Airmen Claim the Night Skies

Airmen did not wait long to exploit what writer George Sterling called the “star-usurping battlements of night.” Aviation pioneers flew their fragile aircraft into the gloom, in search of the camouflage of darkness and in pursuit of enemy aircraft seeking the same edge. In 1909, Wilbur Wright and Army 2d Lt. Frederick E. Humphreys became the first Americans to fly at night, orbiting College Park, Maryland, in Signal Corps Airplane No. 1 for forty-two minutes and drawing a large crowd from Baltimore and Washington. The genesis of aerial night fighting, however, came in World War I from a Germany desperate to break through the morass of trench warfare on the Western Front. The Germans sent bombers to England to carry the war to the home front-behind the armies in the field.

The first true night fighter aircraft were British, struggling to hunt down German Zeppelins lurking in the night skies over England in 1915. These slow behemoths were sitting ducks in daylight, so they were used primarily after dark. For six months British airmen struggled to find the Zeppelins and shoot them down. This effort exposed several problems: once notified, how to ascend and reach the enemy’s altitude before he flew out of range; how to find the enemy in a darkened sky; and, finally, how to knock him down. Technology soon provided answers, allowing R. A. J. Warneford to use aerial bombs to claim the first Zeppelin in June 1915. British night defenses exacted an increasing toll, claiming 79 of the 123 airships Germany built for the war.

The enemy then switched from Zeppelins to a bomber airplane offensive against England. At first striking by day, German Gothas and Giants soon sought the night’s protection from British defenses. What airmen lost in bombing accuracy by flying at night they more than made up in safety against enemy defenses. The night assault caught the public’s imagination, but caused no serious damage. British planes performed well against German bombers protected by machine guns and the dark; in fact, the night itself proved the greater danger. In nineteen night raids, the defense, guided by radio intercepts, ground observers, searchlights, and blind luck, claimed twenty-four invading bombers, while thirty-six others were destroyed in unrelated crashes. Together, German bombers and airships claimed about 1,400 dead on the ground and nearly 3,400 injured, enough to threaten the British sense of pride and breach the insular protection previously afforded by the English Channel. Though the German aerial offensive hardly threatened the British war effort, it did force a diversion of eight hundred British fighters from the Western Front, where they were sorely needed. Though primitive, this first “Battle of Britain” set the stage for the aerial night fighting in the next war.