Manfred von
Richthofen
Name: Manfred Albrecht
Freiherr von Richthofen
Country: Germany
Rank: Rittmeister
Units: FFA 69, Jasta 2, 11, JG 1 KG 2
Victories: 80
Date Of Birth: May 2, 1892
Place of Birth: Breslau
Date Of Death: April 21, 1918
Place of Death: Morlancourt Ridge
Buried: Wiesbaden, Germany
The most famous ace of the war, Manfred von briefly
served in the trenches before transferring to the German Air Service
in 1916. Oswald
Boelcke's star pupil was a fast learner and achieved immediate
success. A month after receiving his first Albatros, von Richthofen had
six victories against Allied aircraft. As his reputation grew, the
"Red Knight of Germany" painted the fuselage of his Albatros D.III
bright red to flaunt his prowess in the air. The British called him
the jolly "Red Baron," to the French he was the "Red Devil." He was
shot down as he flew over the trenches in pursuit of Wilfrid May on
April 21, 1918.
Although Arthur
Brown was officially credited with the victory, evidence
suggests von Richthofen was hit by a single bullet fired from a machine
gun in the trenches. A British pilot flew over the German aerodrome
at Cappy and dropped a note informing the Germans of the Baron's
death. Buried in France with full military honours, von Richthofen's body
was later exhumed and reburied in the family cemetery at Wiesbaden.
The planes Anthony Fokker delivered to the front at the
end of 1916 looked very familiar to the
airmen. Fokker never made a
secret of the fact that he used downed aircraft as models
and improved on designs the Allies
had been kind enough to test in
the field. Out of his factory came
the new crop of such aircraft and they were among
the best and most advanced to fly in the war.
The
Germans portrayed such heroes as Baron Manfred von
Richthofen as larger than life. This photo and others like
it could be
found in nearly every German home during the war.
The first plane the new crop of fliers were given was
not a Fokker (though by this time, Anthony
Fokker had become a virtual
minister of aircraft procurement in the
government), but the
Albatross D LI (later to evolve into
the D LII), a lightweight plywood-frame biplane
fighter with a
powerful 160-horsepower Mercedes engine and
two Spandau machine guns. (At the beginning of
the war, Albatross was the
largest German aircraft builder, supplying 60 percent of the
entire air force. By the war’s
end, it could barely field a few
fighters, and after the war the
company disappeared, appearing
briefly in a failed 1919 attempt
at commercial aviation.) The German fliers
were convinced that these
were the finest machines either side
had produced—or could
produce—until they received the
new planes from Fokker.
Richthofen and his Flying Circus became
famous flying the
Fokker- Dr I, a triplane that borrowed heavily from the
Sopwith Triplane.
The Dr I could be controlled by only the best
pilots, which
limited its deployment. In the hands of Richthofen, the Dr I
could
zigzag like a large fly, eluding faster planes
The first was the Fokker Dr I, a
triplane modelled after the Sopwith
Triplane (made famous by British ace
Raymond Collishaw, whose
plane was called Black Maria), but
including features of the Sopwith Camel, and
equipped with an additional
wing on the undercarriage for more
manoeuvrability. The Dr I was compact and
agile, presenting a small target that was almost
impossible to hit: a length of
less than nineteen feet (6m), a
wingspan of less than twenty-four feet (7m), and a
top speed of 103 miles per hour
(l66kph), which was not the
fastest in the sky, but more than enough to evade virtually
any attack run.
It was flying this
plane that one ace in particular, Manfred von Richthofen, became a legend
and one of the most famous fliers in history. Manfred von
Richthofen was born on Max 2, 1892. to an aristocratic
Silesian family. He grew up to he a handsome young man with
a proud, piercing stare and steely nerves, and soon came to
the attention of Oswald Boelcke, who made him the commander
of Jasta 2, renamed Jagdstaffel Boelcke after the great
ace’s death. Von Richthofen extended Boelcke’s ideas of
teamwork and fostered a unity in the corps that allowed it
to function as a single-minded and single-willed unit.
Von Richthofen was still flying an Albatross D II when he won
his Blue Max after his eighth kill in November 1916 and when
he downed Lanoe Hawker (sometimes called “the British
Boelcke”) on November 23. It was this engagement that
convinced von Richthofen that he needed a fighter with more
agility, even at the expense of speed. By the end of 19 1 6,
von Richthofen had acquired the new Fokker Dr I and he flew
both it and the Albatross II) Ill, as the situation
warranted. After he learned that he had shot down Hawker,
von Richthofen painted his plane red out of joy, giving rise
to a new epithet, the “Red Baron.”
Fighter pilots on
both sides recognized the
special comraderie
among the aces of the same squadron. This is von Richthofen
and his Jasta
He created a new squadron consisting of
the best fliers in Germany, jasta 11, and the planes began
their operations in earnest in January of 1917. In order to
camouflage which plane was his, all the planes of Jasta 11
were brightly coloured with much red, though it was clear to
most ground observers which airplane was almost entirely
red. (The Germans learned that the bright colours of the
planes had a disorienting effect on gunners and, far from
offering a better target as was feared, gave the pilots a
tactical advantage.)
In order to be close to the front, and as
mobile as possible to avoid Allied bombing, Jasta 11 (men
and planes) were quartered in tents, giving rise to a
nickname for the squadron: “the Flying Circus.” The Red
Baron often landed near the crash site of a fallen enemy to
retrieve a memento. Of all the aces of the war, von
Richthofen may lay claim to having been the most complex,
the most troubled by the war, and the most uncertain of his
role in it. He fought severe headaches and bouts of
depression, and recognized more than most the disparity
between how the war was going in the air and how Germany was
faring on the ground.
By the end of March, the fliers of Jasta
11 were tested and hardened into a cohesive unit that was
invincible in the sky. The month of April 1 917 was one of
the worst for Allied airmen, as Jasta 11 alone accounted for
eighty three victories and 3 1 6 lost airmen. The month
became known as “Bloody April” and the Germans were uncontested
in the skies over the Somme battlefields below. But on
the ground the Germans called 1917 “the turnip year,” as the
embargo of the continent by the British continued to
strangle the Central Powers. It seemed to all that 1918
might be the fateful year in which the war would end. In 1918
Fokker created one more plane, taking the basic design of
the Nieuports and creating the D VII, a biplane thought
today to be the finest all-around fighter of the war, and
the only plane the Allies insisted the Germans relinquish as
a condition of the armistice. But the crash program to turn
out these planes came too late to affect the outcome of the
war.
By 1918 the Allies had recovered from
Bloody April and even von Richthofen’s talents could not
overcome the plodding, methodical, piecemeal conquest of the
skies by the Allies. Manfred von Richthofen met his end in
battle on April 21 1918 probably at the hands of a Canadian
pilot of a Sopwith Camel, Captain A. Roy Brown, though
questions persisted as to exactly how the Red Baron died.
Von Richtofen, chasing the plane piloted by Captain Brown and
being pursued by a plane piloted by another Canadian,
Lieutenant Wilford May, was caught by a bullet fired by one
or the other of his assailants as he stood and turned to
check the tail of his plane. Having fallen in Allied
territory, the Red Baron was taken from his plane and given
a funeral by the Allies worthy of one of their own fallen
aces—the pallbearers were all captains and squadron
commanders, as von Richthofen himself had been.
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