Schuh, Horst Luftkrieg über Front und Heimat 1914/18

Flieger und Luftschiffer zwischen Westfront und Rhein

1914 marks the beginning of an armed conflict on a global scale, resulting in millions of deaths. The modern "mass killers" are machine guns and artillery in particular, as well as poison gas as a chemical weapon that kills silently. With the new weapons technology, tanks and aeroplanes also appear. In order to escape the anonymous mass deaths in the drumfire, in the clouds of poison gas and in the mud of the trenches, thousands sign up for the air force. They were encouraged in this decision not only by a generally promoted enthusiasm for technology and flying, but above all by the image propagated by the media of the combat-ready and death-defying aviation hero. For example, a Rhenish farmer's son from the Eifel region, Peter Falkenstein, emerges from the nameless army of front-line fighters to attack cities and defence sites in the enemy's hinterland as the pilot of a large fighter plane. In addition to causing material destruction, strategic air warfare aimed to weaken the morale and willingness of the civilian population to fight. The attacks by German airships and aeroplanes on London and Paris were answered by the French and British air forces with bombing raids on Rhineland cities such as Düsseldorf, Cologne, Koblenz and Trier. The German homeland air defence countered these attacks with anti-aircraft and single-seat fighter squadrons. The Rhineland thus became the theatre of an air war which, for the inhabitants, already contained a premonition of the horrors of bombing terror in the Second World War. The end of the war in 1918 also signalled the demise of the German air force.