On April 18, 1915, French aviation pioneer Roland Garros was brought down behind German lines. 

First crossing of the Mediterranean 1913 Roland Garros
La Poste September 23, 2013
Designer: Romain Hugault

 

Roland Garros (1888-1918)
La Poste July 2, 1988
Designer: Jacques Gauthier

Roland Garros saw his first aircraft when he attended the 1909 air show Grande Semaine d’Aviation de la Champagne. It was this exposure that created his lifelong passion for all things aviation.  After watching the competition, and seeing the many pilots and airplanes, Garros became obsessed with flying. 

That year, Garros learned to fly in a Santos-Dumont Demoiselle monoplane at Clement Bayard’s flight school. It was rumoured Santos-Dumont himself taught Garros to fly. He obtained his pilot’s license, Aero-Club de France no. 147, on July 19, 1910, flying the Demoiselle. From there, Garros quickly moved to a faster Blériot XI monoplane and competed in races across Europe and the USA. He quickly became a familiar face among the competitors. 

Among his prewar achievements:

• 1911 placed second in the famed Circuit of Europe (Paris–London–Paris). 
• 1911 altitude record of 3,950 m (12,960 ft)
• 1912 altitude record of 5,610 m (18,410 ft).
• 1913 first to fly non-stop across the Mediterranean, from France to Tunisia.  Flew in a Morane-Saulnier G.

In August 1914, Garros was in Germany participating in exhibition flights and training military pilots when the war broke out. As a Frenchman, he was in danger of being arrested and detained, so he made a hasty, and impressive escape. 

Since Germany was now at war with France, Garros being an ‘enemy’ would most likely have been arrested. However, he managed to make a dramatic airborne escape that very night without being detected by the German ground crew (hardly anyone had flown in darkness till then). He soon joined the French army as an aviator.  Roland Garros (1888-1918) (sps-aviation.com)

Once back in France, Garros enlisted in the French Army and was sent to the L’Aviation Militaire for training. From there he joined Escadrille 26MS as a reconnaissance pilot, flying a Morane-Saulnier, but Type L. 

While in the military, Garros helped develop a deflector that changed the face of aerial warfare, allowing the development of fighter planes.

In December 1914 Garros visited the Morane-Saulnier manufacturing works keen to see if they could make a forward firing machine gun. Till then military aircraft were either defenceless or carried only simple hand-held weapons. It was no easy task for a pilot to fire a pistol at an enemy aircraft while airborne. Neither could guns be fitted in the nose of the plane because of the danger that the rounds might hit the propeller. However, Garros calculated that on the average only about seven per cent of the rounds would have a trajectory that might hit the whirring propeller. So along with Raymond Saulnier he designed steel wedge-shaped deflectors that would be attached to the edge of each propeller blade to deflect the rounds harmlessly. A workable installation was fitted to his aircraft and it enabled him to approach the enemy head-on in the air, thus giving him a vast advantage. On April 1, 1915, Garros shot down a German Albatross unarmed reconnaissance aircraft. It was the first ever shooting-down of an aircraft by a fighter firing through a propeller. During the next two weeks he accounted for another two German planes. 
ibid

This system was a very rudimentary firing mechanism, described as a “brute-force method of firing through a prop arc by diverting a small number of bullets” (The story of Roland Garros: the Playboy who Invented Air Combat and became the First Fighter Pilot – The Aviation Geek Club). In a few short weeks French pilots shot down 5 German airplanes, 3 by Garros. He was the first fighter pilot.

17 days after the introduction of the deflector, a fuel line malfunction brought Garros down behind German lines. This was disastrous for the French military.  When he landed, Garros desperately tried to destroy the aircraft so the interrupter would not fall into enemy hands. He failed and he and his device were captured. The German army turned to brilliant aviation designer Anthony Fokker and his team of engineers to deconstruct the device and adapt it for German forces. Fokker didn’t just copy the deflector. He analysed its flaws and developed an improved firing mechanism that, instead of deflecting the bullets past the propellor, synchronised the bullets and the propeller. The synchronizer gear, the Fokker Stangensteuerung system, was quickly installed on Fokker E1s. This was another major turning point in aviation history. In the hands of pilots Max Immelmann and Oswald Boelcke, aerial warfare took a far more deadly turn. By August 1915, the skies were ruled by the Fokker Scourge.   

Roland Garros spent the next 3 years in a German POW camp, until he escaped on February 14, 1918. On his return to France, he rejoined Escadrille 26, which by this time were equipped with SPAD fighters. In three years, the world of aerial warfare had moved beyond the rudimentary tactics used in 1915. 

On October 2, 1918, he downed his fourth German victim. However, in the intervening three years air combat tactics had changed dramatically and he could not beat his more nimble opponents. On October 5, 1918, he was shot down and killed near Vouziers, Ardennes. It was just five weeks before the end of the war and a day before his 30th birthday. ibid