Marked for Death (27 page)

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.’
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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.

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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.
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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.
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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.’
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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,
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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.

But there is another aspect. Unlike Richthofen, Bishop was one of the aces who acted as ‘lone wolves’. Such men of exalted reputation were often pretty much free to come and go as they chose, preferring to hunt alone, and this inevitably made
corroborating their victories more difficult even at the time. The implication that anyone whose score is doubtful was probably a liar is an easy cynicism. Bishop and others like him typically flew far more sorties in a given period than the average airman – often twice as many - and there is every reason to suppose that this level of obsessive searching for quarry would have paid off in higher scores. At the very least the sheer courage in spending twice as much time in the air, thereby doubling the chances of disaster, is undeniable.

However, the lingering doubt about Bishop’s award of the VC for his 2nd June sortie remains awkward, and even Kilduff skirts the issue. The awarding of the most prestigious British medal in these anomalous circumstances must naturally prompt the question of whether there might not have been political motives at work here. First it must be said that the awarding of
any
medal has a political component since the recommendation has to be passed from the unit commander up through the chain of higher command until it is officially ratified, rejected or modified. Some sort of attempt at even-handedness has always to be made: it would be injudicious to allow one particular service, regiment or squadron to receive far more awards than any other. It was yet another of the drawbacks of the ‘ace’ system that once its laurelled heroes had entered a kind of national pantheon, they themselves acquired political significance willy-nilly. It so happens that in Canada by April 1917 popular backing for the war was evaporating. In that month the Canadian House of Commons passed a conscription act that was bitterly divisive. For one thing French Canadians in Québec were stolidly opposed to being forced to fight in yet another European war. Canada had already sacrificed large numbers of its bravest young men on a muddy altar thousands of miles away with no sign of an end in sight. And while British Canada continued to support the Canadian Corps, which had racked up brilliant victories as well as catastrophic casualties, many Canadians were privately opposed to
conscription – above all farmers who stood to lose their young farm hands. Thus it is not at all beyond conjecture that a decision was taken at the most senior British level, and almost certainly with the agreement of the King himself, that the Empire’s highest award for bravery would be a very timely morale booster for Canada and make it that much more difficult for the Dominion to slacken its efforts.

The fact is that by 1917 (and regardless of disdainful leading articles in
Flying
about foreign practices) no military was above using its heroes to its own internal advantage, especially when it came to the various services competing to prise more money out of dwindling national treasuries. This writer has no desire to enter the lists in disputes about any of the aces’ scores. Even if it turned out that none had ever made more than thirty kills they would still be revealed as men of quite outstanding valour and skill, and Billy Bishop is no exception to this. It would just have been far better for his posthumous reputation had he been awarded the medal for cumulative bravery, like Albert Ball. God knows he’d earned it. It was a shame they chose that particular morning’s unwitnessed action for the citation. In any case the VC Bishop was awarded in 1917 turned him overnight into a national hero, to be fêted and celebrated for the rest of his life. Perhaps the most famous Canadian of his generation, he went on to become Air Marshal of the RCAF on the outbreak of the Second World War and died in 1956 at the age of sixty-two, a national hero to the last. Nevertheless, the scholarly wrangles continue to this day over the deeds of his younger self in the skies above France almost a hundred years ago, as they do over those of his peers on both sides.

There are 188 known First World War flying aces listed with twenty and more kills, which of course excludes virtually all the earliest aces like Pégoud with five and over, as well as one of the two greatest pioneers of aerial combat, Max Immelmann, with his fifteen victories – a good example of the inherent bias of a system that only counts gun-notches. Justice has since been done
to Oswald Boelcke, who at the time of his death was credited with nineteen victories but has now been granted forty, scholarship having posthumously overcome his modesty. Even among the highest-scoring men some names are more familiar than others, perhaps a reflection of the attention paid to them by the newspapers of the day according to the relative attractiveness of their personalities. Thus the second-ranking ace of the war, René Fonck with seventy-five victories, is arguably less well known outside France than his more sympathetic compatriot Georges Guynemer with fifty-three. Similarly, while many Britons have heard of the RFC’s second, third and fifth highest scorers – respectively Mick Mannock, James McCudden and Albert Ball – fewer are familiar with George McElroy, in the UK’s fourth position with forty-seven victories. But why? Was it because he was Irish-born?