1903
| The Wright brothers’ first powered and manned flight.
|
1908
| Sam Cody makes the first powered aircraft flight in Britain at Farnborough.
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1909
| Louis Blériot flies the Channel.
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1910
| Hon. Charles Stuart Rolls becomes the first person in Britain to die while flying a powered aircraft.
|
1911
| Italian army airmen in Libya are the first to drop bombs from an aircraft.
|
1912
| French army airmen bomb Moroccan rebels.
|
The British Army forms the Royal Flying Corps strictly for aerial observation. The Central Flying School is established for instructors. The Royal Navy forms the Royal Naval Air Service and inherits the Army’s Balloon Corps. The Royal Aircraft Factory at Farnborough becomes the official British aviation research establishment under its superintendent, Mervyn O’Gorman.
|
1913
| February
: German airships are seen over Whitby.
|
August
: Sam Cody is killed at Farnborough.
|
1914
| July 28
–August 4
: the First World War breaks out incrementally. Britain declares war on Germany on August 4.
|
August 13
: Britain’s four RFC squadrons of largely obsolete aircraft fly in stages to France, one crashing at Netheravon and killing both aircrew.
|
August 22
: The first RFC aircraft to be shot down, an Avro 504, succumbs to ground fire from German infantry.
|
All the combatants’ air forces are beginning to employ aircraft for observation.
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September
: Observation and reconnaissance by RFC aircraft prove invaluable to Allied commanders on the ground in the Battle of Mons and the Battle of the Marne, where the German advance into France is halted.
|
Aircrew on all sides are using pistols and rifles to shoot at each other in the air as the war on the ground becomes increasingly static and literally entrenched. Various experiments are made in mounting machine guns in aircraft for the observer’s use.
|
October
: A French Voisin shoots down a German Aviatik: the first successful downing of one aircraft by another.
|
October
–November
: First Battle of Ypres. An Allied Pyrrhic victory in which the regular British Army is decimated, emphasising the need for rapid recruitment.
|
December 16
: German warships shell Scarborough and Hartlepool.
|
December 24 & 25
: Two German aircraft drop the first bombs on British soil near Dover and Sheerness. Opposed only by inaccurate anti-aircraft fire, they escape.
|
1915
| January
: Zeppelins bomb Great Yarmouth and King’s Lynn.
|
The European battlefront has more or less stabilised and now stretches from the Channel to Switzerland.
|
Most aircraft over the battlefields in France and Belgium are still two-seat observation machines but single-seat ‘scouts’ are being designed purely as fighters.
|
January
–February
: Ottoman and German forces attack the Suez Canal at the start of a long Middle-Eastern campaign in which aircraft play a major role in reconnaissance.
|
February
: British and French troops respond to a Russian request to help weaken a Turkish attack in the Caucasus. The naval campaign begins.
|
April
: The Gallipoli campaign also gets under way on land.
|
First Zeppelin air raids on London.
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April 1
: The French airman Roland Garros in a Morane-Saulnier ‘Parasol’ monoplane becomes the first pilot in history to shoot down another aircraft using a fixed machine gun firing through the arc of his own propeller, but the synchronisation gear still needs development.
|
April 22
: Second Battle of Ypres begins, during which Germans use poison gas for the first time. Heavy British casualties.
|
May
: British Cunard passenger liner RMS
Lusitania
is
sunk by a German U-boat, causing outrage on both sides of the Atlantic.
|
The British Army’s growing shortage of artillery shells causes the ‘Shell Crisis’ whose repercussions will help bring down the Asquith government in 1916.
|
Italy joins the war on the side of the Entente (Allies).
|
July 11
: The German light cruiser SMS
Königsberg
is destroyed in German East Africa as the result of aerial reconnaissance by RNAS aircraft.
|
July 18
: The French pilot Adolphe Pégoud shoots down his sixth German aircraft and is awarded ‘ace’ status, becoming the first-ever air ace.
|
July 25
: Captain Lanoe Hawker shoots down three German aircraft in one day, earning the Victoria Cross.
|
A turning point is reached in the history of aerial warfare. Having learned from a crashed Parasol’s secrets, Anthony Fokker designs his own superior synchronisation system and installs it in his new E.I
Eindecker
(monoplane). Thus begins the so-called ‘Fokker Scourge’ that lasts roughly six months when Allied aircraft, lacking synchronised machine guns, are regularly outclassed in the air. The RFC’s B.E.2c observation aircraft prove particularly easy meat and increasingly need to be escorted by F.E.2s and Vickers ‘Gunbuses’ to have much hope of survival.
|
By the autumn Max Immelmann and Oswald Boelcke, both flying the new monoplanes, have become the first German aces.
|
October 12
: Edith Cavell is executed by a German firing squad for spying, causing widespread condemnation of German ‘frightfulness’.
|
December
: French and British forces abandon the Dardanelles/Gallipoli campaign with heavy losses and retreat to Egypt and Salonika.
|
Lanoe Hawker VC becomes the first British ace with seven victories, achieved by means of a single-shot rifle.
|
1916
| January
: Max Immelmann and Oswald Boelcke are both awarded the Blue Max.
|
March
: Noel Pemberton Billing MP’s maiden speech in Westminster mocks the RFC’s inadequate aircraft and its inept administration.
|
The ‘Fokker Scourge’ is effectively ended by the Nieuport ‘Bébé’ plus the D.H.2 and F.E.8.
|
April
: Romania enters the war on the side of the Entente.
|
April
: In Mesopotamia the RFC carries out daily drops of food and supplies to besieged British and Indian troops in Kut-al-Amara, Iraq.
|
April 29
: Major-General Charles Townshend humiliatingly surrenders Kut and 13,000 Allied troops are taken prisoner by Ottoman forces.
|
May
: The RFC in France takes delivery of the first Sopwith 1½ Strutters with Sopwith-Kauper synchronised machine guns.
|
June
: Sopwith’s prototype triplane fighter is sent to France for evaluation.
|
RFC squadrons participate in the Macedonian campaign.
|
June 1
: At the Battle of Jutland Admiral Jellicoe’s fleet comes off second best to the Germans’ in terms of ships lost and damaged.
|
June 18
: Max Immelmann is killed when his aircraft disintegrates in a dogfight.
|
July 27
: Captain Charles Fryatt is executed in Bruges by a German firing squad for trying to ram a U-boat with his merchant vessel, a propaganda disaster for the Germans.
|
July
–November
: The Somme offensive reveals crucial limitations in the RFC’s observation and photo-reconnaissance capabilities.
|
Simultaneously, German aircraft encounter the same problems over Verdun.
|
August
: The Sopwith Pup is delivered to the RNAS in small numbers. The RFC’s large order of Pups is delayed
and delivered only in early 1917, by which time the newest German fighters are superior.
|
October 8
: The creation of the Luftstreitkräfte, the near-independent German air force, from the army’s
Fliegertruppen
.
|
October 28
: Oswald Boelcke is killed as the result of a collision during a dogfight.
|
November 23
: Lanoe Hawker VC is shot down and killed by Manfred von Richthofen.
|
November 28
: The first bombing raid on London by German aircraft (as opposed to airships).
|
December
: Robert Smith-Barry is posted as CO of No. 1 Reserve Squadron at Gosport to institute a radical new training regime for RFC instructors and aircrew.
|
1917
| January
: Manfred von Richthofen is awarded the Blue Max for his eighteen victories.
|
February
: RNAS Sopwith Triplanes appear in numbers and are soon seen to be superior to the German Albatros. Fokker hastily aborts his current fighter design to convert it into a triplane.
|
The German Navy steps up its U-boat campaign with orders to sink on sight all Allied shipping and any neutral ships heading for British ports.
|
April
: This month is forever known to the British as ‘Bloody April’: the RFC’s lowest point when German air superiority is decisively re-established by the Albatros D.III, the skills of individual aces like the ‘Red Baron’ Manfred von Richthofen and his younger brother Lothar, and the Jasta fighter groups planned by the late Oswald Boelcke.
|
April 6
: The United States declares war on Germany, but RFC and French expectations of vast reinforcements of
American aircraft are dashed when it turns out they don’t exist. To the end of the war American pilots are almost entirely reliant on French and British aircraft.
|
May
: The first raid on London by twin-engined Gotha bombers, the start of a series of raids that will at last lead to the organisation of a proper system of home defence.
|
July
: The Smuts Report ‘Home Defence Against Air Raids’ calls for RFC and RNAS squadrons to have a single command and London to have better anti-aircraft defences, a proper air-raid warning system and three squadrons of fighters permanently on call.
|
September
: The Germans introduce the giant four-engined Zeppelin-Staaken biplane bombers in raids on London.
|
Manfred von Richthofen tests the prototype Fokker Triplane and hundreds more are ordered.
|
November
: The Constantinesco synchronising gear belatedly becomes standard for all British aircraft fitted with forward-firing machine guns, well over two years after Fokker’s system was pioneered for German fighters.
|
The Third Battle of Ypres ends with Canadian troops’ capture of Passchendaele.
|
British tanks are used in a devastating massed attack at Cambrai.
|
The catastrophic defeat of Italian forces by German and Austro-Hungarian forces at Caporetto.
|
December
: General Allenby takes Jerusalem.
|
1918
| March
: Following the Bolshevik Revolution, Russia and Germany sign the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk and are no longer at war.
|
April 1
: Formation of the Royal Air Force by amalgamation of the RFC and RNAS.
|
April 21
: Death of Manfred von Richthofen, the war’s greatest ace, with eighty victories.
|
June
: Formation of the allied Independent Air Force for the long-distance bombing of Rhineland targets.
|
August
: General Haig’s attacks begin the Battle of Amiens.
|
In the Balkans/Macedonia, the Allies break through from Salonika.
|
September
: General Allenby occupies Damascus, but Prince Feisal, T. E. Lawrence and the victorious Sherifian forces are already in possession of the city and have announced a provisional Arab government in accordance with British promises, later reneged. Bulgaria capitulates.
|
November 9
: Kaiser Wilhelm II (‘Kaiser Bill’) abdicates.
|
November 11
: The Armistice signed between the Allies and Germany ends the war in Europe.
|
1919
| August
: The first scheduled commercial airline flights between London and Paris begin.
|
1922
| August
: T. E. Lawrence (‘of Arabia’) joins the RAF as Aircraftsman Ross.
|
