Goodbye, Red Baron

The Overlook

By Tom Clavin

“The Overlook” can be found at tomclavin.substack.com. An overlook is a place from which one can see in several if not all directions, including where one has been and where one is going. If you enjoy the column, please "like" it and let me know what you think by commenting (check out previous ones while you're at it).  Likes, comments, and shares help with author “discoverability” on Substack.com, and all support is appreciated. Don't forget to hit the ‘Subscribe’ button – it’s free!

Today is the 104th anniversary of the death of the Red Baron, whose full name was Manfred Albrecht Freiherr von Richthofen. Until recently, Bob Drury and I were considering a book on him . . . but not just him, also the pilots on both sides of World War I who ruled the skies in fragile aircraft less than two decades after the very first flight by the Wright Brothers.

We have since moved on to another target of our literary labors, but while we were at it we found the flyboys of over a century ago to be fascinating. We very much wanted to explore the amazing technological breakthroughs that over a short period of time allowed men to go aloft in various Spads, Fokkers, and Nieuport bi-planes to introduce a new method of man-to-man combat. Concentrating on the stories of von Richthofen and the American ace Eddie Rickenbacker would have enabled us to weave into our narrative the feats of forgotten aces from Great Britain, France, Canada, and of course the host of young American flyers who flocked to war-torn Europe in order to counter the von Richthofen cohort by forming the famed Lafayette Escadrille.

Descended from Prussian nobility, von Richthofen went to war as a 22-year-old cavalry officer before transferring into the German air service. He proved a natural dogfighter, scoring his first “kill” on one of his initial patrols in late 1916. Over the next 18 months he went on to down an astounding 79 more enemy aircraft. Naturally, Germany’s best pilots vied to join his squadron, dubbed the “Flying Circus” for the gaudy colors with which they painted their aircraft.

The flamboyant von Richthofen, vaunted for his tactical flying skills and feared for the deadly accuracy with which he wielded his Parabellum machine gun, would often land his plane next to his downed prey to collect a souvenir as a trophy. He even had a famous wingman in the person of Werner Voss, another young cavalryman-turned-pilot who scored his first “kill” at the age of 18. Voss, who would total 47 additional aerial victories, was also known to land his plane after downing an enemy – not to collect trophies, but to check to see if his adversary was still alive and, if so, to present him with a cigar. It is not recorded if the seven-plane British squadron which finally cornered and blasted young Voss from the sky in 1918 returned the favor.

On the other side was the jaunty Edward Vernon Rickenbacker, the son of Swiss immigrants who had already competed in the Indianapolis 500 and set land speed records at Daytona Beach by the time the first shots of the Great War had been fired. Rickenbacker, fluent in German, was languishing as the personal chauffeur for General John. J. “Black Jack” Pershing, leader of the American Expeditionary Force into Europe, when in 1918 he talked his way into the nascent U.S. Army Air Service. Rickenbacker at 27 was considered too old for flight training – the War Department had recently set the cut-off age for American pilots at 25. But his race-car driver’s knowledge of and familiarity with combustible engines smoothed his transition. After a short stint as a squadron engineer he proved a natural daredevil in the cockpit, taking seemingly suicidal risks in combat.

Rickenbacker was known for single-handedly ambushing large squadrons of German aircraft, inching perilously close to his foes through cloud cover before pouncing. In September 1918, flying alone, Rickenbacker engaged a flight of seven Fokkers. As Allied troops watched from below, he downed two aircraft before escaping, his French-made Nieuport flying home on fumes. He was awarded the Medal of Honor for the action, to go along with his seven Distinguished Service Crosses and his French Croix de Guerre and Legion of Honor. Rickenbacker, hailed as the “Ace of Aces” by the American press, survived the war with a total of 26 “kills” to his ledger, including an astonishing 18 in the span of 48 days.

How did the various armed services manage to get these combat pilots up into the air so soon after the Wright Brothers’ invention of the first rudimentary flying machine? A mere six years after their first flight on that North Carolina beach in 1903, Orville and Wilbur Wright were awarded a military contract by the U.S. Army’s Signal Corps to construct what were then known as weaponized “heavier-than-air craft.” Within 24 months, a global arms race was in full swing from Japan to Russia to Europe, with Great Britain standing up a Royal Flying Corps; France forming the Aviation Militaire wing of its armed forces; and converted German armaments factories churning out fighter planes for its new Luftstreitkrafte (later to become the Luftwaffe).

  The onset of World War I in 1914 was rapidly followed by a series of aerial combat firsts whose developmental speeds defy belief, from a Russian pilot becoming the first aviator to ram his plane into a German spotter plane in October to a German flyer using his handgun to shoot down a French scout plane later that month. When the Dutch inventor Anthony Fokker managed to synchronize the burst of bullets from a cockpit-mounted machine gun with the rotation of an aircraft’s propeller, a new method of fighting was born. Mere weeks after that sharpshooting German dropped his French counterpart with a Luger, the first conventional air-to-air “kill” occurred when the pilot of a French Voisin took revenge by machine-gunning a German Aviatik reconnaissance aircraft.

During our research, the feats of several other flyers jumped out at us. One of them was the Englishman Albert Ball, the British Empire’s most beloved fighter pilot. He was as renowned for his ferocious offensive sallies – resulting in a “kill count” of 44 German aircraft – as for his introverted demeanor on the ground, evidenced by his love of gardening. He was deeply troubled by the violence of combat, he barely engaged socially with his fellow pilots on the ground, and he often wrestled with bouts of depression. This stress of war may have played a role in his death, when his Nieuport mysteriously crashed in 1917 while tangling with several Fokkers from von Richthofen’s Flying Circus. Ball was joined in the Royal Flying Corps by the deadly marksman William Bishop, a former Canadian crop duster whose aerobatic style was so reckless that his superiors, fearing for his life, pulled him from combat duty when it became apparent that the conflict was coming to an end.

Before the United States’ entry into the war, the famed French pilot Georges Guynemer vied with Ball and Bishop for recognition as the Allies’ premier ace. A former mechanic awarded his wings in 1915, he would go on to down 54 enemy aircraft. But he was best known for using his mechanical expertise – dubbed his avion magique – to install a 37-mm cannon on his Spad. One story concerning Guynemer personifies the spirit of noblesse oblige many pilots had: In June 1917, he was engaged in a lengthy dogfight with the German ace Ernst Udet. At one point, employing an acrobatic loop-de-loop, Guynemer finally had Udet in his sights. It was then that he realized that the German’s gun had jammed. Acknowledging his foe’s predicament, Guynemer threw Udet a debonair wave and flew off. He later told associates that he was certain that they would meet again. He was wrong – soon afterward, Guynemer, who had previously survived seven plane crashes, was shot down and killed.

Eventually, there were a slew of adventuresome Americans flying into combat, not least of whom was the mustachioed Harvard graduate Norman Prince. Eager to meet the “Huns” in battle and too impatient to wait for the U.S. to officially declare war, he sailed to France in 1915 and, speaking fluent French, convinced the government to cede to him a score of second-rate airplanes. It was with these “rattle traps” that he founded the Lafayette Escadrille. Over the next 21 months Prince became America’s first ace, flying 122 combat missions before dying in a crash.

A similar fate awaited the French-born American citizen Gervais Raoul Lufbery, another former aircraft mechanic whose official total of 17 downed Fokkers was likely double that as, like Rickenbacker after him, he preferred to hunt alone. He was thus denied many official “kills” because they had not been witnessed by either a squadron mate or Allied troops on the ground. Before Lufbery died from jumping to his death from his flaming cockpit – these early fighter pilots considered parachutes unmanly accoutrements – Lufbery tutored Rickenbacker in the art of “lone wolf” tactics. To this day pulling a mid-air “Lufbery Wheel” is a defensive maneuver well known to all modern fighter pilots.

The famed General Billy Mitchell, perhaps inter-war America’s most vociferous proponent of airpower, began his aviation career in the Escadrille and was the first American to fly over German lines. And the 21-year-old Frank Luke, though arriving in Europe only weeks before the end of the war, accomplished 18 shoot-downs in eight days, a 10-sortie rampage before his bullet-riddled plane was forced to the ground, where Luke died from his wounds.

One of the sadder stories of WWI aerial combat is that of Quentin Roosevelt. The youngest child of former President Theodore Roosevelt, the 20-year-old Quentin completed his pilot training in December 1917 and was assigned to the “Kicking Mules” of the U.S. Army’s 95th Aero Squadron. On his first combat mission over France in July 1918, he recorded a “kill.” But nine days later, Roosevelt’s recon team was jumped by a flight of Fokkers. Ignoring his squadron commander’s hand signals, Roosevelt turned to face his attackers in hopes of allowing his companions time to escape. He was killed by a flurry of machine-gun bullets. It is said that the death of Teddy Roosevelt’s “favorite child” was the final blow to the former President who, already recovering from an illness acquired during a recent expedition to South America, died within six months.

It was on April 21, 1918, that von Richthofen was shot down and mortally wounded by an Australian infantry machine gunner firing from the banks of the bloody Somme River battlefield. British troops recovered the body, and the Red Baron was buried in France with full military honors. The remains were later exhumed and reburied in his family’s cemetery in Wiesbaden.

Tom Clavin is the bestselling author/co-author of 18 books. The trade paperback edition of Blood and Treasure: Daniel Boone and the Fight for America’s First Frontier (with Bob Drury) was published last month and this Sunday will be its fourth consecutive week on the New York Times bestseller list, in the Paperback Nonfiction category. To purchase a copy, please go to your local bookstore or to Bookshop.org, Amazon.com, or BN.com.