of aviation technology under the spur of war could have been foreseen . Billing also blamed the initially poor performance of the British Aircraft manufacturers squarely on what he saw as the favouritism shown by the Royal Flying Corps ( part of the British army ) towards the Royal Aircraft Factory ( although officially , a civilian organisation this was also really part of the army ) . This had produced , he believed , a situation in which : Even among writers who have recognised the hysteria of this version of events this picture of the Fokker scourge gained considerable currency both during the war , and , increasingly , in the following years . As a well known German aviation historian has ironically remarked :