Roland Garros is shot down behind German lines and taken prisoner. His plane is recovered intact by the Germans, which results in a technological leap forward for aerial warfare.
Garros was an aspiring concert pianist who gained fame as an aviator prior to World War I when he flew nonstop across the Mediterranean Sea. He’s considered the first true fighter pilot in history.
He joined the French army at the outbreak of hostilities and was soon engaged in the new aerial combat. Finding it too difficult to fly and shoot at the same time, Garros mounted a forward-firing machine gun to his plane and fitted metal deflector plates to the propeller to protect it from the bullets. The enhancement allowed Garros to attack head-on, and he shot down five German planes within two weeks, becoming the war’s first ace.
After Garros was shot down (ironically, by ground fire), his plane was turned over to Anthony Fokker, a Dutch aircraft engineer building planes for Germany. Improving on Garros’s idea, Fokker’s team designed the interrupter gear that synchronized the propeller and the gun’s firing action, allowing bullets to pass between the prop blades without striking them. This became standard on German aircraft and soon was copied in Allied aircraft. The mayhem was on.
Garros himself managed to escape from a POW camp in early 1918. After making his way back to French lines, he returned to combat. He was shot down and killed in October 1918, a month before the war ended.
If Garros’s name sounds familiar, you may have heard it in a different context: the tennis center in Paris where the annual French Open is played is named for Roland Garros.—TL