Von Richthofen: The Legend Evaluated Read online

  On the matter of tracer bullets: when they came in … ‘it was thought that they would make close fighting impossible. They have not made the difference that one would expect. One reason is that it is very hard to estimate the range in the air, just as at sea. The tracers burn for a comparatively short time, so that they go out before hitting the target. This means that the bullet apparently hits, but really falls away from the target.’

  Under ‘Usual Enemy Tactics’ he says that hitherto fighters have tried to approach from behind and, if seen, dived then climbed for a belly shot and continued to dive and climb repeatedly. These were predominantly the Fokker El. However, with the entry of the Albatros: ‘Sometimes now they dive under one, and then climb quickly, so that when next seen they are above and behind one’s machine. To prevent this, hustle the Enemy to prevent him coming up again.’

  The tactics laid down for RFC pilots flying single-seat fighters and the observer-gunners in two-seaters were the same as those that the enemy had worked out for themselves, except that their Spandau and Parabellum machine-guns were of a heavier calibre than the Lewis and effective at longer ranges.

  It was at this point in the development of air fighting that Manfred arrived on the scene.

  CHAPTER 3 - HEREDITY AND FORMATIVE YEARS

  Manfred’s family were typical Dunker, aristocratic Prussian landowners; and, though not, in the words of Sir William Gilbert, ‘the very model of a modern major-general’, he was undeniably the very essence of a German regular officer. Obedience, discipline and duty were inculcated in him from childhood and set his standards of conduct for life.

  Like most of his kind, he was an ardent hunter of game, from partridge to bison. It was this passion for hunting that has caused many critics to condemn him as a cold and calculating, even psychopathic, killer who took human life as unfeelingly as he shot birds and animals. This was jumping to a wrong conclusion, because a good game shot prides himself on making clean kills that do not cause suffering. There are others who attribute his enjoyment of air fighting to a love of sport, as Major Rees did about British pilots, but that is not true either. War has never been a sport, it is a grim business in which men — and women — set out to destroy the enemy from patriotism or political dedication. A clean kill is not given a thought. One puts the enemy out of action by whatever means one can: death, swift or slow, or wounds that make him unfit to fight permanently or temporarily.

  In battles between aircraft, before the present era when homing missiles blow pilots and crews to smithereens in a split second, men often burned slowly to death, died in agony from mutilation, fell thousands of feet without a parachute, or suffered some other tormented end. The victors who inflicted such horrors on them were decent people of various nationalities, including British, who would never have been deliberately cruel to anyone.

  A passage in Manfred’s autobiography vindicates him of accusations that he was insensitive and bloodthirsty: ‘I have long since had nightmares of the first Englishman I saw plummeting down’. The context makes it clear that he was referring to the first enemy aircraft he shot down. His heredity and upbringing to be a professional soldier had not blunted his humanity.

  His parents were Major Albrecht Freiherr and Kunigunde Freifrau von Richthofen. His father was serving in the dragoons, the First Leibkürassieren Regiment, at Breslau, capital city of Silesia, with 600,000 inhabitants (now Wroclaw, in Poland), when their first three children were born: a daughter, Ilse, in 1890, Manfred on 2 May 1892, Lothar in 1894. The Major, after rescuing one of his troopers who had fallen into the wintry river Oder, became deaf in one ear and was invalided out of the Army. The family moved to a small town thirty miles south-west, Schweidnitz (now Swidniza), population then 30,000, where the youngest child, Karl Bolko, was born in 1903.

  From early boyhood the eldest son was adventurous. One of his frequent feats was to climb the tallest apple tree in the orchard, then, instead of clambering down the same way, swing from branch to branch.

  At the age of eleven he entered the Cadet Academy at Wahlstatt. He had not chosen a military life. ‘I was not particularly eager to become a cadet, but my father wished it and I was not consulted’. He was so unhappy there that he warned Lothar not to be coerced into following him.

  He did not do well academically, because he worked only enough to pass his examinations, but excelled at gymnastics and marksmanship. He was particularly expert on the parallel bars and could also perform the difficult standing forward somersault.

  A year later, during a holiday between semesters, he was given an airgun. To demonstrate his prowess, he shot three ducks and proudly brought his mother a feather from each as trophies. Presumably he was inspired to emulate his father, who had adorned the house with some 400 animal heads and stuffed birds as witness to his skill with rifle and gun. Asked where he had found the ducks, he confessed that they were swimming in the garden pond. Evidently German boys were not taught that it is the worst of bad sportsmanship to shoot a sitting (or floating) bird. His mother scolded him, but his grandmother intervened with the plea that his honesty in admitting to the slaughter of what were regarded as pets outweighed the misdeed. He glued the feathers to a sheet of brown paper and they became the first of his many trophies, which culminated in his collection of cups and aeroplane parts commemorating his aerial victories.

  While at the cadet school, to test his nerve he climbed the highest church tower in the town and tied a handkerchief to the lightning conductor as proof of his daring. There is an aberration in his recollection of the escapade. In his book My Life In The War, he wrote amusedly, ‘Ten years later I visited my youngest brother, Bolko, at Wahlstatt and I saw my handkerchief still tied high in the air.’ Later he contradicts this with equal amusement: ‘My youngest brother, Bolko, wrote a long letter of complaint to the family. He is a cadet at Wahlstatt and says that I portrayed the teachers so badly in my book, he is having so much unpleasantness that he cannot bear it any longer. He asks that I submit the manuscript of my next book for his approval. I think he demands a lot, besides accusing me of lies. I related how I once climbed the church tower at Wahlstatt and hung a handkerchief there. He has established that it no longer hangs there and because of that I could hardly have told the truth. I think he is asking too much of a handkerchief to adorn a church tower for fifteen years.’

  The display of courage would have earned the admiration of Douglas Bader and others at the Royal Air Force College, Cranwell, in the late nineteen-twenties. The bravest cadets, Douglas among them, performed a lethally dangerous trick for which they would have been dismissed the Service if found out. Flying solo in the rear cockpit of a dual control Avro 504K (top speed 95 mph), a trainer version of a 1914-1918 reconnaissance type, these young pilots undid their seat straps and parachute harness, climbed out of the cockpit, straddled the fuselage and moved forward to tie a handkerchief to the control column in the front cockpit; then returned, refastened all the straps, landed and removed the incriminating evidence before an officer spotted it. Of such intrepid high spirits have fighter pilots always been made; but in the later 1930s high speeds made such defiance of danger impossible. A potentially fatal climb by a fourteen-year-old was a fair equivalent.

  In 1909 Manfred was admitted to the Senior Cadet Academy at Lichterfelde. He had been riding since boyhood, and here he competed in equestrian events. On passing out from there he became an Officer Candidate, applied to join No. 1 Ulan (Lancer) Regiment Kaiser Alexander III of Russia and was accepted. (Alexander III was the Kaiser’s uncle and father of Czar Nikolai II, Russia’s ruler.) The next stage of his training was a short course at the Berlin War Academy, after which he was commissioned. He records, ‘Finally I received my epaulettes and was so proud to be addressed as Herr Leutnant.’

  At twenty years old he was a personable young man with a ready smile that graces even photographs taken at times of intense battle stress. He was short, like many great fighter pilots in both world wars, slim and blue-eyed; again,
blue or grey eyes are a common feature among the best fighter pilots and are said to denote excellent sight. He appears to have been more than a trifle bandy-legged (not quite in the couldn’t-stop-a-pig category) which is not surprising in anyone who has ridden a lot from an early age.

  He took to regimental life with zest. His father gave him ‘a beautiful mare named Santuzza’. He found that she was a fine jumper, so entered her for a jumping race — whether over fences or hurdles he does not say. On the eve of the event she fell while practising, injured a shoulder and he cracked a collarbone.

  He seems to have been a bold and reckless horseman rather than a polished one. At Breslau in 1912 he competed in what he calls ‘the Olympiad’. The word was already in common use as a synonym for ‘Olympic Games’, although its original meaning was the four-year period between each Games. His use of the term is puzzling. This was an Olympic year, but the Games were held in Stockholm.

  He rode ‘a very beautiful chestnut bay horse in the distance race’. Approaching the last jump, he saw a crowd of spectators there and deduced that it must be the most difficult one. People were gesturing at him to reduce speed, but he ignored them. He galloped up a slope at the top of which was the obstacle. Felix flew over it, then ‘mount and rider disappeared, head over heels, into the Weistritz River’, just beyond. But he kept his sense of humour: ‘At the weigh-in, people were amazed that I had not lost the usual kilogramme, but, rather, was five kilos heavier. Thank God no-one saw I was soaking wet.’

  His last win came on a mare named Blume (Flower) in the 1913 Kaiser Prize Race. He was the only rider to have a clear round, despite an accident.

  ‘I galloped over the heather and then suddenly landed on my head. The mare had put her foot in a rabbit hole and in the fall I broke my collarbone. I remounted and rode another seventy kilometres with the injury, but finished in good time without a fault’.

  With seventy kilometres remaining after he had already completed part of the course, the mind reels at trying to guess how long the whole ride must have been.

  He makes no mention of girl friends or mess life. The impression one has is that he was too private a person to record any romantic relationships or sexual liaisons and would, anyway, have regarded it as ill-bred and ungallant to mention such intimate matters. However, it is unlikely that in his circumstances a well-off, good-looking, lively young sportsman would choose to be celibate; especially in an era when uniforms and the dashing reputation of cavalrymen exerted a highly charged sexual attraction.

  A well-known RAF fighter pilot, interviewed during the fiftieth anniversary of the Battle of Britain, said frankly ‘At nineteen, all you think about is beer and women’. Dashing young airmen had superseded the cavalry, who now clanked about in armoured vehicles.

  This echoes what a famous World War I Canadian fighter pilot wrote, unambiguously, in his memoirs; ‘On some evenings we would go into the local town to drink and dine, and do more interesting things.’

  There was, in fact, a sweetheart in Manfred’s life, but, as will be seen, the association was, to use a contemporary term, strictly honourable.

  Carousing is another matter and young officers of all nations have traditionally been subjected to it by their seniors as a rite of passage, for ‘a gentleman must learn to hold his liquor’. Manfred mentions the odd occasion when champagne flowed, but only to celebrate a special event or ameliorate tedium, not in the daily life of an officers’ mess. Perhaps he had another characteristic in common with Douglas Bader, who did not drink; he had tasted beer, sherry and whisky but disliked them. A brilliant cricketer, rugger player and boxer, he eschewed alcohol anyway, because it reduced fitness; and his natural high spirits were enough to make him enjoy a party or the company of his comrades without artificial stimulus.

  CHAPTER 4 - WAR IS DECLARED

  /

  In his History of the First World War, B. H. Liddell Hart wrote, ‘Fifty years were spent in the making of Europe explosive. Five days were enough to detonate it’. This is relevant to Manfred von Richthofen’s career because, unless the causes are explained, one might wonder why his regiment, named after a past Czar, should suddenly find itself fighting Russia.

  The explanation is that on 27 June 1914 Archduke Franz Ferdinand, heir to the ruler of Austria-Hungary, and his wife, were assassinated on a visit to Serbia. On 28 July Austria-Hungary declared war on Serbia. Two major opposing alliances existed in Europe: one between Germany, Austria-Hungary and Italy, the other comprising Great Britain, Russia and France. Russia, an ally of Serbia, mobilised its armed forces. Germany, supporting Austria-Hungary, declared war on Russia on 1 August and on France two days later. On the following morning Germany invaded Belgium. Thereupon Britain declared war on Germany. Italy deserted its alliance with Germany and Austria-Hungary and declared itself neutral; but came in on the side of Britain, France and Russia on 24 May 1915.

  In expectation of war, Manfred’s regiment had been moved to a small town, Ostrovo, near the Russian frontier. In his book he makes a rare mention of what he calls ‘celebration’ in the mess on the evening of 1 August, which is a euphemism for tipsy revelry. The regiment had been brought to readiness several times recently and each alarm had been a false one. ‘We had convinced ourselves that war was out of the question.’ They had to change their minds when their party was interrupted by the District Magistrate, who brought urgent news. Germany had closed the bridges in Silesia across the river that formed the frontier with Russia and guards had been posted at every one.

  On 2 August Manfred wrote home to say, ‘These, written in haste, might be my last lines. My heartfelt greetings to you all.

  ‘If we do not see each other again, accept my most sincere thanks for everything you have done for me. I have no debts and am taking money with me. I embrace each of you. Your grateful and obedient son and brother.’

  At midnight he led a mounted patrol over a bridge across the river Prosna, expecting an immediate encounter with the enemy. Early next morning the Ulans entered Kieltze, a village whose church tower attracted his attention. He posted a lookout there, then locked the parish priest in it, had the belfry ladder removed so that he could not ring an alarm, and warned him that ‘if the slightest hostile behaviour were noticed among the population’, he would be hanged.

  Although the German Imperial Military Air Service comprised thirty-three Field Service Units, each of six aeroplanes, and ten Home Defence Units of four, none had yet been sent to this sector of the Eastern Front, so the cavalry had to do all the reconnaissance.

  The Russians also relied on cavalry here at first. When they did begin aerial reconnaissance, one of their pilots was unique: Princess Shakovskaya, the only woman flyer in any air force. Her photograph appeared in a December issue of The War Illustrated, leaning with elegant nonchalance against her aeroplane.

  Manfred had to send a despatch rider to his Headquarters every evening with a report. As these did not rejoin him, their number steadily diminished.

  On the fifth night, by when all but two of his troopers had gone, the sentry on the church tower woke him and announced, ‘The Cossacks are here.’

  It was drizzly and starless. The three Germans led their horses away. It was so dark that fifteen metres sufficed for a safe distance. Manfred’s weapons were the sabre and pistol. He borrowed a carbine from one of his men and returned alone to reconnoitre. He had released the priest that day and now, by the light of lanterns that some of the enemy carried, saw him among them, whose numbers he put at twenty to thirty.

  He rejoined his men and they took their horses to a wood, from where, at dawn, they saw the Cossacks leave. That evening, he sent a sixth man off with a despatch and on the seventh returned to the regiment with the one remaining trooper. There was astonishment at his appearance, as a rumour had spread that they had both been killed.

  That was the last he saw of the Russian Front for the time being. The regiment entrained next day for France and arrived at a destination north of Metz twen
ty-four hours later. Festivity relieved the monotony and discomfort; ‘We had to take provisions for a long journey. Naturally, we did not lack something to drink.’

  First they rode north for some thirty kilometres towards Luxembourg with patrols scouting ahead, but had no sight of the enemy. After crossing into Luxembourg they headed north-west to Arlon, in Belgium, another forty kilometres. Everywhere, ‘right and left, on every street, in front of us and behind us’ marched soldiers of every arm.

  On 21 August, at Etalle, seventeen kilometres west of Arlon, he led a fifteen-strong patrol to learn the strength of the enemy who were in a vast forest. They came upon a forester’s uninhabited cottage and after they had ridden past it a shot came from one of its windows; a trooper was wounded in the hand and his horse in its belly. The patrol surrounded the house and found half a dozen youths inside, but no gun.

  ‘My anger was high, but I had never killed anyone in my life and the moment was extremely unpleasant.’

  The youths bolted through the back door. The troopers later found a gun, so Manfred ordered the cottage to be burned down. He had been set a precedent; nine days before, his cousin Wolfram was killed by a franc tireur at a village in this vicinity and every house that might hide these partisans had been put to the torch.

  Now from the edge of the trees he saw a troop of French dragoons. When they disappeared he set out to find them. On his right was a wall of rock, on his left a stream; fifty metres ahead, a meadow; then the forest’s edge. He was looking through his field glasses when rifle fire broke out from the forest, aimed at his patrol. He estimated that over 200 men were hiding there. It would be useless to take cover, so he ordered a retreat. Against his orders, his men had bunched together, so only he and four troopers escaped; but a couple more came back on foot, their mounts shot from under them. ‘This baptism of fire was not as much fun as I had thought.’