*Includes pictures
*Includes accounts of the fighting
*Includes online resources and a bibliography for further reading
World War I, also known in its time as the "Great War" or the "War to End all Wars", was an unprecedented holocaust in terms of its sheer scale. Fought by men who hailed from all corners of the globe, it saw millions of soldiers do battle in brutal assaults of attrition which dragged on for months with little to no respite. Tens of millions of artillery shells and untold hundreds of millions of rifle and machine gun bullets were fired in a conflict that demonstrated man's capacity to kill each other on a heretofore unprecedented scale, and as always, such a war brought about technological innovation at a rate that made the boom of the Industrial Revolution seem stagnant.
One of the most important breakthroughs in military technology associated with World War I, and certainly the one that continues to capture the public imagination, was the use of airplanes, which were a virtual novelty a decade before. While the war quickly ground to a halt in its first few months, the skies above the Western Front became increasingly busy. The great powers had already been acquiring aircraft for potential uses, but given that aerial warfare had never been a major component of any conflict, it's understandable that few on either side had any idea what the planes were capable of doing. Furthermore, at the start of the war, all sides' aircraft were ill-equipped for combat mostly because the idea that planes might somehow fight was still a novel one, and the adaptations had not yet been developed that would allow the aerial battles later in the war.
Some armies, such as the French, saw air intelligence as a strategic matter, with aircraft capable mainly of identifying enemy forces before battle and contributing to advanced preparations. The Germans, on the other hand, believed that aircraft could provide tactical information once battle had commenced. Pilots such as Oswald Boelcke, Germany's first great aerial officer, would identify Allied positions to direct the fire of artillery on the ground.
As a result, aircraft were used almost entirely for reconnaissance early on, allowing generals to gain unprecedented levels of information about enemy movements. Such intelligence allowed the French to counter German movements in what became the First Battle of the Marne, ending Germany's hopes for victory through the Schlieffen plan. Similarly, in the east, German planes were vital in tracking, encircling and destroying Russian forces at Tannenberg.
The Royal Air Force (RAF), Britain's legendary air arm, was born in the skies above the First World War. The British had previously used balloons for spotting and reconnaissance for decades, and in the years leading up to the war, planes started seeing military use. They mostly provided reconnaissance, though experiments were made in using them offensively. During the Boer War of 1899-1902, the British Army used the crews of helium-filled balloons to plot and help target artillery fire. But these were small, tentative steps. The first patent to fit a machine gun to a plane, taken out in 1910, had not yet led to active fighting vehicles, and there was no doctrine, no tactics, and no combat between massed air fleets. That changed during World War I, as the skies above the Western Front became the crucible in which the preceding fragments of aerial warfare were smelted in the white hot heat of war. For the British, this meant the creation of a large and unified flying force which by 1918 would become the RAF.
German and Allied Air Forces in World War I: The History and Legacy of the Rivals in the Sky during the Great War looks at the roles the German and Allied air forces played during the war, from their origins to the war's end. Along with pictures of important people, places, and events, you will learn about the rival air forces like never b