Fokker Dr 1 Aces of World War 1 (Review)

Fokker Dr 1 Aces of World War 1 (Review)

‘ve always thought of writing a semi-fictional book about World War One aviation. I realized there is far more to know than just the planes. Did pilots use zippers or buttons on their flies? Did they drink coffee (could the Germans even get coffee by 1918?). What was the slang, the thoughts, even the haircuts. Think about your own life and the number of little items in it – now imagine trying to write a compelling story at some level of detail.

In the end, I still love flying so I wrote a book about crows, an excellent book that didn’t sell, dammit.

But the point was, in reading Franks’ and VanWyngarden’s Fokker Dr 1 Aces of World War 1, I now knew how little I actually knew.

This book (one of the Osprey Airfraft of the Aces series) had everything you could possibly want to know about the aces who scored kills using the dreaded (and slow) Fokker Dr 1 triplane. They go jasta (squadron) by jasta, ace by ace, listing every detail about then, how they lived, what were they like, how they died (in the war or after). It was quite an impressive effort for one of those small hobby books.  Most impressive were the color plates, pages and pages of researched paint schemes (the Germans allowed their pilots to paint their planes any-old-how). The authors would look at B&W pictures of the pilots in front of their planes and find every account about the aircraft in question and then present the planes (profile and top wing view) to show the best-guess view of the plane in question.

While there were surprises in these pages, the biggest one (for me) was about Werner Voss’s sky-blue triplane and why there was a weird face (with a mustache) on the nose. Turns out that Voss’s father was involved in some sort of import/export business with Japan, and as a child, he got a Japanese fighting kite with that same face on it. See, the detail?

So a great book for anyone either building a model or curious about the people and planes of the time. A real eye-opener for me.

>>>MY BOOKS FOR SALE DOWN THIS LINK, EXCEPT FOR THE CROW BOOK, DAMMIT<<<