Oct 16th 2016: Centenary of the Raid on Oberndorf

The Belfort Aerodrome and its WWI events
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LesterBoffo
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Oct 16th 2016: Centenary of the Raid on Oberndorf

Postby LesterBoffo » Sun Sep 11, 2016 12:36 am

It will be 100 years ago on that date, that a small, valiant group of WWI French bomber crews, supported by both British and Americans flying for France, embarked on an ambitious early morning bombing raid on the Mauser weapon factory in Oberndorf. Historically it was a failure and lost more than half the planes and crews tasked. Depending on who you talk to, the damage at the factory was either slight or substantial.

It was flown with the last version of the Farman MF11 biz with the Renault V12 These were known by their crews as 'Chicken Coops' and other less appraising epithets. Ironically there were better planes available, but the lead commander of the Belfort Escadrille of MF29, Maurice Happe, had shaped up a group of pilots and bomber/gunner/observers that were truly respected by their German counterparts. That there was a 25,000 German ReichsMark bounty on his flight group and on Happe himself, spoke of the troubles he was causing the factories and towns of the Black Forest and Saarbrucken region.

To those wanting to join, this will be on the historic date of October 16th, which is a Sunday. We will start gathering at about 16:00 UTC, and hopefully will have enough interested to fly the entire 300+ kilometer flight course. Starting airport would have historically been at Luxieul but since we have Belfort, I would prefer to use it for the ambiance. The aircraft will be hopefully authentic to this flight, in the MF11 it's going to be a few hours long flight. We''ll start at Belfort, climb to 4000' and gather up our group and then head across the Vosges to Lahr EDTR, and at Lahr we''ll head due East towards Winzeln-Schramberg EDTW which is just a few miles West of Oberndorf, where we'll then circle and return to Belfort direct heading ( as the crow flys..)

I'd like to keep the planes used as historic as possible There would have been some good Eindekker pilots out of Housen and Habsheim, but the Fokker was long in the tooth at that stage, the IGAS already had better fighters like the Halberstadt DII and the Albatros D.I was about to make a rare appearance later in October over Verdun.

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Re: Oct 16th 2016: Centenary of the Raid on Obendorf

Postby IAHM-COL » Sun Sep 11, 2016 7:19 am

I'll test those WWI warriors and I'll report.
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Re: Oct 16th 2016: Centenary of the Raid on Obendorf

Postby jwocky » Sun Sep 11, 2016 2:47 pm

It's Oberndorf and the plant is actually still there. I guess, there are not enough pilots interested to fly the German KEK (Kampfeinsitzerkommando) Habsheim. There were indeed some fairly good German pilots stationed there (Ernst Udet who would end the war with 62 air victories for example, had his first five of them by October 1916 and flew in Oct 1916 one of the first DIIIs, Manfred von Richthofen operated out of Velú which seems not too far away with a DI, Erwin Böhme, sometimes using still his Halberstadt, and Hans Reiman on DI were at the time also with Jasta 2 out of Vélu. In October 1916 also Werner Voss served in Jasta 2onAlbatros Di and later Dreidecker. And there was of course Oswald Boelcke, the squadron leader of Jasta 2 on DII, whowas in October 1916 still leading in victories before Richthofen, KAK Vaux, later Jasta 4, was operating on the first Albatros D.II, with pilots like Rudolf Berthold, Wilhelm Frankl, Walter Höhndorf and Ernst Freiherr von Althaus. All of them would become aces. Bruno Loerzer was in October 1916 with KEK Habsheim, another ace). So actually the term "some fairly good pilots" describes here about the upper third of the German WWI ace list.
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Re: Oct 16th 2016: Centenary of the Raid on Obendorf

Postby jwocky » Sun Sep 11, 2016 3:45 pm

And about the success of the raid ...
22 British Aircraft and between 21 and 34 French Aircraft (the French book keeping was a pain). The Brits were 9 Sopwith Bombers, 6 Bregueat and seven Sopwith Fighters. The French had (at least) 12 Farman F.42,7 Breuget IV one Breguet V and 1 Sopwith fighter (the latter two borrowed from RNAS). They also had 4 Nieuport 17s from Escadrille N.124 and the Escadrille Americaine was flying escort.
The flights took off with separations of five to ten minutes which meant, it took from 1:15pm to after 2:00pm to bring all the planes up and in the meantime a bank of clouds moved i. The last flight of bombers therefore had to return without even crossing the lines.
For the others, it was a 225 miles ride to Oberndorf and back. The first Sopwith bomber fell victim to a Fkooer D.II flown by Lt. Ludwig Hanstein (another "failry good" alter ace). During that attack a Sopwith fighter tried to intercept and got himself engine trouble, so he had to return without being hit by enemy bullets, just for technical difficulties. There would be more and some of them had to go down without even seeing a German fighter due to technical difficulties. Other planes got damaged and crashed later during landing attempts. Norman Prince, originally Escadrille Americaine, flew escort on that raid, got his plane seriously damaged by a German fighter, had to return and crashed when the gear caught some telegraph cables near the air base. He died three days later (it seems the French telegraph service was almost as effective against French planes as the Luftwaffe).
Allegedly, I have only some obvious propaganda articles from entete reporters, of the more then 40 plaes, 33 returned. The authors usually forgot to mention the at least 12 planes returned before they even reached Oberndorf.

Oberndorf meant and still means two things Majolika and Mauser. Majolika produces table wear but aside of the line "the Germans threw everything at them including the table ware and boiler plate" was not really relevant as target. However, since those plants were next to each other back then, Majolika was identified wrongfully as part of Mauser and hits on the table ware manufacturer added to the delusion that they had achieved a big victory.
Mauser produced a lot of arms and therefore, there aws some heavy AA artillery concentration around. The bombers actually approached the factories cross over the Mauser test field, so even those guys got some shots at them. Nevertheless, they flew through the defensive AA fire and delivered their bombs. Most hits were achieved on the Majolika side. On the Mauser side ... well, that is such a story. They produced machine guns and mostly infantry rifles there, the infamous Kar98. Some bombs hit buildings of Mauser, even photos are rare. But since Mauser took up production already with the night shift and was able to roll out deliveries of Kar98s the next morning, the damage can't have been too significant. Germany was at this time equipping several new units with Kar98s from Mauser in Oberndorf and it doesn't appear as if there were any delays.

The historical value of the Oberndorf raid lies not in its success. The use of infantry attacks along the whole front sector to distract the Germans away from the flight paths of the planes was a good idea, but it failed because communication had late in 1916 already too effective. The new role of communication in war (which earlier in 1870/71 and before there in the first highly mechanized war, the American Civil War had been still secondary) became clear for the first time in this raid.
The other thing is, while Oberndorf was not successful in terms of damage done, it showed one of the most important effects of air power, the ability to reach in a short time relative far away targets. While the number of guns and production buildings destroyed was insignificant, the possibility of that kind of operation forced the Germans to put more stress on their fighter squadrons (Jastas). Which then again meant less German bombers and recons could be produced because Germany needed fighters to prevent such raids. This kind of thinking, the use of air power for psychologically effective would become later in history part of the arsenal. 24 years later, with the Doolittle Raid, Americans would use that and force Japan's Navy, which had nothing really to do with that right, into the Battle of Midway. Of course, there are books and movies about Midway, even about the Doolittle Raid and not much about the Oberndorf Raid, but Oberndorf was where this line of thinking started.
And Oberndorf was the beginning of another line of thinking, even that seems to be missed by most authors. After Oberndorf some asked the question "what, if we could have instead of bombs, could have landed soldiers?". It was just a question tossed around. And a question, the Germans wondered themselves about. Of course, it was WWI, everybody was busy with thousand other things, but some stuck with that question. The idea per se was not new, Benjamin Franklin for example had envisioned "sky soldiers" already in 1784, but of course the understanding of the principles of parachuting were then still too crude. But in WWI, after Oberndorf, the question was asked again, there were experiments, plans, in short a development. In 1917, Churchill suggested to form airborne assault forces, indicating, only a year after Oberndorf, they had mastered the technical problems (mostly). In late 1918, elements of the U.S. 1. Division were trained to be dropped behind the German lines at Metz. But Germany surrendered before this operation could be executed.
Then, between the wars was of course a lot of development, up to developing the abilities to land troops in corps size in airborne operations. The development included already in the early 1920s parachute and glider troops, which, as history would show, would see a lot of action in WWII. But it all started with the questions after Oberndorf.
So, while throwing bombs was not that successful, the Oberndorf Raid is kind of a first milestone to several of the crucial points modern air war and as this, it is hard to overestimate it's historical significance.
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Re: Oct 16th 2016: Centenary of the Raid on Oberndorf

Postby LesterBoffo » Sun Sep 11, 2016 6:01 pm

Wow, extensive historic background on this in your post Jwocky, I shame my good German name for the omission of the 'r' in Oberndorf. :oops:

My main source on this raid was an old book by R, Mason son of one of the Escadrille Lafayette pilots of 1917-18. Knowing what I did when I read that book, "The Lafayette Escadrille" the Chapter, 'Oberndorf: Journey into Darkness', it didn't occur to me that the effect of this raid would have on the German military. Mason's narrative had all the KEK fighters as EIII's, with a few Ago C-2's also flying offensive support. Note that the British ace Ray Collingshaw of Naval 3, flew one of the Sopwith Half-Strutter fighter escorts. The fuel range of the Nieuport 11's tasked with defense limited them to intercepting the return leg of Happe's flight. They were considering using the heavier Nieuport 12 two-seater which would have made the entire trip, but it was still under an evaluation, and Naval 3 lost two pilots to joy-riding in one of Esc. MF29's N12's because of C/G problems.

The French Bombing Command wrote off this mission as a failure and bombed Maurice Happe's career with the French Air Service. Pretty galling when you consider that Maurice had struggled with procurement of any kind of effective aircraft for his squadron, having to accept older, more obsolete types, yet despite these handicaps he managed to establish fundamentals in defensive aircraft grouping that kept all the planes covered by defensive fire arcs. He also trained his crews extensively in bomb sighting, targeting and knowing the flight area so well that they could fly accurately using gaps in the clouds for land mark recognition.

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Re: Oct 16th 2016: Centenary of the Raid on Oberndorf

Postby LesterBoffo » Sun Sep 11, 2016 6:31 pm

List of this centenary flight's aircraft:

M Farman 11 Biz-a http://www.mediafire.com/download/ast5vkwt4895fr2/MF-11biz-a.zip
Neiuport 11
Fokker Eindekker III http://www.mediafire.com/download/ulu96yc6dysma56/Fokker-Eindecker-EIII.zip
We don't have the Sopwith Strutters, but I think we can substitute the AVRO 504..http://www.mediafire.com/download/rk391kkpuro1x6n/AVRO-504-D.zip
I don't know if I'll have the time to do a fair job on modding Helijah's Fokker Eindekker III to a Doppledekker II or III, the later version being equipped with the Twin Row 160 HP Oberusal, which was considered a miserable fighter.
Since the Aviatik Factory was in Freiburg, the Aviatik CI would be part of the aircraft encountered. http://www.mediafire.com/download/gpqcbmzqh91tco6/Aviatik-CI.zip

Please Israel, if you can update or add any aircraft I've mentioned in my links to FGMEMBERS, The MF11Bis will be NONGPL.

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Re: Oct 16th 2016: Centenary of the Raid on Oberndorf

Postby IAHM-COL » Sun Sep 11, 2016 6:54 pm

quick question Lesbof.
Is the Red Baron's fokker a good choice for me to test out?
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Re: Oct 16th 2016: Centenary of the Raid on Oberndorf

Postby IAHM-COL » Sun Sep 11, 2016 6:55 pm

LesterBoffo wrote:Please Israel, if you can update or add any aircraft I've mentioned in my links to FGMEMBERS, The MF11Bis will be NONGPL.



Thanks for the note Lesbof! :D
It will be my pleasure to update.

Quick question: NON-GPL, does this stand for CC BY-NC-SA 3.0 ? [More specifically?]
https://raw.githubusercontent.com/IAHM-COL/gpg-pubkey/master/pubkey.asc

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If we gave everybody in the World free software today, but we failed to teach them about the four freedoms, five years from now, would they still have it?

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Re: Oct 16th 2016: Centenary of the Raid on Oberndorf

Postby LesterBoffo » Sun Sep 11, 2016 7:10 pm

IAHM-COL wrote:quick question Lesbof.
Is the Red Baron's fokker a good choice for me to test out?


The Dreidekker is a little later in the war, late 1917 through early-mid 1918.

The Fokker EIII, the Aviatik C.I and Albatros C.III would be good alternatives. I have an Halberstadt D.II that will be added for the flight.

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Re: Oct 16th 2016: Centenary of the Raid on Oberndorf

Postby LesterBoffo » Sun Sep 11, 2016 7:12 pm

IAHM-COL wrote:
LesterBoffo wrote:Please Israel, if you can update or add any aircraft I've mentioned in my links to FGMEMBERS, The MF11Bis will be NONGPL.



Thanks for the note Lesbof! :D
It will be my pleasure to update.

Quick question: NON-GPL, does this stand for CC BY-NC-SA 3.0 ? [More specifically?]


Yes I believe so, to mention or retain the original Author's freeware comments, Non commercial, Share-Alike.


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