WAR

In layout the new monoplane somewhat resembled the Bleriot machine
flown by Pegoud, but to its construction Fokker brought a real innovation: the
fuselage and wing skeletons were built of welded steel tubing instead of wood.
This was eminently characteristic. Fokker usually borrowed ideas, in this case
the form of the aeroplane was inspired by the French monoplanes, but he made
a stronger aeroplane by using steel tubing. The gifted mechanic could always
do something a little better, and in the new M.5, Fokker looped and stunted
about Germany, thrilling his audiences, and, what is of particular importance,
making a stunning impression on General von Falkenhayn, the Minister of War,
who witnessed one of Fokker's flying exhibitions in the spring of 1914.
Fokker's extraordinary flying so moved the newspaper reporters that they
called him and his dainty monoplane the "masters of the sky."
but the sky was dark in the east, the end of the world was near, and there
was now no time left for the happy games that had been played in the last
bubbly days of peace.
There were no fighter aeroplanes as such and there would not be for some
time. But there were fighters. The first man to land at Amiens on the occasion
of the RFC fly-over, Lieutenant H. D. Harvey-Kelly of No. 2 Squadron, was flying
an observation mission on August 26, 1914, with two other B.E.2a's. Near the
front lines the pilots spotted a German reconnaissance machine and impulsively
gave chase, banging away at it with pistols. Somehow they forced the machine
down and its pilot landed it in a field. As the British machines landed beside it
the pilot and observer scrambled out and went tearing for the woods. Lieutenants
Harvey-Kelly and Mansfield charged into the woods after them, waving their
pistols in the air, but returned in a few minutes hot and out of breath, having
been distanced handily by their quarry. They had to be satisfied with setting fire
to the enemv aeroplane, a somewhat left-handed victory.
Harvey-Kelly lounges under
the nose of old 347.