JF Ptak Science Books Quick Post
It seems to me that this is the first time that a spotter’s guide to enemy aircraft appeared in The Illustrated London News for WWI–ditto the Illustrirte Zeitung. I luckily own both journals covering the war years, and I’ve been through every page of coverage, and I do believe that this is probably a very early display of German aircraft identification for popular use. Of course it couldn’t really get that much earlier, as the war was on for 150 days or so. And the “air forces” in general were very new–the German army received their first aircraft in 1910 for what would eventually become the (for France it was 1911), so the concept of a unified fighting force of the air was still very new. In another 1111 days or so, the aircraft losses for the Entente and the Central Powers would be about 110,000, or about 5,500 of these pages showing destroyed aircraft.
