The German Dragon Pilot 1914
Lt. Plüschow the Kaiser's Only Airman in China
When World War One erupted 28 year old Leutnant zur See Gunther Plüschow, flying an already obsolete airplane, was the Kaisers entire air force in China.
Born in 1886 near Munich, Gunther Plüschow had all the makings of a renaissance man. He grew up traveling with his family around the world and learned several languages fluently in the course of his Jesuit education. In 1901 he joined the Naval Institute in Berlin as a cadet, graduating four years later as a lieutenant. After service on a torpedo boat in the Baltic he was transferred to the armored cruiser SMS Furst Bismarck which was serving on the other side of the world in the Imperial German colony of Tsing-tau (now Qingdao) in China. While serving in China he acquired a tattoo of a dragon on his forearm, which would lead to his nickname in the service. Returning to Germany in 1911 he soon applied for service in the Kaiserliche Marine's fledging new aviation arm. Plüschow trained at the Rumpler airplane works in Johannisthal near Berlin to be a naval pilot and in 1913 left for the his old duty station in Tsing-tau with his airplane to provide a reconnaissance capability to the German fleet (the Kaiserliche Marine's East Asiatic Squadron )stationed there.
Pluschow's plane, a Rumpler built- Etrich Taube (Pigeon), was the German military's first mass produced airplane. Designed only six years after the Wright Brothers flew it was extremely simple. Constructed mainly of wood and translucent canvas, the monoplane design was powered by a 99hp engine that could pull its 1,870 lb (850kg) maximum weight up to a blistering 60mph (100km/h). It was unarmed and designed to take off, patrol for an hour or so for the enemy, and land again. It was slow to turn and slow to climb which therefore made it an easy target. Two planes were originally sent to Tsing-tau but only one managed to be airworthy by August 1914.
When World War One started, the East Asiatic Squadron in Tsing-tau under Admiral Spee took to the sea, leaving the colony to fend for itself. A combined allied fleet blockaded the colony on August 27, 1914 and soon began landing what would build up to a 50,000 man attack force. This force outnumbered the combined Austro-German and Chinese native defenders by a factor of some 10: 1. The odds were slightly better for Plüschow as he and his Taube were only arrayed against eight larger and faster allied aircraft. Over the course of the more than two month long allied siege operations Plüschow was able to undertake several reconnaissance missions in his aircraft. He also pushed the envelope and undertook both aerial combat (firing some 30 rounds from his Luger 9mm pistol at a Japanese seaplane) and aerial bombing (dropping two small handheld bombs unsuccessfully on the allied fleet). Some accounts even give him credit for downing a Japanese Maurice Farman aircraft . On November 7, 1914, the day the city fell, Plüschow took to the air with the last of the colonies dispatches. He burned his ditched plane near the town of Lianyungang when he ran out of fuel and made it to Shanghai on foot.
The hardy Lieutenant made it back to Germany after an epic round the world voyage during which he was captured by the British and escaped from the same spectacularly. He later wrote several books and became a noted aviation pioneer, being lost while exploring Tierra del Fuego in 1931.
Sources
Whittaker, Roberrt E Dragon master: The Kaiser's one-man air force in Tsingtau , China, 1914, (1994),
Plüschow, Gunter: Die Abenteuer des Fliegers von Tsingtau . Gunther Plüschow: The Adventures of Airman of Tsingtau. Ullsteinverlag 1916 1939 reprint, translation available from the University of Vermont Press.
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