Sorry, Red Baron, Smithsonian Says Wwi Is Overrated As Air War

WASHINGTON - Forget what you heard about the Red Baron or watched in movie dogfights pitting Fokkers and Pfalzes against Spads and Sopwith Snipes. The Smithsonian Institution doesn't think aviation contributed much in World War I.

The National Air and Space Museum last week opened an exhibit designed to show that World War I flying wasn't the big deal it's been made out to be.

"I think it's safe to say it is the first time the museum is trying to debunk the myth," said Dominick Pisano, lead curator for the exhibit "Legend, Memory and the Great War in the Air."

"The basic idea is to set the record straight what aviation in World War I was all about," Pisano said.

World War I aviation, thought of as dogfights and derring-do and the pursuit of infamous German flying ace Manfred von Richthofen, lived through pulp magazines, comic books and model making in the minds of untold numbers of children.

"Curse you, Red Baron," the Peanuts character Snoopy echoed time after time.

Buffs won't like it, but the fact is that many of the Red Baron's 80 kills came not in dogfights but through stealth and surprise. That did not stop Floyd Gibbons from writing in his bestseller about von Richthofen that "he fought fair, hard and to kill, and the better his foeman fought to kill him, the better he liked him for it."

Such idolatry made Richthofen a hero to many a youngster in the 1920s and '30s. Reflecting that fact, the Smithsonian included a typical boy's room in the exhibit, complete with a BB gun, socks on the floor and an airplane model hanging from the ceiling.

World War I, which pitted Germany and its allies against France, Britain, Russia, Italy and the United States, cost more than 11 million lives.

Because the war was fought chiefly in the trenches, "only fliers seemed capable of moving where they wished - free from the mud, barbed wire and anonymous mass death of the trench war," the exhibit notes.

Hanging from the ceiling of the exhibit is a Spad 13, the dominant airplane flown by French and U.S. pilots, its two .30-caliber Marlin machine guns still looking menacing.

Some famous planes are represented only by scale models, including the Jeannin Stahltaube ("steel pigeon"), a German plane designed for reconnaissance. But some aviators carried pistols, and others dropped aerial darts on the enemy.

Ground troops envied the fliers, but theirs was no easy task. The pilots were sent into combat with little training, causing Cecil Lewis of the Royal Flying Corps to say in 1916: "Fourteen hours! It's absolutely disgraceful to send pilots overseas with so little flying. . . . My God, it's murder."

Some fledgling pilots, the exhibit points out, never even had driven an automobile before they learned to fly. Instructional aids? The Royal Flying Corps used posters to illustrate some of the hazards of flying.

Among those was the Lewis machine gun with a drum of only 47 rounds, mounted on the pusher-engine F.E.8 (for British Fighter Experiment). To change the drum during combat, the pilot had to release the airplane's controls, remove the empty drum and replace it, all the while fighting the blast of the slipstream.

Pisano said: "We are really trying to make you understand how the airplane was used."