On 1 July 1915, near Lunéville in eastern France, a young German lieutenant in a small monoplane closed on a French Morane-Saulnier parasol and did something no fighter pilot had yet done successfully in combat. He aimed his whole aircraft at the enemy and fired a machine gun straight through the arc of his own spinning propeller.

His name was Kurt Wintgens. That first attack was never confirmed, because the French aircraft came down on its own side of the lines. But two weeks later, on 15 July 1915, Wintgens scored again, and this time the victory was confirmed: the first official kill by a fighter with a synchronised machine gun. It opened the period the Allies would come to call the Fokker Scourge.

Shooting Through the Propeller

In 1915 the problem every aviator faced was simple to describe and hard to solve. The easiest way to aim a machine gun from a single-seat tractor aeroplane is to point the aircraft at the target. But the propeller is in the way. Frenchman Roland Garros tried a brute-force answer: steel wedges on his propeller blades that deflected any bullets that struck them. He scored three victories before he was forced down behind German lines on 18 April 1915, and his aircraft was captured.

The Fokker company went further. Its Stangensteuerung, a push-rod system driven by cams on the engine, timed the gun to fire only when no blade was in front of the muzzle. Fitted to Anthony Fokker's small M.5K monoplane, it created the Fokker Eindecker, often described as the first true fighter aircraft.

A Pilot Who Asked for the Job

Wintgens had served on the Eastern Front with a telegraph battalion and won the Iron Cross, Second Class, before training as a pilot at the Fokker school in Schwerin in early 1915. When the new armed Fokker appeared, he asked for it by name.

He was posted to Feldflieger-Abteilung 6b near Saarburg as one of the very first Eindecker pilots, flying the aircraft with the serial E.5/15. On 1 July 1915 he attacked the Morane-Saulnier L of Capitaine Paul du Peuty, who landed on the French side. On 4 July he forced down another Parasol, again without confirmation. On 15 July he shot down a third, and this one counted. He received the Iron Cross, First Class.

The documentary series Four Years of Thunder on the first air war and the Fokker Scourge. Video: History With Troy

The Fokker Scourge

Wintgens was soon joined by the pilots who would become far more famous. Max Immelmann's first confirmed victory came on 1 August 1915, a date often given as the official start of the Fokker Scourge, and Oswald Boelcke was flying the new Fokkers too. The monoplanes were not fast or especially agile, but a pilot who could aim his gun by aiming his aircraft had an enormous advantage over opponents who could not.

Between June 1915 and January 1916 the Royal Flying Corps lost 120 aircraft. In Britain the losses became a political scandal. Noel Pemberton Billing, a Member of Parliament and former naval airman, attacked the Royal Aircraft Factory in the House of Commons for sending pilots to war in inferior aircraft.

The advantage did not last. The British Airco DH.2 arrived early in 1916 and the French Nieuport 11 in the spring, and by the late summer of 1916 the last Eindeckers had left front-line service.

The Blue Max, and the End

Wintgens kept scoring through 1916. On 24 June 1916 his seventh confirmed victim was Victor Chapman of the Lafayette Escadrille, the American volunteer squadron. On 1 July 1916, exactly a year after that first unconfirmed attack, he received the Pour le Mérite, the fourth airman to be given the Blue Max.

He did not survive the autumn. On 25 September 1916, near Villers-Carbonnel on the Somme, his aircraft broke up in combat, most likely shot down by the French ace Alfred Heurtaux in an early SPAD S.VII. Wintgens was 22. He was credited with at least 19 confirmed victories, and up to 22 counting probables and force-downs. Fame went to Immelmann, Boelcke and later Richthofen, but the first confirmed kill of the fighter age was his.

A flying Fokker E.III replica at an airshow in 2023, showing how small and fragile the Eindecker was. Video: Pterodactyl Flight

Watch the replicas today and the Eindecker looks almost toy-like: a wire-braced monoplane with a rotary engine and one gun. In 1915 it was the most dangerous thing in the sky, and a 20-year-old lieutenant who had asked for it by name was the first to prove it.

The view from the cockpit of a Fokker E.III replica built by Airdrome Aeroplanes. Video: Ross Brodie

Sources: Wikipedia (Kurt Wintgens, Fokker Scourge), Vintage Aviation News