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***image1***By 1916, the third year of World War I, the military aircraft was firmly established as a weapon and German and British aircraft were regularly used for strafing and low-level bombing. But the hundreds of machine guns in the trenches caused heavy losses to the fragile biplanes on both sides; the British tended to ignore the losses, but the Germans began to develop an aircraft strictly for ground attack.
Professor Hugo Junkers had built a strong, all-metal monoplane in 1916 but Junkers had little experience with mass production, so the German High Command persuaded him to work with Anthony Fokker (whom Junkers disliked) on a new, armored two-seater biplane for low-level ground attack, observation and army cooperation.
The result was the J.1 – the first airplane in the world designed solely for ground attack. It was a sesquiplane (a biplane with one wing much smaller than the other) that had a one piece, five-millimeter thick chrome-nickel sheet-steel armored “bathtub” running from just behind the propeller to the gunner’s position. This armored tub served as both the main fuselage structure and provided effective protection against machine gun fire for the 200 horsepower liquid-cooled engine and the crew.
The rest of the aircraft was made of a framework of thin duraluminum tubes covered with sheets of corrugated aluminum, a “tin roof” design which was a feature of most pre-World War II Junkers aircraft, most notably the Ju-52 transport.
The J.1 first flew in late January 1917 and, while heavy and not particularly maneuverable, it was almost as fast as contemporary fighters. It was enthusiastically received and the German Air Force immediately ordered 50 examples, making it the first all-metal aircraft to be mass produced, and by August 1917, the aircrews at the front were taking the first deliveries.
The J.1’s heavy armor and armament made it ideal for low-level missions and it was very popular with its crews, who dubbed it the Möbelwagen – moving van. The J.1 units were organized into special reconnaissance and ground attack squadrons and were the first combat aircraft units equipped with radios, which they used to report troop movements.
Junkers and Fokker produced a total of 227 J.1s and in March 1918, J.1s were responsible for singlehandedly stopping a British tank attack – the first pure anti-tank mission in aviation history.
Junkers also developed the first all-metal monoplane fighter, the D.1, but few were produced before the war ended.
At the end of WWI, Junkers moved his aircraft manufacturing equipment out of Germany into the Soviet Union. The Soviets found Junkers’ all-metal construction techniques ideal for the bad weather in Russia, and used the D.1 fighter as a model for some of their early fighter designs, such as the Grigorovich I-Z.
Apparently, the J.1 and its armored “tub” were noted by Soviet designer Sergei Ilyushin, whose design bureau installed an armored tub in the WWII Ilyushin Il-2 Shturmovik – Stalin’s “Warthog.”
