When World War I began, powered flight was barely ten years old, but all the major combatant armies had small air forces. These early aircraft were slow, primitive, and unarmed, and mainly used for reconnaissance and artillery spotting. But soon pilots were taking up pistols and rifles to attack the enemy. Within months a way of mounting machine guns so that they could fire through an aircraft's propellors had been invented, and the first fighters were born. For the next three years, flown by aces - such as Manfred von Richthofen, Albert Ball, and Georges Guynemer - whose exploits became legendary, they grappled over the Western Front in massive dogfights. The impetus of war produced a whole new range of aerial combat.
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