The Mammoth Book of Fighter Pilots (59 page)

“Fifteen.”

I had had enough.

APPENDIX I:
GERMAN WAR BIRDS

ANTON H.G. FOKKER

Fokker, a Dutchman, founded the Fokker aircraft factory at Schwerin in Germany in 1913, which turned over to the making of war planes for the German military with the commencement of World War I in 1914. A year later he developed the interrupter gear which allowed a machine gun to fire through the revolving propeller blades of a fighter. In this extract from his memoirs he recalls the personalities of Germany’s most legendary WWI aces, Richthofen, Boelcke and Immelmann.

The contempt of the German flyers for death was only equalled by their love of life while they still had that precious possession. So complete was their disregard for the hazard of aerial combat, I sometimes thought they were hardly aware of its terrible dangers. Yet that could not be possible, for on every day they went hunting in the skies some members of the
Jagdstaffel
failed to return. When I met them in their headquarters at the Front they jested and sported as though the angel of death were not the permanent leader of their circus, and when they came to Berlin for a fortnight’s holiday, they lived as riotously as though they hadn’t a care in the world. That is, with a few exceptions, among them Richthofen. He was calm, cold, ambitious; a born leader of men and Germany’s greatest ace.

Richthofen, Boelcke, and Immelmann, Germany’s trio of aces, I knew intimately; as intimately at least as one knows men who, having stared at death so often, have learned to wear a mask lest an occasional human weakness betray their almost hypnotic gallantry. They were as different as men of the same breed can be. One by one I saw them die as I knew they must die; for they were in a contest not with a human opponent but with Time, the cruelest foe in the world. Judging their bravery by my own, I reckoned them supreme. Knowing the accuracy of the machine gun and the airplane in the hands of a skilled pilot, calculating the remote chance of surviving any prolonged campaign in the air, I would never have had the courage to face the enemy. Every man who went aloft was marked for death, sooner or later, once his wheels left the ground.

Max Immelmann, with Boelcke, was the first German pilot to win the Pour le Mérite, the Empire’s highest decoration for military bravery. This medal originated by Frederick the Great, was colloquially called “the blue Max”, from its colour and Frederick’s name. Its French title was due to the fact that the founder of the German Empire would only speak French. Immelmann was a serious, modest youngster, intensely interested in the technical details of flying. He was popular, and originally better known than Boelcke. He came to Berlin after his fourth or fifth victory and I took him to Schwerin for a tour of my factory. We talked little of abstract matters, but always of machine guns – he was an excellent shot – of aerial maneuvers, of the relative merits of one pursuit plane over another. He had eyes like a bird of prey, and a short, athletic body capable of standing the bombardment of nerves from which every flyer suffers when alone with his imagination. At no time did he drop a hint that he considered air fighting dangerous. As far as I might have known, he had not the slightest care in the world. He gained fifteen victories before he was killed June 18, 1916.

Almost as much mystery surrounds the manner of Immelmann’s death as Guynemer’s, which was never adequately explained. Immelmann’s plane suddenly fell to the ground as he was flying near the German front lines. It was first given out that his Fokker fighter had failed in midair. This explanation naturally did not satisfy me, and I insisted on examining the remains of the wreck, and establishing the facts of his death. What I saw convinced me and others that the fuselage had been shot in two by shrapnel fire. The control wires were cut as by shrapnel, the severed ends bent in, not stretched as they would have been in an ordinary crash. The tail of the fuselage was found a considerable distance from the plane itself. As he was flying over the German lines there was a strong opinion in the air force that his comparatively still unknown monoplane type – which somewhat resembled a Morane-Saulnier – had been mistaken for a French plane. I was finally able to convince air headquarters sufficiently so that, while it was not stated that he had been shot down by German artillery – which would have horrified his millions of admirers – neither was the disaster blamed on the weakness of his Fokker plane. The air corps exonerated the Fokker plane unofficially, although as far as the public was concerned the whole episode was hushed up. Because of this investigation, however, silhouettes of all German types were sent to all artillery commanders to prevent a repetition of the Immelmann catastrophe.

Boelcke, the son of a Saxon schoolmaster, was of quite a different type, although like Immelmann intensely interested in the technical details of flying and aerial combat. In a desperate effort to save him from inevitable death, the High Command restricted his flying after his sixteenth victory in 1916, and sent him to Austria, Bulgaria, and Turkey to instruct others in airmanship. But he became so wearied of the relentless adulation showered on him that he begged leave to return to the Front. Until Lieutenant Boehme, of his
staffel
collided with his plane in midair causing his wing to drop off, his victories mounted, reaching a total of forty before he died. Lieutenant Boehme, who was barely restrained from suicide in his grief, was later shot down in a dogfight.

Choosing the flying corps because an asthmatic affliction kept him from harder labour, Boelcke left the signal corps shortly before the War to enter the Halberstadt flying school. After seven weeks’ training he became a pilot and the first of September, 1914, saw him flying over the Western Front as an observer. It was in June of 1915 that he obtained his first Fokker single-seater in company with Immelmann and began his career as an ace. Boelcke had charm, and a kindness of heart which extended itself even to the enemies he brought down. He spent much of his leisure motoring to hospitals to cheer up his wounded opponents, leaving some gift of cigarettes or other trifle as he departed. Richthofen, who worshipped Boelcke and learned many of his flying tricks from him, records the fact that “it is a strange thing that everybody who met Boelcke imagined that he alone was his true friend. I have met about forty men, each of whom imagined that he alone had Boelcke’s affection. Men whose names were unknown to Boelcke believed that he was particularly fond of them. Boelcke had not a personal enemy.” Yet no one had a better record of bravery. He died on October 28, 1916.

Richthofen, with whom I became very friendly, was an entirely different sort of flyer from the other two. Without the subconscious art which Boelcke and Immelmann possessed, he was slow to learn to fly, crashing on his first solo flight and only mastering the plane at last by sheer force of superior will. Time and again he escaped death by a miracle before he managed to conquer the unruly plane which later became his willing slave. A Prussian, son of a Junker family, Richthofen was imbued with the usual ideas of a young nobleman. He flew spectacularly in his series of all-red planes which became famous over the Western Front. Flaunting himself in the face of his enemies, he built up a reputation which perhaps somewhat daunted his opponents before the fight began.

Ultimately, Richthofen became an excellent flyer and a fine shot, having always done a lot of big game hunting. But whereas many pilots flew with a kind of innocent courage which had its special kind of magnificence, Richthofen flew with his brains, and made his ability serve him. Analyzing every problem of aerial combat, he reduced chance to the minimum. In the beginning his victories were easy. Picking out an observation plane, he dived on it from the unprotected rear, opened up with a burst and completed the job almost before the enemy pilots were aware of trouble. It was something of this machine-like perfection which accounts for his near death in 1917 after his fifty-seventh victory. Richthofen himself has described the experience:

“On a very fine day, July 6, 1917, I was scouting with my gentlemen. We had flown for quite a while between Ypres and Armentières without getting into contact with the enemy.

“Then I saw a formation on the other side and thought immediately, these fellows want to fly over . . . We had an unfavorable wind – that is, it came from the east. I watched them fly some distance behind our lines. Then I cut off their retreat. They were again my dear friends, the Big Vickers . . . The observer sits in front. . . .

“My opponent turned and accepted the fight, but at such a distance that one could hardly call it a real air fight. I had not even prepared my gun for firing, for there was lots of time before I could begin to fight. Then I saw the enemy’s observer, probably from sheer excitement, open fire. I let him shoot, for, at a distance of 300 yards or more, the best marksmanship is helpless. One does not hit one’s target at such a distance.

“Now he flies toward me, and I hope that I will succeed in getting behind him and opening fire.

“Suddenly, something strikes me in the head. For a moment, my whole body is paralyzed. My arms hang down limply beside me; my legs flop loosely beyond my control. The worst was that a nerve leading to my eyes had been paralyzed and I was completely blind.

“I feel my machine tumbling down – falling. At the moment, the idea struck me. “This is how it feels when one is shot down to his death.” Any moment I wait for my wings to break off. I am alone in my bus. I don’t lose my senses for a moment.

“Soon I regain power over my arms and legs, so that I grip the wheel. Mechanically, I cut off the motor, but what good does that do? One can’t fly without sight. I forced my eyes open – tore off my goggles – but even then I could not see the sun. I was completely blind. The seconds seemed like eternities. I noticed I was still falling.

“From time to time, my machine had caught itself, but only to slip off again. At the beginning, I had been at a height of 4,000 yards, and now I must have fallen at least 2,000 or 3,000 yards. I concentrated all my energy and said to myself, “I must see – I must – I must see.”

“Whether my energy helped me in this case, I do not know. At any rate, suddenly I could discern black-and-white spots, and more and more I regained my eyesight. I looked into the sun – could stare straight into it without having the least pains. It seemed as though I was looking through thick black goggles.

“Again I caught the machine and brought it into a normal position and continued gliding down. Nothing but shell holes below me. A big block of forest came before my vision and I recognized that I was within our lines.

“If the Englishman had followed me, he could have brought me down without difficulty but, thanks to God, my comrades protected me. At the beginning, they couldn’t understand my fall.

“I wanted to land immediately, for I didn’t know how long I could keep up consciousness. . . .

“I noticed that my strength was leaving me and that everything was turning black before my eyes. Now it was high time.

“I landed my machine without any particular difficulties, tore down a few telephone wires, which I didn’t mind at the moment. . . . I tumbled out of the machine and could not rise again. . . .

“I had quite a good-sized hole – a wound of about ten centimeters in length. At one spot, as big as a dollar, the bare white skull bone lay exposed. My thick Richthofen skull had proved itself bullet proof.”

The bad news of his fall was kept from the German public which superstitiously regarded him as a superman, beyond death. It was less than a month before he was back in the air again, but never his old self. Something had gone out of him: “Manfred was changed after he received his wounds,” his mother is reported to have said. Now he knew that death could reach him as well as the others, and that is no knowledge for an airman to live with, day and night.

The Richthofen “circus,” as the Allies called it, was known in Germany as the
Jagdgeschwader
, composed of four
staffels
of five planes each. Toward the end of the War, there were three of these, and their size increased to forty-eight planes. They moved back and forth along the lines from July, 1917, on, wherever the fighting was thickest. It was with
Jagdstaffel
II, Boelcke’s old group to whose command Richthofen succeeded, that the greatest German ace gained his long list of victories before the formation of the “circus”. The Allied planes were camouflaged in colours, but as if in direct challenge, Richthofen’s circus was brighter than the sun in colour. His own plane was red from propeller to tail, and the planes of his particular
staffel
were red in kind, with little distinguishing marks, such as a blue tail, white rudder, black aileron, to set them apart from the Red Knight.

For three weeks I lived with the Richthofen
Jagdstaffel
, located at the time on the Ypres front. Ten or twelve officers were living together in a pretty little Belgian country place. This was only a short time before Richthofen was killed, when he commanded the circus and had a great deal of executive work to attend to as well as his daily fighting. Secretaries raced about, and orderlies came and went all day.

Artillery sites were only about fifteen kilometers behind the Front lines, and so, when the circus was scheduled to go aloft, I would start an hour or so ahead of time for the artillery camp, and follow the air fights through their powerful range finders. As a rule the fights would not be more than nine or ten miles off, and two or three miles in the sky.

Spending hours at the artillery range, I saw battle after battle in the air.
Staffel
after
staffel
would leave its airport, circle for height, proceed to the appointed rendezvous in the sky, and form the “circus” before cruising along the Front in search of Allied squadrons. Richthofen would be flying out in front, the lowest plane in an echelon of Vs, like a flock of immobile geese, fantastically coloured and flashing like mirrors in the sun.