Fokker G.I
The Fokker G.I was a Dutch twin-engined, twin-boom heavy fighter, designed in secret by Fokker as a multirole jachtkruiser (air cruiser) and first flown on 16 March 1937. Shown at the Paris Air Show before it flew, it equipped two Dutch fighter units and fought in the German invasion of May 1940, in which most of the fleet was destroyed on the ground; captured aircraft later trained Luftwaffe Bf 110 crews. Sixty-two production aircraft were built, in Mercury and Wasp variants. No original survives; a replica is displayed at the Nationaal Militair Museum.
Why It Mattered
The Fokker G.I was the Dutch answer to a 1930s idea: the jachtkruiser, or air cruiser, a heavy fighter expected to patrol, intercept bombers, reconnoitre, drop bombs and strafe ground targets with a single airframe. Fokker built it in secret in Amsterdam and unveiled it at the Paris Air Show in November 1936, before it had flown; the French press nicknamed it le Faucheur, the Reaper, for the battery of guns in its nose. When Germany invaded in May 1940 it was the best and most modern aircraft in Dutch service, yet most of the fleet was destroyed on the ground on the first day.
Design Notes
The G.I put two engines on a twin-boom airframe and gathered crew and armament into a central nacelle that held two or three men. Construction followed Fokker's house style of mixed materials: the rear of the nacelle and the wings were wood, the tail booms were aluminium, and the forward pod was a welded frame under aluminium skin. The Mercury variant mounted eight 7.9 mm machine guns in the nose and a ninth in a rotating rear turret, while the smaller Wasp variant mounted four nose guns. Glazed hatches beneath the fuselage served reconnaissance, and bomb racks behind them carried up to 400 kg of bombs. Its designers, Erich Schatzki and Marius Beeling, had wanted Rolls-Royce Kestrel engines that Britain would not release for export, so the type was produced with Bristol Mercury and Pratt & Whitney Twin Wasp Junior engines instead.
Operational History
The prototype first flew at Welschap airfield, near Eindhoven, on 16 March 1937. Testing nearly destroyed it that September, when a supercharger explosion led to its Hispano-Suiza engines being replaced by Pratt & Whitney Twin Wasp Juniors. The Dutch air arm ordered 36 Mercury-engined aircraft, which were delivered from the summer of 1939 to the 3rd and 4th Jachtvliegafdelingen. During the armed neutrality that followed, G.Is repeatedly took off against aircraft violating Dutch airspace, and on 20 March 1940 one of them forced down an RAF Whitley that had strayed across the border. When Germany invaded on 10 May 1940, 23 G.Is were serviceable: eight aircraft of the 3rd Jachtvliegafdeling got airborne from Waalhaven, but the 4th was caught on the ground at Bergen, and by the end of the first day only three G.Is were still airworthy. The survivors were used mainly for ground attack, strafing German infantry and the transport aircraft landing troops; the Dutch records are fragmentary, and the type is credited with up to 14 confirmed aerial victories. Spain's order for 26 Wasp-engined aircraft, blocked by a Dutch embargo, had been requisitioned just before the invasion, and ten of them were made ready in time to fly a combat sortie on 14 May 1940.
Afterlife
Germany captured a number of G.Is in 1940 and used them for trials and for training the crews of the Bf 110. The Wasp-engined aircraft completed at the Amsterdam plant were assigned as fighter trainers at Wiener Neustadt, where a Luftwaffe flying school flew them for some two years until attrition grounded the fleet. On 5 May 1941 Fokker test pilot Hidde Leegstra and engineer Piet Vos flew one G.I to England on a supposed test flight; the aircraft passed to Miles Aircraft, was left outdoors for the rest of the war, and was scrapped after 1945. No original G.I survives today, and a full-size replica is displayed at the Nationaal Militair Museum. Since 1997 the Stichting Fokker G-1 has gathered and preserved what remains of the type's history.