As this month of April begins on a rainy note here in Montreal, perhaps it would be a good time to reflect back on another April day, April 21st, 1918.
It was the last day of the Red Baron's life.
He died at age twenty-five, the same type of sudden death he had dealt out to so many young Allied pilots and observers over the Western Front. He was both respected and feared by his enemies, in those last dying days of the age of chivalry.
It was still a time of kings and queens, and luckily far removed from the last ring of Hell that the First World War had become on the ground. As men were dying in relative anonymity in the mud thousands of feet below them, the knights of the air lived a life in full public view.
Man had only taken to the air fifteen years before, and the basic principles of air warfare were being written each and every day. They flew machines made of fabric and wood, machines that would sometimes break apart on their own in mid-air.
The speeds at which they flew and fought were not much more than a cars speed on the highway today. The Fokker Triplane Richthofen died in had a maximum speed of about one hundred and five miles per hour, and cruised at about ninety. It weighed about thirteen hundred pounds, was about eighteen feet long, twenty three feet wide, and less than ten feet high.
In battle, they fought close enough to see each others faces. In reading some of Richthofen's combat reports, one is struck by the fact that he is sometimes thirty feet or less away from his victim when he delivers the fatal blow.
On some occasions he lands in time to assist in the removal of injured pilots, men he has himself shot, and he takes care of them with compassion and respect. He sometimes goes to their graves, and says a prayer for them.
Here is account of his first kill, on the 17th September, 1915
When he had come down to about three hundred feet he tried to escape by flying in a zig-zag course during which, as is well known, it is difficult for an observer to shoot. That was my most favorable moment. I followed him at an altitude of from two hundred and fifty feet to one hundred and fifty feet, firing all the time. The Englishman could not help falling. But the jamming of my gun nearly robbed me of my success.
My opponent fell, shot through the head, one hundred and fifty feet behind our line. His machine gun was dug out of the ground and it ornaments the entrance of my dwelling.
A hunter in his youth, Richthofen kept trophies of his kills. He went out and had a small silver cup engraved with the details of each. On that day he died, eighty of them were on display in his room. On it's walls hung pieces of fabric from some of his victims planes that fell behind German lines.
When he was at the rudder, and in the air, he was a part of a machine. His Fokker Triplane was notoriously unstable in the air, but in the hands of an expert pilot that weakness became a great strength. It's three wings allowed great lift and mobility, both things that increased a pilot's lifespan if used properly.
This is how he spoke of the act of shooting down an enemy pilot.
My father discriminates between a sportsman and a butcher. The latter shoots for fun. When I have shot down an Englishman my hunting passion is satisfied for a quarter of an hour. Therefore I do not succeed in shooting two Englishmen in succession. If one of them comes down I have the feeling of complete satisfaction. Only much, much later I have overcome my instinct and have become a butcher.
Sometimes, in fact most times, those deaths were horrible. This is another account that might bring about a different view of that commonly used term " shot down in flames. "
Once I was on the ground next to a benzine tank. It contained one hundred litres of benzine which exploded and burnt. The heat was so great that I could not bear to be within ten yards of it. One can therefore imagine what it means if a tank containing a large quantity of this devilish liquid explodes a few inches in front of one while the blast from the propeller blows the flame into one's face. I believe a man must lose consciousness at the very first moment. Sometimes miracles do happen. For in stance, I once saw an English aeroplane falling down in flames. The flames burst out only at an altitude of fifteen hundred feet. The whole machine was burning. When we had flown home we were told that one of the occupants of the machine had jumped from an altitude of one hundred and fifty feet. It was the observer. One hundred and fifty feet is the height of a good sized steeple. Supposing somebody should jump from its top to the ground, what would be his condition? Most men would break their bones in jumping from a first floor window. At any rate, this good fellow jumped from a burning machine at an altitude of one hundred and fifty feet, from a machine which had been burning for over a minute, and nothing happened to him except a simple fracture of the leg. Soon after his adventure he made a statement from which it appears that his nerve had not suffered.
On July 6th 1917, the Red Baron came as close to death as one could come in those days, and still live to tell the tale. It was a wound that should have ended his flying career, but Richthofen could not desert the men of the squadron he lead, nor the cause he fought for.
In his book, von Richthofen describes how he was about to attack a Vickers "bomber" and had not even taken the safety catch off his gun when the bomber's observer started to fire at a range of 300 m, a distance that von Richthofen considered to be too far away for "real" combat. In his own words, "the best marksman just does not hit the target at this distance". Suddenly there was a blow to his head and he was totally paralysed and blinded. After a great effort he was able to move his limbs again while sensing that his plane was in a dive; still he could not see. When the darkness slowly lifted he first checked his altimeter, which showed 800 m, a drop of 3200 m within a few moments. He reduced his altitude to 50 m and made a rough landing, when he realised he was going to faint again. He was able to get out of the plane and collapsed remembering only that he had fallen on a thistle and had not been able to move from the spot. After a drive of several hours in a motorcar he was taken to a field hospital.
The history in his medical file is very similar, noting that he did not lose consciousness in the plane. "His arms fell down, legs moved to the front of the plane. The flying apparatus fell towards the ground. At the same time he had a feeling of total blindness and the engine sound was heard as if from a great distance. After regaining his senses and control over his limbs, he estimated that the time of paralysis lasted for only a minute. He descended to an altitude of 50 m to find an appropriate landing spot until he felt that he could no longer fly the aircraft. Afterwards he could not remember where he had landed. He left the plane and collapsed." His memory of his transportation to the hospital was blurred. Upon arrival von Richthofen immediately told his physician that he had only been able to retain control of the aircraft because he had had the firm conviction that otherwise he would have been a dead man.
The initial diagnosis on reaching hospital was "machinegun (projectile) ricocheting from head". The stay in hospital was uneventful after surgery to ascertain that the bullet had not entered the brain.
Von Richthofen stayed in the field hospital for 20 days until July 25, 1917 (figure 2). He left because he wanted to take command of his wing again. The skull wound was not closed, and the bare bone was probably visible until his death. He was advised not to fly until the wound in his head had healed completely. There is a special mention of the fact that even the surgeon in charge held this opinion in the medical file. It was also recorded that "without a doubt there had been a severe concussion of the brain and even more probable a cerebral haemorrhage. For this reason sudden changes in air pressure during flight might lead to disturbances of his consciousness". The record ends with the statement that von Richthofen promised not to resume flying before he had been given permission by a physician.
A new chapter of The Red Air Fighter was added in the spring of 1918, in which von Richthofen mentioned his depression and melancholy when he thought about the future. He describes a totally different von Richthofen than the one who wrote the first edition of The Red Air Fighter. He feels unwell after each air combat and attributes this feeling to his head injury. After landing he stays in his quarters and does not want to see or to talk to anybody.
At the end of January, 1918, when on another visit home, his mother noted the change in her son: she describes him as taciturn, distant, and almost unapproachable. She thought that he had changed because he had seen death too many times.
And so, on that last April day of his life, burnt-out and physically weak, he violated his own air warfare rules. He was far behind enemy lines, far too low to the ground, and allowed himself to be caught in a crossfire of machine guns from both the young Canadian pilot behind him (Roy Brown), and an Australian anti-aircraft position as he fixated on the target flying yards in front of him.
A discussion still continues to this very day as to who fired that fatal bullet.
Like many of his victims, he probably never knew what hit him.
A bullet pierced his heart, and the small frail red machine made an almost perfect landing on the ground below. Once the troops on the ground realized who had just been shot down, his plane was picked apart by eager souvenir hunters.
The engine from his plane is an exhibit at the British War Museum.
His body was lifted gently from it's seat, and he was given a full military funeral by the very same men he had spent most of his military life trying to kill. They treated him as one of their own, and that perhaps tells us how much the world has changed since that April day in 1917.
After his burial, his body was moved three times. He finally returned home to Wiesbaden, to the family's burial plot in 1975. There he lies today, a symbol of an almost forgotten time when war was fought with rules, by men of honour.
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