Left: Roland Garros c. 1910, Right: Anthony Fokker c. 1916, [Public
Domain] via Creative Commons)
In World War One, the French
airman, Roland Garros, took the first step in revolutionizing the airplane for
warfare. His dream was to be able to fire a machine gun through turning
airplane propellers without endangering the aircraft. Garros’ design was
simplistic and not the most efficient model, but it got the job done—he
basically armored his propellers with metal wedges that deflected bullets away
from the propeller blades. Even though his design was a bit brutish, Roland
Garros managed to shoot down four German airplanes by the time he crashed and
was captured by the Germans in 1915. He would remain a prisoner of war in
Germany until 1918.
Unfortunately for the Allied
Powers of WWI, Roland Garros was not all that was recovered from the crash in
1915—Germany also salvaged Garros’ airplane propeller and gun design. The
Germans then handed the design over to the brilliant Dutch engineer, Anthony
Fokker. Although Fokker wanted to remain neutral in WWI, and had actually tried
to sell his airplanes to the Allies, the Allied Powers had refused to buy his
planes and Germany became his main client. The Allies would soon regret their
decision not to work with Fokker, for he would take Garros’ design and improve
it exponentially.
In less than a year after
Roland Garros was captured, Anthony Fokker designed a mechanism that
synchronized an airplane’s machine gun to the propellers in such a way that the
bullets passed by the propeller blades like clockwork without collision. With
this new invention in 1915, the Fokker E-1 fighter plane was born and the
Fokker Scourge of German air superiority began.
As for Roland Garros, he
escaped from German custody in February of 1918 and immediately took to the skies
in an Allied fighter plane. Unfortunately for Garros, however, his plane was
shot down later that year, but this time, he did not survive. In a twist of
irony, the German plane that shot Garros out of the sky was none other than one
of Anthony Fokker’s synchronized fighter planes.
Written by C. Keith Hansley
- https://www.britannica.com/biography/Anthony-Herman-Gerard-Fokker
- http://www.nationalaviation.org/our-enshrinees/fokker-anthony/
- http://www.militaryfactory.com/aircraft/detail.asp?aircraft_id=393
- http://edition.cnn.com/2014/05/29/sport/roland-garros-war-hero-french-open/
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