by P Fitzsimons
On the crisp, clear morning of 21 April 1918, George Wilkins was driving north on the Bray–Corbie road not too far from Villers-Bretonneux on the Western Front to do his usual daily rounds of taking photos in the trenches. The last months had been intense, and in the course of them he had sustained no fewer than nine wounds about his body—courtesy of bombs, bullets, shrapnel and gas—but somehow he had survived the lot, and was still as passionate and fearless as ever, to capture everything possible on film. On this morning, he was fascinated to see suddenly break out right ahead of him a dogfight so intense—with five…six…hang on, ten, no…fifteen…and now as many as thirty planes involved! One of the planes, he noted, was an entirely red triplane…
Could it be?
It was. The day before, Manfred von Richthofen had shot down two Allied planes in the skies above Villers-Bretonneux—to bring his total to eighty—and today he had led his squadron back to this El Dorado of English flyers, where he could almost guarantee they would be swarming thickly. He had been patrolling over the Somme River that morning with nine other German planes under his command when they had been engaged by two squadrons of Sopwith Camels, totalling fourteen. In the course of the furious dogfight that followed, the German Rittmeister spied something well below that pleased him greatly. It was a lone Sopwith, breaking from the pack and scuttling to make for the safety of the Allied lines. Therein lay a story…
At the briefing back at base that morning, a novice Canadian pilot, Lieutenant Wilfrid ‘Wop’ May of No. 209 Squadron, Royal Air Force, had been going out on his first ever patrol, and been ordered not to get involved in any serious fighting. Are we clear, Lieutenant? Very clear, sir…
No matter that the man giving those orders, the commander of No. 209 Squadron, Captain Roy Brown, was an old school friend of May. This was a formal military briefing, in front of their military peers, and form had to be followed.
In fact, however, once the German planes had come at them in such numbers, Lieutenant May had felt justified in breaking those orders and getting involved. This was fine until his guns jammed, and he realised that in this situation, discretion really was the better part of valour and it was time to get away. In an instant he had spun out of the battle, and was racing to the west to get back to his own lines. Alas, the young Canadian had not yet learned enough to know that a plane of his type, flying at that speed and altitude, on its own away from a dogfight, was like a fat chicken in a farmyard waddling away from a ravenous wolf…
Manfred von Richthofen moved in for the kill. The Sopwith was so low that there would barely be space to use his preferred method, which was to come up at his targets from behind and below, where the enemy pilots could not see him. Instead, the German decided to swoop down and chase the Sopwith before blowing it out of the sky. He pushed the joystick forward and in an instant his red triplane Fokker responded, darting downward and accelerating all the while as the Sopwith loomed large, fat and ready over his gun-sights…
Unbeknown to von Richthofen, however, disengaging from the dogfight at that moment just above him was his quarry’s flight commander, Captain Roy Brown. Vastly experienced, Brown summed up the situation in an instant, and now, in his Sopwith Camel, hurtled down after the Red Baron in the hope that he could prevent the certain death of his compatriot and old school friend, Lieutenant May.
Rally, school!
Ruhig…ruhig…ruhig…Steady…steady…steady…
Just a few hundred feet from his target now, the Red Baron was doing what he always did in such circumstances—holding his fire until he just couldn’t miss. Other pilots were satisfied if they hit any part of an enemy plane but not him. He always shot straight for the enemy plane’s fuel tank knowing that with just one bullet in the right spot, he would win—500 feet away…400…300…200…
As ever, his finger tightened on the trigger and his twin Spandaus suddenly leapt into life, his plane vibrating in a pleasing fashion. Amazingly, however, this time his first burst of fire didn’t bring his quarry down. And what was worse, the Sopwith pilot, now aware that he was under attack, began evasive action, twisting and turning from side to side and going ever lower while still racing like a scalded cat for the Allied lines with every ounce of speed that the terrified Canadian could muster from his tortured engine. In terms of performance capacity, in some ways it was a fair fight, as both the Sopwith Camel and the Fokker Dr.I had maximum speeds of about 113 miles per hour, and while all else being equal the Camel was marginally more manoeuvrable than the Dr.I, in this case the fact that Lieutenant May was so inexperienced probably meant that advantage was neutralised.
The Red Baron, embracing the chase, followed closely, endeavouring to anticipate every move the Sopwith pilot made before he made it. And yet, he got it wrong! Time and again von Richthofen fired where the young Canadian pilot would have been, had he been experienced only to find that his target had moved an instant earlier in an entirely unexpected direction.32 Worse for the Red Baron, the two planes had now flashed over Allied lines—pushed along by a strong tailwind—meaning that the German pursuer was now the intruder, not the Canadian. At this point, it is surprising that von Richthofen continued the fight. Just days before, he had completed and submitted to Supreme Headquarters his Air Combat Operations Manual, essentially a textbook for all German pilots to follow based on everything he had learnt, and one principle he had spelt out in clearest terms was:
One should never obstinately stay with an opponent who, through bad shooting or skilful turning, one has been unable to shoot down, when the battle lasts until it is far on the other side of the front and one is alone and faced by a greater number of opponents.33
Ignoring that entirely, the Red Baron stayed on the tail of Lieutenant May, as the Canadian twisted and turned up the valley of the Somme River, just 50 feet above the surface of the water.
Oh…God.
Though May momentarily thought at one point that he had shaken the German, he became suddenly aware that his pursuer had hopped over a hill on a river bend, and was now coming down on him. This time, there was no escape. This time, trapped by the narrow valley sides, he couldn’t dart to the left or to the right. He was as good as dead.34 He tensed, waiting for the blast he knew was coming, and wondered if he should end it himself by jamming the stick forward and hitting the river.
As it turned out, however, von Richthofen was just coming in to fire off his final deadly burst, when…
Suddenly the German’s aircraft began to shudder and shake and splinters of wood filled his cockpit. Exactly as had happened to Charles Kingsford Smith a few months earlier, the Red Baron was under attack from above! Taking instant evasive action himself, he twisted the red Fokker triplane away, which as fate would have it took him towards a hill held by the AIF’s 53rd Australian Field Battery, 5th Division.
Atop this particular hill, an Australian gunner by the name of Robert Buie—an oyster farmer before the war, from Brooklyn, just north of Sydney—had watched the whole distant dogfight with fascination and was now amazed to see the red plane heading in his rough direction. It was soon only a few hundred feet away from him, at an altitude of just 50 feet or so! This was too good an opportunity to miss, and Buie was not prone to missing a target that close, ever since those days growing up on the Hawkesbury River, when he had honed his shooting skills by knocking sea eagles out of the sky as they tried to steal fish from his net.
Pointing his Lewis gun upwards, he fired at the plane, while from a nearby hill Sergeant Cedric Popkin of the Australian 24th Machine Gun Company fired his Vickers machine gun…while still another soldier fired a Lee Enfield .303 at the plane…and yet another Australian, Gunner ‘Snowy’ Evans, fired a burst from his Lewis gun.
In the end there was no doubt that a blizzard of bullets was whizzing up, and into the Fokker. Nevertheless, Robert Buie, for one, was absolutely certain that his bullets hit right where the German was sitting, as he could see the fragments from the cockpit flying around as he kept shooting…35
Sergeant Frank Wormald, standing just 4 yards from Robert Buie, was also sure that it was Buie’s bullets that hit the red plane, and later recounted that he could see, ‘plain as daylight…the Baron sort of shrug and sit up. I could see him’.36
An instant later, the Red Baron’s plane—for so long a bright red streak of death, the terror of the western skies—staggered in the air, slowed, and then turned, beginning a rapid descent.
Unfortunately, George Wilkins missed this final part of the action. Still back on the Bray–Corbie road, it had been a few moments earlier that the red Fokker had ‘side-slipped’ downwards behind a hill, momentarily obscuring the photographer’s view. Wilkins did not witness, therefore, the Red Baron’s plane coming to ground ‘like a wounded bird’, right in front of the men of the 53rd Australian Field Battery of the 5th Division, who were dug in on the high ground of Morlancourt Ridge, and peeping over their sandbags. As soon as they were sure there were no more German planes coming their way, spitting death, some of the Diggers rushed forward to find the pilot slumped in his cockpit, barely alive. The German legend managed to get out just one last word before expiring: ‘Kaputt.’37
It was 10.50 am, on a cool, windy day.
Well before George Wilkins arrived at the scene to take photos of the crashed plane, the Diggers had the pilot’s only slightly bloodied body out and, going through his papers, realised who he was.
Stone the bloody crows…the bloke himself! Von Richthofen! They had got him at last!
For all the excitement at their achievement, however, the body of Manfred von Richthofen was treated with elaborate respect. They carefully laid him on his back on the ground, closed his eyes, and joined his hands in the supplicatory biblical pose that von Richthofen’s mother surely would have wanted. Shortly thereafter, the commanding officer of the Australian Flying Corps No. 3 Squadron, Major David Blake, took responsibility for the body and began to organise a full military funeral. That very afternoon an autopsy was held, which showed that the German pilot who had personally caused the deaths of eighty Allied airmen confirmed and possibly another twenty, had himself been killed by a single bullet that had entered his body below his right armpit towards his back, gone through his heart, and exited next to his left nipple.
That evening the Red Baron effectively lay ‘in state’, in an open coffin in one of No. 3 Squadron’s hangars, as a long line of his former opponents and their ground crew came by and paid their final respects. Yes, he had killed many of their comrades, but he had been an honourable opponent and had only done to the Allied pilots what they had been trying to do to him. In their deadly common calling, he was the best.
To bear his coffin the following afternoon, Major Blake chose six captains of the Australian Flying Corps—the same rank as von Richthofen. Too, an honour guard from the other ranks was chosen, comprising twelve Australian soldiers in full dress uniform, and each of these men used spit and polish to be absolutely impeccable for the occasion.
Wreaths were presented by other Allied squadrons, and von Richthofen was buried in the overgrown cemetery of the village of Bertangles, with the propeller of his plane serving as the initial cross at the head of the grave. As a final salute, each man in the honour guard fired three shots into the air. Photos were taken, and copies of these were dropped by an English pilot above a German air base, together with a note confirming von Richthofen’s death:
To the German Flying Corps,
Rittmeister Baron Manfred von Richthofen was killed in aerial
combat on April 21st 1918. He was buried with full military
honours.
From,
British Royal Air Force.
In a later note, the German pilots were further advised that if they wished to, they could fly, unmolested, over his grave on the following day between 3 pm and 6 pm, to drop their own wreaths—an opportunity that many of von Richthofen’s fellow pilots availed themselves of.
So ended an extraordinary saga, albeit with a noteworthy addendum…
Von Richthofen’s place as commander of his ‘Flying Circus’, was taken initially by Oberleutnant Wilhelm Reinhard, until he crashed three weeks later, at which point the new commander was a German ace with eighteen kills to his credit, one Oberleutnant Hermann Göring…
‘No longer fit for combat duty.’
He was what?
No longer fit for combat duty, son.
That was the phrase used by the English doctors, and nothing the Australian said could change it. In response, Charles Kingsford Smith was disgusted, bristling with indignation. Now mostly recovered, he believed, from his wounds of the previous year, he had returned to England via the usual six-week journey by ship—this time going on the Orontes across first the Pacific Ocean via Wellington, Tahiti, the Panama Canal, New York, then the Atlantic Ocean. Only to be told by medical officers that they would no longer give him clearance to fly! Kingsford Smith could have understood their reasoning if part of flying had been pedalling like mad with your feet, but as the only use for his feet was to operate the rudder, and he was fully capable of doing that, even with his injured foot, it simply didn’t make sense.
Do you hear me?!
Accustomed to such indignation from brave men, and trained to counter it regardless, the military doctors simply closed his folder and refused to change their determination.
The role he was offered now was as a flying instructor with No. 204 Training Depot, at Eastchurch on the Isle of Sheppey. And as a matter of fact, he would no longer be part of the British Army’s Royal Flying Corps, as that had ceased to exist from 1 April 1918, when it had merged with the Royal Naval Air Service to become the Royal Air Force. A job as a flying instructor wasn’t remotely what the Australian had in mind when he had returned to Great Britain, but at least he would be back in the air once more and besides that most crucial feature, his time there was not without its pleasures. Kingsford Smith was able to keep more than busy when not instructing, attracting local women to his bed, and was so successful his fellow officers referred to him as ‘King Dick’.38 At one point, on a course at Shoreham, his colleagues were stunned when they were billeted at a hotel where two girls were resident, one of whom was the hotelier’s daughter. In the space of just two days, King Dick had bedded them both, while simultaneously having an affair with an Italian violinist playing in an orchestra up in London.
‘He just seemed to hypnotise women,’ one of those colleagues, James Cross, would recall to author Ian Mackersey many years later.39
Whatever Kingsford Smith’s activities, by this stage of the war the truth was that there was quite likely more action to be had between the sheets than in the air. Simply put, the combined industrial might of the Allies was now so strong that Germany and its fellow Central European powers—Austria–Hungary, Bulgaria and the Ottoman Empire—couldn’t keep up and that most definitely applied to the war in the air. Things were so bad that from the middle of 1918 onwards, German Supreme Army Command tried to keep its planes out of the air as much as possible, to reduce opportunities for den Engländer to shoot them down.
This was deeply frustrating for the Allied pilots, particularly Australia’s premier air ace, Captain Arthur Harry Cobby of the Australian Flying Corps No. 4 Squadron, who was then credited with twenty-five kills of enemy planes and thirteen balloons. In an effort to get the Germans to come out and play, Cobby and the men under his command began to engage in the practice of swooping in low over enemy aerodromes, to drop, yes, old boots upon them!
Inside the boots would be messages addressed to ‘the footsore aerial knights of Germany’, inviting them to quit their cowardly ways and come up and have a go. More than a few German pilots, seething with rage, did exactly that, and were shot down for their trouble, allowing Cobby to take his tally up to twenty-nine.40
Elsewhere, other Australian pilots were also making outstanding contributions to the war effort, none more so than a charismatic chunk of a man by the name of Ross Smith, who had begun the war with t
he Light Horse in Gallipoli and Palestine before training to become a pilot. A swashbuckling larrikin as a soldier, he was known as a fearless, born leader in the air, with a notable capacity to fly well beyond the realms of regulation—not particularly caring what the higher-ups thought so long as he did damage to the Germans. (It was also said of him by one of his pukkah British colleagues that, ‘For an Aussie he had a fine command of English and an unusually impressive diction…’)
On one legendary occasion Ross Smith and his observer, Stan Nunan, came up with a plan to attack a newly established German aerodrome in northern Palestine. On their first pass over it, they dropped some of their bombs near the hangars to ensure that all the German mechanics would scramble to their trenches and give them an empty canvas on which to execute their own brand of artistry. Then Ross Smith practically dropped out of the sky, so quickly did he bring his Bristol Fighter down onto the runway.
Let the fun begin. As the plane came to a halt, Nunan jumped out with a revolver in one hand and a Very pistol in the other, while Smith manned the Bristol’s Lewis gun and trained it in the direction that the German soldiers and mechanics could be expected to come from. Sure enough…
Nunan fired first the revolver into the petrol tank of one German plane, causing fuel to gush forth, and then the Very pistol at the resulting puddle, whereupon the plane exploded with force enough to singe his eyebrows and wake the dead. And then another and another! Smith, in the meantime, ensured that the motor of their own plane was kept at fair throttle, ready for the getaway, even as he kept the Lewis gun firing at the Germans, who were now gathering themselves.
Of course, it couldn’t last. Suddenly, twenty German soldiers appeared running towards them, all with rifles, all firing. Nunan, unfortunately, was having a great deal of trouble getting the fourth German plane to explode and couldn’t bear to leave before the job was done. Smith, understanding perfectly his desire to destroy the plane above and beyond the desire to get away, taxied the plane up behind Nunan and between them they were able to throw their remaining bomb at the German plane and destroy it before taking off in extremis, with bullets whistling around their ears and into the fuselage of the plane.