Chapter Forty
Sunday, Bloody Sunday
Sunday, April 21, 1918.
On the evening of that fateful Sunday, Manfred von Richtofen, the Red Baron, met his fate. He was shot down in combat, either by Captain Roy Brown, a Canadian in the RAF, or by Australian machine gunners. It was a controversy, and a bitter one, that persisted for years. I can state for a certainty that it wasn’t us. We came upon the fracas in the closing stages. While I didn’t know who we were supporting or fighting, it sort of came back upon wracking my memory cells.
I did in fact recall several machines breaking off the combat and heading along the river. First there was a Camel, and then a tri-plane, and then a pause and another Camel. Then more planes broke off in different directions. From our altitude, we couldn’t see who was who or who did exactly what.
I was grateful to be let off the hook. Subsequent events convinced me that fame is an awful thing. Fame is fleeting and useless. You can’t eat it, you can’t fuck it, so you might as well piss on it. A lot of famous guys had big problems fitting into civilian life after the war. The fame got in the way of normal existence. For most aces, fame translated into something pretty useless.
The gist of it was, a guy called Wop May, another Canuck, had a problem with his guns I think, it’s not important, and so he broke and ran for home. Exactly as ordered. He broke off alone, and dove to the north, and sought to escape without notice. But the Red Baron saw him go. He entered pursuit, rapidly catching May, down low along the river. Wop May thought he was a goner for sure. But Captain Brown, mindful of a friend from home and knowing May’s inexperience, went after the Baron, and fired on him a number of times.
The Baron’s head jerked around and he obviously knew Roy Brown was there.
At some point the Baron broke off from May, and flew over the land, where his plane crashed. He must have been wounded, for he turned into enemy, or our territory, when by all rights he should have turned for home. But that’s merely deductive reasoning.
Maybe the Baron became disoriented. It’s easy enough to do, especially if you’re really tired. And there’s simply no telling who shot him or when, whether Brown did it, or if the Baron was already dead. Maybe he was already dead, and his flight path had no correlation to May’s movements except coincidence.
People are entitled to an opinion, but it’s not enough to convince a doubter. There were thirty or forty reports to mull over and they all said different things from different vantage points. And that was just my guys. Never mind the other squadrons, or all of the people on the ground.
Some of us remembered three planes breaking off to the north, that was about it for our contribution. Coincidentally, we only got one kill. Nothing to report, really. Bartlett picked off a wounded straggler. But the lines were abuzz with it, and technically we had to be debriefed, just for the record. At some point a group arrived from higher command. Senior Army officers, RAF, spooks from Military Intelligence, you name them and they sent a representative.
There must have been twenty of them.
They wanted to settle their bet, i.e. to settle what happened. They wanted a few authoritative, decisive answers, and they wanted them from me. Always glad to help, but not much to say. They weren’t taking no for an answer.
“He knew his star was on the wane.” I began. “He’s known that for a long time. Not to speak ill of the dead, but he knew he would inevitably return to earth, like a meteorite.”
It’s one of those unwritten laws. Yet these men would not leave me alone, and if our mission was to continue, I had to satisfy them in some way.
“So you can neither confirm nor deny, that Australian machine-gunners fired on him and hit him?” Someone asked.
“It would seem likely that they did.” I admitted. “It’s also just as likely that Captain Brown hit him, or any one of a hundred other pilots.”
They digested that, and were unsatisfied. Can’t blame them for that.
 |
| Dead at 26. |
“Where’s my perspective? Two miles above the battlefield, and on the wrong side of the smoke.”
It’s not my problem.
Were they trying to figure out who to give a fucking medal to?
Not my job.
“Von Richtofen was worn to a frazzle, by weeks of continuous bombing, harassment, and aerial combat at high altitudes.” I noted for the room’s benefit. “I doubt if a few days leave over the past year really helped with his absolute and complete exhaustion.”
The room was very quiet.
“He found himself fighting superior formations, using superior tactics.” I went on.
“Our training is improving, and the skill level of the pilots they had available, is declining,” I continued. “It’s in all the daily intelligence reports.”
I started by feeding their own intelligence, or propaganda, right back at them.
They nodded, and some of them were making notes.
“The man was tired. He made bad decisions. The explanation is too simple. We’ll have to mythologize something that will suffice.”
They stared open-mouthed at that.
“By the way, where do you think Roy got his training?”
I taught some of them guys when I was at Gosport. So the day hadn’t exactly been a total loss for me, for my former boss Smith-Barry, nor for the RAF in general.
It was a ‘red-letter day,’ whatever the hell that means.
“Why do you think Von Richtofen was so far from home?” Someone asked.
“Possibly avoiding us.” I murmured.
Trying to grab some credit, but not too much. It would put them off if they thought it was all bullshit. They made my skin crawl. Not to try and grab some of the glory would appear unnatural. Yet a little caution was in order. These guys get to go home to England. My boys had to finish this battle. The less the enemy heard about us, the better.
“That’s our feeling too, but nothing formalized enough to put in writing…” Said some anonymous, pudgy-faced bastard.
Ah…now I see where the wind is blowing.
“The Rittmeister, Manfred von Richtofen, made several fundamental errors.” I began anew. “And that is essentially what killed him in the end.”
I told the assembly of big shots and brass hats the whole story insofar as I could make one up quickly.
“He had the habit of looking for the wounded bird, the easy kill.” I outlined some of my thoughts, but not all. “Bullies can be predicted within certain parameters.”
“He thought the name of the game was to rack up a score, when the game is to foil the enemy and bring home the bacon.” I soliloquized, like some asshole character in a play.
“To retreat was not cowardice in his mind, but I have no idea what he was thinking. Maybe he thought, I’ll just bag a quick one for the pot and be home for dinner.”
I thought further.
“He made a fundamental error when he turned his back on the fur-ball.” I told them.
“Why is that?” Came the question.
“When you initiate an attack, you carry it through.” I patiently explained. “You don’t just turn your back and go home. Why would your victim ever want to let you go?”
A thought struck again.
“He should have at least tried to climb out of there. His plane had that advantage. He wasn’t damaged. He didn’t seem to be damaged, when he went after May.”
I thought further.
“He seemed okay to dive with the plane, and he caught up to the Camel.”
Camels were not enormously fast in a dive, but neither was the Fokker.
“He didn’t have to pursue May.”
That made some sense to them, and it was what they wanted to hear, mostly.
“You gentlemen are all cleared? I heard the Baron was having silver cups engraved for every kill?” And they all nodded, no doubt having read the same or a similar report.
“I think he must have been very jaded.” I surmised.
“What other mistakes did he make?” Asked Bernie, very quietly from the back row.
Good man, keep us on track.
“He forgot to look behind, and under his tail.”
All those eyes just stared.
“He forgot that the most aggressive pilot has the best chance of survival. He should never have turned his back to the fight. Where was his wingman?”
All those ears sat and listened.
“Let me think here a moment, guys. Someone pour a few drinks?”
Dawley rose to do the honors. My audience seemed a little less restive now. They had something with a little meat on it.
Some lessons for all of those mouths to chew on.
“Someone suggested that he may have had a problem with either the motor or the aeroplane.” Came the pedantic voice of Bill Chosser.
My, oh, my, what a coincidence.
All of my old crimes coming home to roost? But he seemed neutral as far as I was concerned. Something about a mime, and a request from the Government of the Republic of France, as I recall. There was a little smile in his eyes.
“Then it was a mistake to go after May with a broken airplane.” I stated firmly. “It was a mistake to go below three thousand feet, anywhere near no-man’s land, or up to a couple or three miles on each side. Maybe more.”
The men kept taking notes. They all have to cover their asses, too. It’s not personal, in any way. They just seek to understand.
“If he was damaged, or if he had a problem, he should have stuck with his wingman. He always had one around…”
How long can the questioning go on?
“I
can guarantee it wasn’t us.” I
told them for about the third time. "Mind you, I can tell my grandkids that I flew against the Red Baron and lived." I said in conclusion.
No one challenged my logic, even though I was barely twenty.
There was some desultory conversation then, but I ignored it, half in and half out of the world for some reason.
“No one cares what you tell your grandkids.” Muttered Chosser, he projected it so beautifully, artlessly, through the hum and buzz.
I just sat and smiled my secret little smile.
“Well, we’re going to have to tell them something.” I told them, and all of a sudden the room went quiet again in expectancy. “That’s good enough for me.”
At least for now. I would have liked more time to compose myself, and my thoughts.
“If he had a damaged aircraft, he wouldn’t have pursued May?” Asked a Navy captain.
“That’s right.” I nodded. “Shouldn’t have, anyway.”
I gulped a glass of rum, slowly, as they looked at each other, consulting silently.
No more questions? That’s fine with me. I’ve had a busy day. The murmuring and muttering gaggle of anonymous, pasty-faced men in all their various uniforms straggled from the tent.
No doubt they would be touring the area for a while, generating maximum glory for their respective services. Hell, maybe I was a little jaded too.
***
Finally they all left, their interminable goodbyes were said, and the motor cavalcade blundered on up the road. Bernie, Dawley and I went back inside.
“Jeez.” Said Dawley. “Some people just can’t take a hint.”
“Snoopy bastards.” I agreed wholeheartedly.
Bernie was, ‘muet,’ or silent.
C’mon, Bernie, spit it out. We didn’t tell the brass everything. We didn’t tell them about spotter planes interrupting their artillery duties to flash a quick three letter code and a reference point when they saw the Baron. We have to keep a few tricks up our sleeve. The big shots would talk it up in the press accounts, which were certain to be legion. Surely he could see the reasoning behind this?
“Everything you see around you is a message.” He told us.
“What will be our fate?” He asked.
“The time of Empire is past.” He said, as we stood there flatfooted.
Dawley and I just looked at each other, dumb and uncomprehending.
“Some very old, very tired, and very stupid men do not realize this yet.” Bernie told us.
“Well, after three nights of bombing.” Dawley replied. “We’re as tired as poor old von Richtofen.”
I had this insane urge to laugh, like when you’re at a funeral and see your cousin in a suit for the first time, and he’s got a fresh haircut, with a wide strip of white between the hair and the brick-red neck.
“Will. Are you going to the funeral?” Asked Bernie.
They would give him a big sendoff and I didn’t want to be seen there. Someone else could go. Maybe Howard-Smythe. We should send Carson in drag, but my fellow officers would mutiny at that point.
“No.” I replied tersely.
After round-the-clock bombing, with aircraft coming in at all times of the night, and day, from virtually all points of the perimeter, with us being dispersed over several airfields, that could all go in the report. A Top Secret report.
Forcing the enemy on to the defensive, and in fact they had really only attempted to attack us once or twice. It was just a matter of time before someone got him.
A simple matter of combat exposure.
“This is going to be one fucking tough report to write.” I rasped peevishly.
“What do you mean?” Asked Bernie with a sigh, as Dawley helped himself to coffee.
“I fail to see how Brown could be engaged with three enemy planes, and see May, watch May leave the fight, see the Red Baron follow May, continue the fight, even climb higher.” I went. “The whole fucking story seems like bullshit. But then I’ve been there, trying to describe something that happened in a millisecond, which takes a thousand words and they still don’t get it. Or it’s just a series of disconnected impressions, just a whole bunch of aircraft, like seagulls wheeling over the city dump.”
They all look the same, to be honest. You just can’t read a hundred aircraft numbers at once, nor notice too many details. Maybe Brown did a quick wingover, and snatched a glimpse that lasted a tenth of a second. And maybe that was all he needed.
Bernie sat there watching me dissect it.
“I’m not here to convince anyone, only to admit that we’ll never know.” He proffered.
He was drinking some God-awful stuff. Something sticky and sweet, a habit only recently acquired.
“But no one else sees that. They won’t let it lie.” Said Bernie. “The Air Ministry is ‘pissed off,’ as you say, about the brand-new Canadian Air Force draining off precious personnel. This is happening at a time when the Aussies are screaming bloody murder about casualties among their infantry. Time to assign some glory, eh?”
He fell silent for a moment.
“Glory is cheap.” He muttered.
“If I could change one thing about this war, it is the relentless quest for medals and God-damned fucking recognition.” I told the walls.
I just didn’t care anymore. Some of the starch had gone out of me.
“I’m not here to moralize.” I concluded. “But it does kind of make you sick.”
Bernie and Dawley sat and stared. They glanced at each other and shrugged.
“You know, if some guy takes out an enemy pillbox, he’s not counting up in his mind, ‘four more to go and you’ll be an ace.’” I explained.
I don’t know if they got it, but I tried.
“He doesn’t have a fucking choice.” I told them. “He’s not thinking, ‘only another fourteen to go and I get a medal.’”
“Was poor old Manfred wounded by Brown?” Asked Dawley.
“Absolutely, and very badly. Probably torso, back, spine, hips, head, whatever. That would account for his flight path.”
“He knew he was dead, and wanted that one last kill?” Murmured Bernie. “They say he was up to seventy or more.”
“How many? Seventy-plus? Holy fuck.” I said in astonishment.
Busy lad, that Manfred.
“Perhaps a hundred.” He shrugged philosophically. “No matter. He is dead.”
“He may have wanted that kill, or some kind of revenge,” I acknowledged. “But there could have been some kind of Siegfried principle at work here, a compelling urge to go out in some kind of goddamned…”
“Gotterdamerung,” Put in Bernie.
“Naw, some kind of goddamned flaming blaze of glory.” I thought. “Like some kind of fucking symbol.”
“Why not tell the Brass?” Bernie asked quietly.
“Because the Brass have big mouths.” I told him firmly. “My men come first.”
A thousand dead men were laughing inside of my head.
‘Some kind of goddamned blaze of glory,’ I could see Dawley write it down.
I’m convinced the man intends to write his memoirs, and on my time too.
“If Brown was as close as he says, how come he didn’t fire off more ammo?” Asked Bernie in his cute little dago accent.
There are times when he inspires real affection.
“If he was low on ammo, he should have fired anyway.” I said. “But what I find fishy is the fucking brass thinks he could fire from two plane-lengths behind and miss.”
That’s just disrespectful. And if May was that far ahead, the Baron should have known instantly that his tri-plane couldn’t catch up.
But he did catch up.
If you believed the reports.
“Flying west along the north bank of the Somme.” I read over the report intensely.
“Fired half a mile before…would have been west of Vaux sur Somme…two miles behind the lines.”
And there was more.
“Parallel to the Somme. Holy crap.” I said. “Was he watching the Baron, or engaged in a fucking map-exercise?”
Stalking a wounded animal is dangerous. The Baron should have known that. Brown, too, but he was apparently flying along with a map in his left hand…a pencil in his right.
“Why not tell the Brass?” Bernie asked again. “Off the record?”
“They can’t handle the truth.” I vowed firmly.
The Baron knew you had to get close, where the target swelled up in your gun sights.
Where its maneuvers and gyrations meant less. At a distance, a plane flies out of the gun-sight in a turn very, very quickly. Up close, a plane turns, and it kind of drags a trail of your bullets right through its own guts.
“What the fuck was he doing a hundred and fifty feet over the riverbank?”
The questions were endless. But this was a typical combat report. You had to be extremely careful what you accepted at face value. People didn’t lie, exactly, they were pretty sincere in their desire to please. They just couldn’t remember.
All those little details, crystal clear in their simplicity, were mostly bullshit.
“Eyewitness accounts have been found to be forty-nine per cent accurate.” Bernie told us. “You could get more accurate results by flipping a coin.”
The big problem with evidence is that it doesn’t always support your convictions.
It’s just a theory, but I like it. And for the Baron to proceed further was asking for trouble.
“I taught half them guys, although I don’t remember Brown, particularly.” I told Bernie and Dawley, who probably already knew it. “Might have been when I first started at Gosport. As an experienced combat pilot, they sent me around to a dozen training schools to lecture and give demonstrations. A two-day course, two or three of them a week for quite some time. It seemed endless.”
But maybe not so pointless.
“What did you show them?” Asked Dawley.
“Some pretty basic maneuvers and simple combat scenarios.” I said absently, reading further. “That’s when we really started flogging the buddy system. When we called it the ‘two-plane element,’ no one cared. Call it the ‘buddy system,’ and we got the go-ahead. After the war, they’ll revert to the three-plane, ‘vic,’ and save twenty-five percent on budget allocations for aircraft.” Oh—and spare pilots sitting around a shack with nothing to do.
No one laughed.
“Fools.” Murmured Bernie. “They can be extremely shortsighted, especially when things are going well.”
“But money is precious. It’s human life that’s cheap.” I grunted, still reading.
Both men were parsing through the materials along with me.
“It says here von Richtofen was within a hundred feet of May.” Said Dawley.
“Then how did he miss?” I asked.
It was turbulent, smoky and hazy, yet how did he miss?
“None of the accounts directly contradict each other, none is definitive. The crazy Australians are pretty adamant.” Sighed Bernie.
“Of course they are.” Scoffed Dawley.
“Ultimately, it really doesn’t matter.” I said. “We got him, didn’t we?”
I can’t describe my feeling or attitude. A lot of the heart had gone out of me.
Ultimately it’s just a set of parabolic curves. Eventually one came to earth. It had to.
“So tell us what really happened.” Suggested Bernie, dark eyes boring into my own.
Like a meteorite.
“Von Richtofen was hovering around on the verge of the fight, up in the sun. He was just lining up an easy kill for his winger. My impression is that he was a new guy, a novice. Von Richtofen shouldn’t have been doing that, but it’s typical of the man. He decided to set up his novice ‘hunter,’ for his first big ‘trophy.’ It’s just a wild guess, but his protégé was probably a member of the nobility. Again, typical of the man.”
They sat up straight and listened in rapt attention.
“He looked up into the sun and saw forty-plus aircraft in three squadrons, plus a smaller group. The Ghosts, in fact. He definitely had a knee-jerk reaction. His plane fish-tailed visibly just before he put up a wing. God, I couldn’t tell you which one. The right wing, I think, and he dove right into the thick of the fray. Whether he had a target, we’ll never know. If so, we must have thrown him off.”
This was just an opinion, but a good one. The Baron figured the fur-ball would take care of all of our attention.
“At some point, he realized there was no future in the middle of a fight with no quarry, no opponent. No good reason to be there. He knew we were up high, and he buggered off out the other side. He saw May below him, maybe half a mile or even a mile ahead.”
May’s guns jammed. I’m pretty sure. Which means there was nothing wrong with the engine.
“The Baron assumed we would join the fight and get caught up in it.”
They just stared, breathless, waiting to hear ‘the truth,’ or some version of it.
“It wouldn’t take long to catch up. If May turned, the Baron cut the inside of the curve. He took a tighter line in the turn. The truth is that the Baron should have climbed to meet us. Instead he plunged through the centre.”
“But, but.” Said Bernie, but I just kept going.
“I would rather meet a whole fucking squadron head on. They can’t all line up their sights on you, they would have to converge. They would crash into each other at some point. It’s a fuck of a lot better than having any number of the bastards on your tail.”
In a converging fight, the closer you get, the harder it is for them to hit you, or even maneuver properly.
“It says they have recovered a seat with a hole in the back, all burnt. They say it came from von Richtofen’s plane,” reported Dawley.
“Was the body burnt?” Muttered Bernie. “Was the seat burnt? How did they strip beautiful, fresh red fabric from a burnt-out plane?”
“Send someone to the funeral and check the corpse.” Blurted Dawley.
“Within a week there will be a dozen seats, all burnt and all with holes in the right fuckin’ places.” I said. “People will pay a penny to see it at some seaside resort or traveling circus sideshow. After a couple of years, they’ll get tired of looking at it, and it’ll end up on the trash heap of fucking history, where it fucking belongs.”
“How could Brown miss at two lengths?” Asked Bernie.
“I already said that.” I pointed out.
Now Dawley was quoting from the reports.
“Climbed to the left in the direction of Corbie.” He said. “How the hell was Manfred a hundred and fifty feet behind May, sixty to a hundred feet above the ground?”
“I think he got tired, and made every mistake in the book.” Was all I could figure.
My personal opinion is that he was already shot up pretty bad, and if the Australian machine gunners wanted him that badly they could have him. For some reason a lot of the starch went out of me. Maybe he was just trying to land, and if they hadn’t shot him, his life might have been spared.
I don’t think he was a bad person. No worse than the rest of us.
“You want to know the truth about the Baron Manfred von Richtofen?”
They stared at me.
“He was a twenty-something year-old kid in a fucking bad aeroplane.” I told them. “He couldn’t do miracles, and he ran out of time.”
When I think of Manfred I wonder about the young man he might have become, if there was peace. Every rifle for miles around must have been popping off at him. At them. May was pretty lucky not to get hit, Brown too. The Germans would have been firing at the British planes. No one remembers that part. It’s not in the official reports. It was in no one’s interest to include those facts.
The Boche could very well have hit their own man, trying to hit May and Brown from what was, after all, a fairly long range. If some German idiot fired at May, from five hundred or even a thousand yards away, they wouldn’t have led him by nearly enough…and that’s a fact. (Odds are they wouldn’t have had the elevation either, but that’s beside the point.)
Manfred’s great uncle was a geographer and a geologist, a world famous one. In 1868, while in China, he gathered data for his masterwork, the five-volumes plus an atlas entitled, ‘China, Ergebrisse eigener Reisen und daraut gegrundeter Studien.’ (China: Travels and Studies, 1877-1912. — ed.)
Guys like Manfred don’t end up in factories bashing tin or assembling cheap alarm clocks. With his background, he could have gone off to East Africa, and become a big-game hunter. Who knows what contributions he might have made to society. He was a gentleman of the leisure class. Whether he collected specimens for the zoo, or whatever, I’m sure that like all the gentlemen of that era, he would have done a lot of reading and writing. But we’ll never know, will we? For all we know, he might have become a world expert on stamp collecting. Manfred had a good brain, and an education, and a sense of honor.
Everything about him, bespoke a young man who knew how to apply himself.
All of that was just a total waste, now.
END
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