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WWI Maj Lanoe Hawker British Ace PVC Patch

Aviators! Are you looking for a high-quality patch you’ll proudly wear or display? Look no further than the WWI Maj Lanoe Hawker British Ace PVC Patch!

• 3.5″ patch
• PVC
• US Naval Aviator Owned Business
• Hook and Loop
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Lanoe George Hawker, VC, DSO (30 December 1890 – 23 November 1916) was a British flying ace of the First World War. Having seven credited victories, he was the third pilot to receive the Victoria Cross, the highest decoration for gallantry awarded to British and Commonwealth servicemen.

He was killed in a dogfight with the famous German flying ace Manfred von Richthofen (“The Red Baron”), who described him as “the British Boelcke”.[1]

Following an initial air victory in June, on 25 July 1915 when on patrol over Passchendaele, Captain Hawker attacked three German aircraft in succession, flying a different Bristol Scout C, serial No. 1611, after his earlier No. 1609 had been written off, transplanting the custom Lewis gun mount onto No. 1611. The first aerial victory for Hawker that day occurred after he had emptied a complete drum of bullets from his aircraft’s single Lewis machine gun into it, sending it spinning down. The second was driven to the ground damaged, and the third – an Albatros C.I of FFA 3[11] – which he attacked at a height of about 10,000 feet, burst into flames and crashed. (Pilot Oberleutnant Uebelacker and observer Hauptmann Roser were both killed.) For this feat he was awarded the Victoria Cross,[12][13] as the third military pilot (and the first fighter pilot) to receive the VC following William Barnard Rhodes-Moorhouse’s pioneering award for bravery during a bombing raid, and Reginald Warneford’s award for an anti-Zeppelin attack on an airborne Deutsches Heer airship, using aerial bombing to bring it down.

This particular sortie was just one of the many which Captain Hawker undertook during almost a year of constant operational flying and fighting. He claimed at least three more victories in August 1915, either in the Scout or flying an F.E.2.[citation needed]

Hawker was posted back to England in late 1915, with some seven victory claims (including one captured, three destroyed, one ‘out of control’ and one ‘forced to land’) making him the first British flying ace, and a figure of considerable fame within the ranks of the RFC.

It has since been argued that shooting down three aircraft in one mission was a feat repeated several times by later pilots, and whether Hawker deserved his Victoria Cross has been questioned. However, in the context of the air war of mid-1915 it was unusual to shoot down even one aircraft, and the VC was awarded on the basis that all the enemy planes were armed with machine guns. More significantly, by the early summer of 1915, the German Feldflieger Abteilung two-seater observation units of the future Luftstreitkräfte, had by this time, received examples of the Fokker Eindecker monoplane, with one Eindecker going to each unit, with a fixed, forward-firing machine gun fitted with a “synchronization gear” that prevented the bullets from striking the propeller. The first claim using this arrangement, though unconfirmed by the German Army, was by Leutnant Kurt Wintgens on 1 July 1915, some 225 miles (362 km) over Lunéville distant from where Hawker had his three-victory success nearly a month later. Therefore, the German pilots like Wintgens and Leutnant Otto Parschau, another pioneering Eindecker pilot, could employ the simple combat tactic of aiming the whole aircraft, and presenting a small target to the enemy while approaching from any angle, preferably from a blind spot where the enemy observer could not return fire.

Hawker flew before Britain had any workable synchroniser gear, so his Bristol Scout had its machine gun mounted on the left side of the cockpit, firing forwards and sideways at a 45 degree angle to avoid the propeller. The only direction from which he could attack an enemy was from its right rear quarter – precisely in a direction from which it was easy for the observer to fire at him. Thus, in each of the three attacks, Hawker was directly exposed to the fire of an enemy machine gun.