Dogfight
A dogfight, or dog fight, is an aerial battle between fighter aircraft that is conducted at close range. Modern terminology for air-to-air combat is air combat manoeuvring, which refers to tactical situations requiring the use of individual basic fighter maneuvers to attack or evade one or more opponents. This differs from aerial warfare, which deals with the strategy involved in planning and executing various missions.
Dogfighting first occurred during the Mexican Revolution in 1913, shortly after the invention of the airplane. It was a component of every major war after that, though with steadily declining frequency, until the end of the Cold War in the early 1990s. Since then, longer-range weapons such as beyond-visual-range missiles have made dogfighting largely obsolete.
Etymology
The term dogfight has been used for centuries to describe a melee: a fierce, fast-paced battle at close quarters between two or more opponents. The term gained popularity during World War II, although its first use in reference to air combat can be traced to the latter years of World War I. One of the first written uses of the word in that sense was in an account of the death of Baron von Richthofen in The Graphic in May 1918: "The Baron joined the mêlée, which, scattering into groups, developed into what our men call a dog fight". On March 21, 1918, several British newspapers published an article by Frederic Cutlack in which the word was used in the modern sense: "A patrol of seven Australian machines on Saturday met about twenty of this circus at 12,000 feet. Ten of the enemy dived to attack our men. A regular dogfight ensued for half a minute."History
Mexican Revolution
The first supposed instance of plane on plane combat and the first instance of one plane intercepting another during an aerial conflict apparently occurred during the Mexican Revolution on November 30, 1913, between two American mercenaries fighting for opposing sides, Dean Ivan Lamb and Phil Rader. The story comes from Lamb himself. According to his own statements in an interview two decades later, both men had orders to kill, but neither pilot wanted to harm the other, so they exchanged multiple volleys of pistol fire, intentionally missing before exhausting their supply of ammunition.World War I
Dogfighting became widespread in World War I. Aircraft were initially used as mobile observation vehicles, and early pilots gave little thought to aerial combat. The new aeroplanes proved their worth by spotting the hidden German advance on Paris in the second month of the war.Enemy pilots at first simply exchanged waves, or shook their fists at each other. Due to weight restrictions, only small weapons could be carried on board. Intrepid pilots decided to interfere with enemy reconnaissance by improvised means, including throwing bricks, grenades and sometimes rope, which they hoped would entangle the enemy plane's propeller. Pilots soon began firing hand-held guns at enemy planes, such as pistols and carbines. The first aerial dogfight of the war occurred during the Battle of Cer, when the Serbian aviator Miodrag Tomić encountered an Austro-Hungarian plane while performing a reconnaissance mission over Austro-Hungarian positions. The Austro-Hungarian pilot initially waved, and Tomić reciprocated. The Austro-Hungarian pilot then fired at Tomić with his revolver. Tomić managed to escape, and within several weeks, all Serbian and Austro-Hungarian planes were fitted with machine-guns. In August 1914, Staff-Captain Pyotr Nesterov, from Russia, became the first pilot to ram his plane into an enemy spotter aircraft. In October 1914, an airplane was shot down by a handgun from another plane for the first time over Reims, France. Once machine guns were mounted on the airplane, either on a flexible mounting or on the top wing of early biplanes, the era of air combat began.
The biggest problem was mounting a machine gun onto an aircraft so that it could be fired forward, through the propeller, and aimed by pointing the nose of the aircraft directly at the enemy. French aviator Roland Garros solved this problem by mounting steel deflector wedges on the propeller of a Morane Saulnier monoplane. He achieved three kills, but was forced down due to engine failure down behind enemy lines and captured before he could burn his plane to prevent it falling into enemy hands. The wreckage was brought to Anthony Fokker, a Dutch designer who built aircraft for the Germans. Fokker decided that the wedges were much too risky, and improved the design by connecting the trigger of an MG 08 Maxim machine gun to the timing of the engine. The invention of this synchronization gear in 1915 transformed air combat and gave the Germans an early air superiority with the Fokker E.I, the first synchronized, forward-firing fighter plane. On the evening of 1 July 1915, the very first aerial engagement by a fighter plane armed with a synchronized, forward-firing machine gun occurred just to the east of Luneville, France. The German Fokker E.I was flown by Lieutenant Kurt Wintgens, who shot down a French two-seat observation monoplane. Later that same month, on 25 July 1915, British Royal Flying Corps Major Lanoe Hawker, flying a very early production Bristol Scout C., attacked three separate aircraft during a single sortie, shooting down two with a non-synchronizable Lewis gun which was mounted next to his cockpit at an outwards angle to avoid hitting the propeller. He forced the third one down, and was awarded the Victoria Cross.
Battles in the air increased as the technological advantage swung from the British to the Germans, then back again. The Feldflieger-Abteilung or "FFA", observation units of the German air service, consisted in 1914–1915 of six two-seat observation aircraft each. Each unit was assigned to a particular German Army headquarters location, and had a single Fokker Eindecker aircraft assigned to each "FFA" unit for general defensive duties, so pilots such as Max Immelmann and Oswald Boelcke began as lone hunters with FFA units, shooting unarmed spotter planes and other enemy aircraft out of the sky. During the first part of the war, there was no tactical doctrine of air-to-air combat. Oswald Boelcke was the first to analyze the tactics of aerial warfare, resulting in a set of rules known as the Dicta Boelcke. Many of Boelcke's concepts from 1916 are still applied today, including the use of sun and altitude, surprise attack, and turning to meet a threat.
Brigadier General Hugh Trenchard ordered that all British reconnaissance aircraft be supported by at least three fighters, creating the first tactical formations in the air. The Germans responded by forming Jagdstaffel or Jastas, large squadrons of fighters solely dedicated to destroying enemy aircraft, under the supervision of Boelcke. Pilots who shot down five or more fighters became known as aces. One of the most famous dogfights, resulting in the death of Major Hawker, is described by the "Red Baron", Manfred von Richthofen:
I WAS extremely proud when, one fine day, I was informed that the airman whom I had brought down on the twenty- third of November, 1916, was the English Immelmann....
First we circled twenty times to the left, and then thirty times to the right. Each tried to get behind and above the other. Soon I discovered that I was not meeting a beginner. He had not the slightest intention of breaking off the fight. He was travelling in a machine which turned beautifully. However, my own was better at rising than his, and I succeeded at last in getting above and beyond my English waltzing partner.
... The impertinent fellow was full of cheek and when we had got down to about 3,000 feet he merrily waved to me as if he would say, "Well, how do you do?"
The circles which we made around one another were so narrow that their diameter was probably no more than 250 or 300 feet. I had time to take a good look at my opponent....
When he had come down to about three hundred feet he tried to escape by flying in a zig-zag course during which, as is well known, it is difficult for an observer to shoot. That was my most favorable moment. I followed him at an altitude of from two hundred and fifty feet to one hundred and fifty feet, firing all the time. The Englishman could not help falling. But the jamming of my gun nearly robbed me of my success.
My opponent fell, shot through the head, one hundred and fifty feet behind our line.
Despite the Germans' early lead in combat tactics and their 'Dicta Boelcke', the Allies were quick to adapt and develop their own tactics. The Royal Flying Corps' Albert Ball was one of a band of pilots who liked to fly solo and he developed 'stalking' tactics for going after enemy two-seaters. He even used his Lewis gun in its top-wing adjustable Foster mounting to fire upwards into the underside of unsuspecting enemy aircraft. Other RFC pilots such as James McCudden and Mick Mannock emphasised mutual support and the advantages of attacking from height. Mannock expressed this in a list of aerial combat rules that were similar to Boelcke's.
During 1916, aerial reconnaissance patrols were usually unaccompanied as there had been few if any aerial disputes between the belligerents. However, just as the Sinai and Palestine Campaign ground war on the Gaza to Beersheba line came to resemble trench warfare on the western front, the air war over southern Palestine also came to resemble that being fought over France. After the Second Battle of Gaza in April 1917 and during the ensuing Stalemate in Southern Palestine, the concentration of Egyptian Expeditionary and Ottoman Army forces holding established front lines grew, as associated supply dumps and lines of communications were developed. The need for information about these installations fuelled "intense rivalry in the air". Aerial reconnaissance patrols were regularly attacked, so all photography and artillery observation patrols had to be accompanied by armed escort aircraft. These special EEF patrols grew into squadrons, attacking hostile aircraft wherever they were found, either in the air or on the ground. However, the technically superior German aircraft shot down numbers of EEF aircraft during dog fights.
By the end of the war, the underpowered machines from just ten years prior had been transformed into fairly powerful, swift, and heavily armed fighter planes, and the basic tactics of dogfighting had been established.