The Fokker Eindecker was a GermanFirst World Warmonoplane single-seat fighter aircraft designed by Dutch engineer Anthony Fokker. Developed in April 1915, the Eindecker ("Monoplane") was the first purpose-built German fighter aircraft and the first aircraft to be fitted with interrupter gear, enabling the pilot to fire a machine gun through the arc of the propeller without striking the blades. The Eindecker granted the German air force almost complete supremacy from July 1915 until early 1916; a period known as the Fokker Scourge during which Allied aviators regarded themselves as "Fokker Fodder".
Total production was 416 aircraft (one aircraft's type is unknown). The main difference between the E.I and E.II was the engine, the former having the 7-cylinder 80 hp Oberurselradial engine while the latter had the 9-cylinder 100 hp version. Production of the types therefore depended on engine availability and the two variants were built in parallel. Many E.IIs were either completed as E.IIIs or upgraded to E.III standard when returned for repair.
The Eindecker was based on Fokker's unarmed M.5K scout which was fitted with an interrupter mechanism controlling a single Parabellum machine gun. Anthony Fokker personally demonstrated the system, having towed the prototype aircraft behind his touring car to a military airfield near Berlin. The first Eindecker victory was achieved by Leutnant Kurt Wintgens on 1 July, 1915 when, while flying the M.5K prototype, he forced down a French Morane-Saulnier Type L monoplane. By this time the first of 54 production Fokker E.Is were arriving at front-line units. The two most famous Eindecker pilots were Oswald Boelcke and Max Immelmann, both of Feldflieger Abteilung 62, who scored their first kills in E.Is in August of 1915.
The definitive version of the Eindecker was the Fokker E.III. Boelcke's Abteilung 62 began operating the E.III towards the end of 1915. Some E.IIIs were armed with twin Spandau lMG 08 machine guns. The final variant was the Fokker E.IV which received a 160-hp engine and was fitted with twin machine guns as standard.
With the arrival in early 1916 of the DH.2 and F.E.2pushers along with the Nieuport 11, Sopwith Pup and Sopwith 1˝ Strutter, the dominance of the Eindecker evaporated and the first Fokker Scourge ended.
References
Phillip Jarrett, "Database: The Fokker Eindeckers", Aeroplane Monthly, December 2004
Fokker senior's doubts were confounded in the early war years when '33 his son not only repaid every penny with interest, but declined his patrimony; whatever he might need thereafter, it would never again be money from his father.
Fokker had never even handled a gun before, but he knew at once that deflector plates on the propeller were a poor solution to the problem.
Fokker, still only twenty-eight, had also built up a cash fortune of some 30,000,000 marks (about $7,000,000), and he was able to smuggle out most of this by converting it to foreign currency and packing it in old suitcases or aboard his yacht.
In April of 1916 a captured Eindecker was tested by the Allies, and found to be inferior in performance to its Morane-Saulnier opposite number.
The Eindecker, ironically, was unseated by aircraft already available before Fokker’s invention of the interrupter gear, and none of them ever had interrupter gear installed.
If the Fokker Scourge was symbolically opened by Boelcke’s first victory, it was symbolically closed when Max Immelmann was killed during a fight with an FE2b on June 18th 1916.
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