Crescent Moon over the Holy Land
The Imperial Turko-German air force in WWI, 1915-1918. By Alberto Rosselli (Translated and edited by Leonardo Pavese) Having neither airplanes nor pilots, during the second half of 1911 the Osmanli Hava Kuvvetleri , that is the Turkish Ottoman air force — founded in June 1911 by Lieutenant Colonel Süreyya Bey — was forced to buy about twenty-five aircraft in France, Great Britain and Germany [1] and send several of their officers to Germany and Great Britain to learn flying and maintenance techniques. At the beginning of January 1912, the Engineer Corps’ Captains Fesa and Yusuf Kenan Bey were sent to France for pilot training, and they returned home on February 21 of the same year. Approximately at the same time, eight more Turkish officers transferred to France to learn to handle their first training aircraft, the Ordu monoplane airplane, designed and built by Robert Esnault-Peltier. The aircraft and another example of the...