Marked for Death

by James Hamilton-Paterson

  Since the new category and role of the dedicated single-seat fighter was by now firmly established, the German Army let Boelcke undertake far-reaching reorganisation of the Fliegertruppen’s fighters. The first of the new ‘hunting squadrons’ was Jasta 2, and in September 1916 it began taking delivery of the Albatros D.1 fighter. Although not outstandingly manoeuvrable, the Albatros was faster and had better firepower than anything the Allies were flying, and even the lighter Pups had to rely on their agility and eventually on sheer altitude to defeat it. In its subsequent marques the Albatros became the main German fighter for the rest of the war. Boelcke was also responsible for instituting the systematic tuition of combat flying. He would accompany formations of new Jasta pilots and assess the performance of each. Using his own hard-won principles, he was probably the first to realise that where combat was concerned, being able to fly and even to perform aerobatics was not enough. Combat was a separate art; and thanks to him the German air force was the first to institutionalise it as something needing to be properly taught.

  On 8th October 1916 the German Army’s Fliegertruppen officially became the Luftstreitkräfte: the first of all the air forces to acquire a degree of administrative independence from the army. Much of the credit for this change was down to Boelcke and the highly effective Jasta system he had planned. Twenty days later, in a grievous blow to the German Air Force, he was dead. Boelcke was killed in combat, not by being shot down but in collision with a colleague when both were attacking the same enemy aircraft. He had nineteen official victories but also many others that he hadn’t claimed in his scrupulously honest and modest fashion and with which he was later to be credited. Of all the German aces Oswald Boelcke was probably the one whom his admiring RFC opponents would most have wanted to shake by the hand and stand a drink. They felt he was one of them, more a fellow airman than a Hun.

  His legacy was considerable. By early 1917 the Albatri (the RFC’s own whimsical plural of Albatros) D.IIIs of the now thirty-seven Jastas that Boelcke had projected had once more restored German air superiority and precipitated the ‘Bloody April’ that even today is still regarded as one of the most disastrous periods in British military aviation history. In that single month 316 pilots and observers out of 912 aircrew in 50 squadrons were killed or captured,128,129 and German aircraft shot down Allied machines in a ratio of five to one. The life expectancy of a newly arrived RFC pilot was eleven days.2* Oswald Boelcke also left behind his Dicta: basic rules for combat flying that became the bible of all German pilots, much as Mick Mannock’s Rules did in the RFC. Finally, he had acted as tutor and mentor to the young Manfred von Richthofen, who was about to make history of his own.

  Boelcke’s code of correct behaviour had much to do with his personal sense of honour. To an extent this same code permeated all the combatants’ air forces although the pressures of war could render it capricious. On 1st July 1916 Lieutenant W. O. Tudor-Hart and Capt. G. W. Webb were shot down in their F.E. Webb was killed outright but Tudor-Hart managed to crash-land the aircraft and survive, later writing home from internment describing the incident and adding that the German pilots had acted ‘like sportsmen and gentlemen’.130 This probably meant he was grateful they had not machine-gunned him on the ground, a practice that by then was not unknown on both sides, usually camouflaged as an attempt to destroy the aircraft. The young Blue Max holder Werner Voss was several times accused of deliberately shooting up his crashed victims on the ground.

  By Bloody April in 1917 the original glamour of flying aces as stainless knights of the air was definitely tarnished. The steady proliferation of aircraft combined with the various armies’ increasing demands on their airmen was taking its toll. The gallantry of pilots like Boelcke gave way to a colder and more businesslike ethos of racking up scores by whatever means. This was probably inevitable by this stage in the war, when mass slaughter on the ground was commonplace and a spirit of cynicism and even nihilism was replacing the naïve patriotism of 1914. To many a combatant it must have felt as though everyone in uniform was an automaton on a treadmill of obligatory killing that might eventually lead to the ending of the war, although how the one might bring about the other seemed beyond conjecture. From Bloody April onwards not much quarter was given in air operations and inter-squadron rivalries over combat scores did little to improve things. Even so, a comradeship among fliers did still exist patchily, and there were shining examples of gallantry on all sides right through to the war’s end.

  Manfred von Richthofen probably supplied precious few of these. Although no doubt honourable enough in private life, he was too dedicated a professional fighter in a late period of the war to waste time on gestures. He was never a born pilot but he was a superb tactician and an excellent shot (this last ability being shown time and time again as more valuable than any capacity for brilliant aerobatics). In January 1917, when he was awarded the Blue Max for his eighteen victories, he took charge of Jasta 11 and thereafter laid the foundations of his reputation as the only pilot of the First World War famous enough for his name to appear in cartoon strips a century later. Until 21st April 1918 Richthofen went on steadily increasing his score and his fame. It is interesting that instructors at the German Fighter Pilot Training School would tell their students: ‘Aim for the aeroplane, not the man. When you put the aeroplane out of action, you will take care of the man.’131 This was the exact opposite of Richthofen’s own advice: ‘Aim for the man and don’t miss. If you’re fighting a two-seater, get the observer first; until you have silenced the gun, don’t bother about the pilot.’132 This sounds as sensible as it is ruthless and was probably the policy adopted by most pilots of all sides including Mick Mannock, although he always said ‘Aim for the pilot.’ Still, many spoke privately of the instinctive reluctance they had to overcome in order to deliberately fire a stream of machine gun and tracer rounds into the back of a fellow aviator from thirty yards away. At that range you could actually see the tracers’ grey smoke trails converging on his sheepskin jacket, watch his body jerk and the nose of his aircraft pitch upwards as he convulsively clutched the stick. Sometimes if you were close enough your goggles might be misted by his blood or brains. The one thing all the aces agreed on was that it was absolutely essential to get really close to your target. As Carl Degelow was to put it, this really separated the men from the boys in aerial combat. The closer you flew to your target, the more nerve it required but the more certain you were of scoring. Nothing so betrayed the nervous airman or the beginner as did opening fire from 300 yards; at that point an experienced combat pilot rejoiced, knowing he had a potential ‘kill’ awaiting him.

  Whatever Richthofen’s tactics, they were extraordinarily successful. In that single month of April 1917 he claimed twenty-two victories in his Albatros D.III, once shooting down four Allied aircraft on a single day. His official score was now fifty-two. His preferred method was to attack out of the sun, and he generally did so with other members of his Jasta covering him. He seldom was the ‘lone hunter’ of combat myth; he couldn’t see the point in taking unnecessary risks. If he didn’t think the odds were good enough he wouldn’t engage. Instead, he became a well-organised and efficient killing machine, which was simply what he interpreted his job to be. As his total climbed, so did his reputation until the name of Richthofen was accorded national hero-worship, although it must have helped that his younger brother Lothar – a much more flamboyant pilot – had forty kills of his own.

  Manfred von Richthofen’s ‘Red Baron’ nickname was given him by his squadron comrades and swiftly taken up by newspapers everywhere. It derived from his family title of ‘Freiherr’, which translates more or less as ‘baron’ in English and accounts for the ‘von’, and his habit – acquired as a squadron leader – of painting the various aircraft he flew red. Here was a curious contrast with the RFC, nearly all of whose aircraft were a uniform khaki colour, which was good camouflage when viewed from above but less good for quick identification in a fight. James McCudden asked
for the underside of his Sopwith Pup to be sprayed light blue so it would be less easy to see from beneath when he was flying high. Later, some colour did begin creeping into the RFC’s aircraft, such as the ace Albert Ball’s red propeller boss, but these were exceptions. The British had long tended to view the Germans as rigid conformists (much as most Germans viewed the Prussians); yet it was the German Army and not the British that allowed its Staffeln and individual pilots to paint their aircraft according to whim. This was fighting machinery gaily decked out. There were black aircraft and white, yellow and green, orange and brown, speckled and striped. However, after Richthofen’s rise to fame there was only one all-red aircraft, although others in his Jasta might have parts of their machines painted red for identification in the air.

  The ‘flying circus’ appellation derived from Richthofen’s leadership of Jagdgeschwader 1. The Jagdgeschwader were something like the RFC’s ‘wings’: groups of squadrons convened for a particular purpose. In this case they were groups of Jastas that were highly mobile and could be deployed up and down the front to trouble spots as required. With their gaudily painted aircraft and habit of travelling around, they quickly acquired the nickname of flying circuses. Inevitably, the one led by the Red Baron acquired the most notoriety among Allied squadrons, as well it might since Richthofen cherry-picked the best combat pilots from the Jastas for his own Jagdgeschwader 1: first-rate men like Ernst Udet and his young friend Werner Voss. He would also dump inferior pilots on other Jagdgeschwader, with the unsurprising result that no other flying circus was as successful as his.

  Not that any of Richthofen’s men was invincible, not even Voss, whom some later reckoned to be the single finest pilot of the war. By 11th September 1917 and barely out of his teens Voss had forty-seven confirmed victories (and Richthofen sixty-one), but he was in severe need of a rest. On 23rd September, flying his new Fokker F.I Triplane (the prototype of the Dr.I), he became embroiled in what was to be one of the most celebrated dogfights of the war in which he found himself effectively alone facing no fewer than eight British aces flying S.E.5a’s. These were from 56 Squadron and included James McCudden and Arthur Rhys-Davids, all of whose aircraft Voss riddled with bullets in a ten-minute exhibition of virtuoso combat flying before he was at last shot through the chest and stomach. He probably died in the air, but in any case his Fokker smashed into the ground so violently it appeared to the watchers overhead that it ‘went into powder’.

  His victors landed their shot-up machines one by one back at their station, shattered by the sheer tension of the encounter, one of them bursting into a fit of weeping and Rhys-Davids (who had fired the shots that killed Voss) still hyperventilating. At that point they none of them knew who their defeated foe was and wondered whether it could have been Richthofen himself. They all recognised him as a superlative airman and the most courageous opponent any of them had ever fought. That night they solemnly drank a standing toast to him in the mess. What was left of Voss’s body was retrieved by a British patrol the following day, identified, and buried in a shell crater that soon vanished beneath fresh artillery barrages. He was twenty years old.

  Mention of Voss’s Fokker F.I (then so new that one of the British pilots misidentified it as a Nieuport) is a reminder that nowadays the commonest depiction of the Red Baron is of him flying an all-red Fokker Triplane. It is not clear why this association should have become so indelible. As already noted, this aircraft was not especially Germanic since it and all other triplane fighters had been directly influenced by the revolutionary Sopwith Triplane whose rate of climb and manoeuvrability had made it so lethal in the hands of its RNAS pilots when it was new in the first half of 1917. (Indeed, had it not been for the small numbers of this new fighter in the hands of Navy pilots, the RFC’s ‘Bloody April’ would have been still bloodier.) Secondly, Richthofen flew several different kinds of aircraft, only piloting his Triplane for a limited period when it accounted for a mere nineteen of his eighty victories. The type he most favoured was the Albatros D.III, although he would almost certainly have switched to the formidable new Fokker D.VII when it came into squadron service in May 1918. However, that aircraft arrived too late for the Red Baron, who was himself finally downed on 23rd April that year in circumstances that will probably be argued over for as long as air historians continue to enjoy an utterly pointless dispute that has already lasted nearly a century. In trying to shoot down a Sopwith Camel at very low level Richthofen was attacked by a second Camel and fatally wounded in the chest by a .303 bullet. He just managed to land his aircraft before dying in his seat. Thereafter argument has raged over whether the bullet was fired from the air or by troops on the ground. It hardly seems to matter now that everybody involved is long dead.

  The twenty-five year-old German who was destined to become the most famous flying ace of all time – a status that will surely now never be eclipsed – was given a burial with full military honours by the Australians of 3 Squadron in whose sector he fell. Units from all over the newly formed RAF sent wreaths in homage to their most redoubtable foe, and messages of commiseration were dropped over the German lines. In Germany itself Richthofen’s death came as a savage blow: the inevitable outcome of elevating anyone to the point of myth where he is believed to enshrine a portion of a nation’s soul. Certainly the whole Luftstreitkräfte felt its morale shattered. Had the Red Baron not been immortal? Well yes, so he was in a historical sense; but as flesh and blood he had proved just as vulnerable as the merest novice to a small copper-jacketed bullet travelling at 2,400 feet per second.

  As with so many other German aces, death had at least spared Richthofen from having to witness his nation’s total collapse of morale in the last weeks of the war and afterwards. Towards the end of 1918 the streets of cities like Hamburg became full of marauding gangs of communists inspired by the Russian Revolution, anarchists or just half-starved citizens desperately looking for food, fuel and warm clothing for the coming winter. As usual after a lost war, returning soldiers were no longer regarded as heroes. As Carl Degelow put it, ‘I realised that my officer’s epaulettes and Pour le Mérite [Blue Max] were not looked upon with favour by people wearing red armbands. A thick briefcase and an official-looking bearing was the preferred style of appearance.’133 Degelow was to survive until 1970. His fellow-ace, Hauptmann Rudolf Berthold, was not so lucky. He had ended the war with forty-four victories in the air, only to fall foul of a street gang of his own countrymen in Hamburg. One of the mob got behind him and strangled him to death with the ribbon of his Blue Max.

  *

  As Hugh Trenchard had maintained from the first, the ‘flying aces’ system would always entail a degree of injustice, not least by implying a monopoly of bravery and skill in the hands of a comparative few. Also, of course, the competitive sports mentality it fostered (which included the amassing of medals) led to endless disputes about the true scores of the ‘winners’, a few of which persist even to this day, fuelled as they sometimes are by ill-concealed nationalist motives. Probably the main figure here is that of the Canadian ace, Billy Bishop, whose total score of seventy-two has been much questioned in the last thirty years, one official historian of the Royal Canadian Air Force, Brereton Greenhous, saying that his true total might actually be twenty-seven.134 This allegation is founded on the fact that many of Bishop’s victory claims cannot be matched with German records, which are admittedly patchy and not always reliable. Despite many crucially missing documents, surviving British casualty records are generally more complete and accurate than their German counterparts. Above all, the famous engagement for which Bishop won the VC cannot be corroborated from the German side. This action took place at 4.30 in the morning of 2nd June 1917. His award citation, as it appeared in the London Gazette for 11th August, read as follows:

  For most conspicuous bravery, determination and skill. Captain Bishop, who had been sent out to work independently, flew first of all to an enemy aerodrome; finding no machines about, he flew on to another aerodrome
about 3 miles southeast, which was at least 12 miles the other side of the line. Seven machines, some with their engines running, were on the ground. He attacked these from about fifty feet and a mechanic, who was starting one of the engines, was seen to fall. One of the machines got off the ground, but at a height of 60 feet Captain Bishop fired 15 rounds into it at very close range, and it crashed to the ground. A second machine got off the ground, into which he fired 30 rounds at 150 yards’ range, and it fell into a tree. Two more machines then rose from the aerodrome. One of these he engaged at a height of 1,000 feet, emptying the rest of his drum of ammunition. This machine crashed 300 yards from the aerodrome, after which Captain Bishop emptied a whole drum of ammunition into the fourth hostile machine, and then flew back to his station. Four hostile scouts were about 1,000 feet above him for about a mile of his return journey, but they would not attack. His machine was very badly shot about by machine-gun fire from the ground.135

  The problem here is that in theory, at least, it is an inviolable rule that a Victoria Cross is never awarded without the corroborative evidence of independent witnesses (except in the sole case of the Unknown Warrior), and it is sometimes claimed that Bishop’s remains the only VC ever to have been awarded entirely on the recipient’s testimony. It is true that his award citation is essentially identical to the report he himself gave on returning to his airfield. One investigator claims that ‘the evidence, from both British and German sources, shows that there were no aircraft losses in the Jastas of 2 or 6 Armée on 2nd June 1917, and indicates very clearly that the aerodrome attack never took place. There is not a shred of evidence to support Bishop’s claims.’136 By contrast the respected American scholar Peter Kilduff, in a definitive and exhaustive new investigation of each of Bishop’s 72 victories published in 2014,137 sees no reason to doubt that this early morning attack took place precisely as Bishop said it did. Furthermore, he believes that the rest of Bishop’s victories should stand – with exactly the same proviso that attaches to every other top-scoring pilot’s claims, viz. that they would inevitably have been subject to a young man’s occasional economy with the truth and wishful thinking, as well as to the pressures of national propaganda and the inter-unit rivalries of the day. No-one’s scores can ever now be proved with absolute certainty.