Firing a fixed machine gun forward from a tractor (propeller-in-front) aircraft means firing between the propeller blades many times a second. The German solution was an interrupter or synchronisation gear that mechanically stopped the gun from firing when a blade was in the way. Fitted to the Fokker Eindecker in 1915, it turned a mediocre monoplane into a killer.

Britain had experimented with synchronisation but had nothing reliable in service in 1915. Rather than wait, de Havilland sidestepped the whole problem: put the engine and propeller behind the pilot. With nothing spinning in front of the nose, a Lewis gun could fire straight ahead with no gear at all. The cost was aerodynamic — a pusher carries the drag of its booms and exposed engine — but in 1916 the trade was worth it. Once the Allies fielded their own synchronisation gears later in 1916, the pusher fighter’s brief moment passed and the tractor scout took over for good.

The Fokker Scourge was as much a psychological as a material campaign: relatively few Eindeckers were ever in the air at once, but their ability to attack from the blind spot behind a two-seater made every reconnaissance flight dangerous and forced the RFC into costly escort formations.

Breaking it took several aircraft working together — the two-seat F.E.2b, the French Nieuport 11 and 17, and the DH.2. What the DH.2 added was a dedicated single-seat fighting scout in the hands of specialist squadrons whose only job was to seek out and destroy enemy aircraft. No. 24 Squadron alone would eventually claim dozens of enemy machines. By mid-1916 the Eindecker had been mastered, and air superiority over the Somme front had swung back to the Allies.

The DH.2 was normally powered by the Gnome Monosoupape (“single-valve”) nine-cylinder rotary of about 100 hp, in which the entire engine spun with the propeller. Rotaries were light and smooth but thirsty and temperamental: they were controlled largely by a fuel/air “blip” switch rather than a conventional throttle, and their spinning mass produced strong gyroscopic effects that a pilot had to fly around.

The Monosoupape had a particular reputation on the DH.2 for occasionally shedding a cylinder in flight — a spectacular and sometimes fatal failure. Some aircraft were later fitted with the 110 hp Le Rhône rotary. None of this was unique to the DH.2, but combined with the type’s spin tendency it fed the aircraft’s early “dangerous” reputation.

Early DH.2 training was costly. The light airframe would drop into a spin quickly, and pilots who did not understand rotary gyroscopics or the type’s narrow margin between flying speed and the stall paid for it. The nickname “spinning incinerator” captured the fear.

The turning point came when experienced pilots showed that the spin was fully recoverable and that, flown correctly, the DH.2 was one of the most manoeuvrable aircraft over the front. Confidence transformed the type’s fortunes: the same agility that killed novices made veterans deadly. It is a recurring pattern in fighter history — an aircraft’s reputation swinging from lethal to beloved once its handling is understood.

The pusher arrangement bought a clear field of fire at a real aerodynamic cost. Exposed cylinders, bracing wires and the twin tail-booms all added drag, capping top speed at around 93 mph even with a modern-for-1915 rotary. The propeller behind the pilot also meant that a crash landing could drive the engine forward into the cockpit.

These were acceptable trades in 1916, when the alternative was having no forward-firing gun at all. But the moment reliable synchronisation reached Allied squadrons, the streamlined tractor scout — Sopwith Pup, Nieuport 17, SPAD — made the pusher fighter obsolete almost overnight.

Unlike modern aircraft, the DH.2 has no meaningful published cost-per-flight-hour figure. First World War military accounting did not track aircraft the way air forces do today, unit prices moved with wartime contracts and inflation, and the type was built and consumed inside a national war economy. What can be said is that it was a cheap, simple, mass-producible aircraft — wood, wire, fabric and a rotary engine — deliberately so, because attrition at the front was brutal and airframes were expected to be short-lived.

We mark unit cost, cost per flight hour and programme cost as not reliably recorded rather than inventing precise figures. Any exact pound-sterling number quoted for a 1916 DH.2 should be treated with caution.

The DH.2 was essentially a single production type rather than a family of major variants; changes were largely limited to engine fit (Gnome Monosoupape or, on some aircraft, the Le Rhône) and detail modifications. It served exclusively with the Royal Flying Corps, most famously with Nos. 24, 29 and 32 Squadrons on the Western Front.

After withdrawal from France it continued with Home Defence flights in Britain and in secondary theatres including the Middle East (Palestine and Sinai) and the Macedonian front. There were no foreign military operators; the type never entered civilian service, and every genuine airframe had been scrapped by 1918.