896 Ch. 22 • The Great War
By the end of 1916, dashing and brave “aces,” such as the German Red
Baron, Manfred von Richthofen, and beginning in 1917 the American
Eddie Rickenbacker, chased each other around the skies in fighter planes,
cheered on by the trench soldiers below. When Richthofen was shot down
behind British lines in April 1918, he was buried by his enemies with full
military honors. Although the “dogfights” of combat in the skies had a
romantic dimension, the airplane soon began to terrorize civilians. Paris
and London were bombed several times during the war, as the speed and
capacity of the first warplanes increased; the Rhineland German cities suf
fered heavy bombardments later in the conflict. By the war’s end, Germany
had produced more than 47,000 aircraft, France more than 51,000, and
Britain more than 55,000 planes.
With the European powers fighting a land war unlike any ever seen, and
conflict having taken to the skies, the seas remained relatively quiet. The
British navy retained control, and the famed and feared German dread
noughts stayed in port. The British navy won a series of initial encounters
as far afield as the coast of Chile, the Falkland Islands near Argentina, and
the Indian Ocean. German battleships trapped in the Mediterranean at
the beginning of the war took refuge in Constantinople and were turned
over to the Turks. The German navy took them back when Turkey entered
the war in November 1914 on the side of the Central Powers (Germany
and Austria-Hungary). Turkey was again pitted against its old enemy, Rus
sia. The Austro-Hungarian navy, based in Trieste, was small and its influence
was limited to the Mediterranean. The British admiralty, which possessed
the German code book—plucked from the Baltic Sea by Russian sailors—
German and British planes in a dogfight high above the trenches.