Koninklijke Luchtmacht - History - Great War
The crest of the Royal Netherlands Air Force bears the words Parvus Numero––Magnus Merito ("small in number but great in merit"). The beginning of this force was indeed very small. On 1 July 1913, Queen Wilhelmina of the Netherlands established by Royal Decree an aeronautical section as part of the Royal Netherlands Army. In its early days, this aeronautical section consisted of one automobile, one borrowed aeroplane, and three pilots, soon to be reinforced by three Farman F-20 aircraft, the well-known French pre-World War I model.
Three years before, in 1910, the first Dutch pilots had received their wings in France; and that same year, on 1 October 1910, one of them, H. Wijnmalen, scored the world's high-altitude record by climbing to a height of 2800 meters. Also in 1910, on 26 March, the Netherlands War Minister had installed a "Military Aeronautics Committee" to report on the issue of "aeronautics…both from a military and a technical viewpoint." The final report of that committee is dated 9 April 1912 and consists of more than 100 pages. Much attention is devoted to the use of balloons. The committee recommends the creation of an aeronautical section, however, in order to compensate for the weakness of the Dutch cavalry.
The newborn aeronautical section was based at Soesterberg, the same air base from which the USAF 32d Tactical Fighter Squadron is now operating but at that time no more than a piece of dry heathery land. When the First World War broke out in 1914, its strength had risen to eight aircraft. The Netherlands government had decided on a policy of strict neutrality; in consequence, the Dutch aircraft had to fly reconnaissance missions along the Netherlands borders, which––more often than not––resulted in a simple three-word debriefing: "Nothing to report." The short ranges of the Farmans necessitated the use of additional airstrips in the southern and eastern part of the Netherlands, some of which are still in use with today's air force. Also, in 1916, the Dutch government bought a piece of land near Amsterdam in order to be able to concentrate its air fleet behind the main Dutch defense line, the so-called Dutch water line, if the Netherlands should become involved in the war. This airstrip later became Holland's national airport, Schiphol.
As a result of the war, no spare parts could be imported from France, and Dutch engineers had to improvise; but the same war provided (rather surprisingly) many additional aircraft, as more and more foreign pilots were forced to make emergency landings on Dutch territory. By the end of World War I, not less than 107 aircraft were interned and––unless they were too much damaged––bought by the Dutch from the original owners. The young Dutch air arm thus became a peculiar mixture of aircraft, but its pilots were certainly among the most versatile in the world.
When World War I ended, the situation in the Netherlands did not differ greatly from that in other countries. Everybody believed that this had been the war to end all wars, and defense funds became scarce. Nonetheless, the 1919-40 period will be remembered because of some remarkable feats, such as the performances of the first Netherlands stunt team, the "five fingers of one hand," as they were called, and the first flight to the then-Netherlands Indies in 1924 in a Fokker F-VII civilian airplane, manned by KLM's chief-pilot Thomassen á Thuessink van der Hoop and Lieutenant Van Weerden Poelman. This first trip took no less than fifty-four days, but it marked the beginning of KLM's international airline schedules. In 1932, two open-cockpit Fokker D-VII aircraft were stationed in Iceland for meteorological observations during the Second International Pole Year. These observations were made at an altitude of 18,000 feet!
During World War I, Anthony Fokker had lived and worked in Germany, but he came back to his native country and founded Fokker Aircraft Industries, the main supplier of military aircraft for the Dutch air arm between 1920 and 1940. In 1919, the Dutch government placed an order for fifty-six Fokker C-1 reconnaissance aircraft and twenty single-seat Fokker D-VII fighter aircraft. The main weapon system for reconnaissance and fighter purposes became the Fokker C-5 single-engine, two-seat biplane, some of which were still in operational service when the war broke out in May 1940.
Its successor, the Fokker C-10, was the last biplane to be introduced in the Netherlands air arm. It was in full operational service during the early days of the war and, although it was inferior to the modern Messerschmitt aircraft, Dutch pilots outwitted their German opponents by what became known as the "house-tree-animal" technique of flying very low over the flat Dutch countryside.
