Nieuport 11/16 Bébé vs Fokker Eindecker

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The appearance in July 1915 of Germany's Fokker E I, armed with interrupter gear that allowed its machine gun to fire forward without striking the propeller, heralded a reign of terror over the Western Front that the Allies called the 'Fokker Scourge'. Among several alternative means for countering the Fokkers - until the Allies introduced practical synchronisation mechanisms of their own - was the French Nieuport 11, a single-seat version of the Nieuport 10 sesquiplane ('one-and-a-half wing') mounting a Lewis machine gun above the upper wing, firing over the airscrew. Nicknamed the Bebe because of its comparatively small size, the Nieuport 11 was, though less robust than true biplanes, superior in structure and overall performance to the German monoplane. During 1916 the Nieuport 11, and its more powerful but more difficult to control stablemate, the Nieuport 16, battled a succession of improved Fokkers, the E II, E III and E IV, until the Germans abandoned the monoplane in favour of a new and deadly generation of biplane fighters.