With the Armistice, the Treaty of Versailles banned the German air force and the manufacture of aircraft in Germany, so the company turned to making air brakes, industrial engines, agricultural machinery, toolboxes and office furniture and then to motorcycles and cars.
The duties of such aircraft were initially intended to be reconnaissance and artillery spotting in support of armies on the ground, just as balloons had been used during the Franco-Prussian War of 1870–1871 and even as far back as the Napoleonic Wars.
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During the war, the Imperial Army Air Service utilised a wide variety of aircraft, ranging from fighters (such as those manufactured by Albatros-Flugzeugwerke and Fokker), reconnaissance aircraft (Aviatik and DFW) and heavy bombers (Gothaer Waggonfabrik, better known simply as Gotha, and Zeppelin-Staaken) and airships of all types.
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:R - Riesenflugzeug - "Giant" aircraft - at least three, up to four or five engines - all serviceable in flight.
Believed to have been first tried within the first six months of 1916, future German rocketry pioneer Leutnant Rudolf Nebel, then flying as a fighter pilot with Jasta 5, one of the earliest German fighter squadrons within the Luftstreitkräfte, used a Halberstadt D.II aircraft of that unit in the first known German attempt at arming an aircraft with wing-mounted rockets as long range armament.
On 20 April 1961 the wing was given the name "Boelcke", in honor of the World War I Luftstreitkräfte fighter pilot Oswald Boelcke.
Rudolf Nebel, who had pioneered German use of wing-mounted offensive rocketry in World War I with the Luftstreitkräfte.