Marked for Death (26 page)

The Royal Flying Corps is coldly impersonal in its official reports. It is in this aspect splendidly unique. It alone among the belligerents steadily refuses the limelight of publicity so far as its personnel is concerned. In its bulletins aeroplanes, not men, are mentioned. The names of its flying officers and observers are recorded only in the Roll of Honour or in the list of awards. ‘Baron von Richthofen,’ says the German bulletin, ‘yesterday secured his sixtieth victim.’ Doubtless the Germans have some good reason for booming their Richthofens at the expense of their [lesser] comrades. It is their considered policy, and it has its advantages as well as its drawbacks. On the whole, our policy is peculiarly British, and it is based upon British traditions. It springs partly from the regimental spirit, partly from the public-school spirit, and partly from the sporting spirit which is found in the British wherever they are…
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Such cultural differences aside, Trenchard initially thought it unfair to laud one man for his bravery while every day equal bravery was being shown by the pilots and observers of humbler types of aircraft, especially two-seaters doing artillery spotting and the like. Nor was it clear who might claim the victory in such a case: the pilot or the observer with the machine gun who actually did the shooting. It was equally problematic when two or more British machines joined forces to down an enemy aircraft. At first each pilot was credited with a kill, but later on a more scrupulous system of awarding fractions was adopted, so an individual score like 12½ became the norm.

The award of the third wartime VC to an RFC airman, Captain Lanoe Hawker, for shooting down three enemy aircraft on a single day in July 1915, was the exception that proved the British rule. By the end of the year Hawker had seven victories, which put him almost on a par with the German aces, and the newspapers back home were already acclaiming him as an ace. To his further credit Hawker had managed this feat
against opponents armed with machine guns while flying a Bristol Scout on which he had fixed a mounting for his single-shot cavalry carbine to fire obliquely past the propeller. Hawker was already an outstanding rifle shot and became expert with this idiosyncratic arrangement that a few other pilots copied but never mastered as he did. When after a tremendous twenty-minute aerial battle in November 1916 he became Manfred von Richthofen’s eleventh victim, his passing was mourned throughout Britain and particularly by the RFC, for whom by then he had become the grand old archetype of a fighter pilot. He was twenty-five.

Immelmann and Boelcke were also killed that same year – Immelmann in June and Boelcke in October. Both were mourned nationally and the RFC dropped notes of regret and respect for such worthy opponents. Of the two, Boelcke was perhaps the more whole-heartedly lamented. By all accounts he was an outstandingly decent man who, whenever he could, landed next to his victims to shake them by the hand, invite them back to his Staffel’s
Kasino
(mess) for lunch, ensure their swift transfer to hospital or salute their cadavers. More than that, he was a superb tactician who did much to bring about the organising of the German
Jagdstaffeln
or Jastas – the hunting squadrons that later formed the ‘flying circuses’ that would serve aces like Richthofen so well. The immense prestige Boelcke had won for himself in Germany – not to mention the Blue Max – enabled him to exert considerable influence on the military authorities, who were happy to defer to him in the field in which he was so clearly expert.

Boelcke lived to see the end of the
Fliegertruppen
’s monoplane supremacy at the hands of the now better-organised fighter squadrons of the RFC and the Aéronautique Militaire. These were principally flying the D.H.2 and the Nieuport ‘Bébé’, although rather earlier in 1916 the RNAS had already begun making inroads into the German monoplanes with the new Sopwith Scout, usually known as the ‘Pup’. Had the RFC been
given the vastly superior Pups at the same time as the Navy, the Fokkers would have been finished months earlier; but of course the Sopwith company was contracted to the Admiralty and not to the Army, a good example of the absurd inefficiency of the British system.

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’.
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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.’
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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.’
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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.