The Red Knight Of Germany - The Story Of Baron Von Richthofen, Germany's Great War Bird [Illustrated Edition]

Floyd Gibbons

• Publisher: Verdun Press
• Year: 2014
• eBook ISBN: 9781782891871
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: British History
• Index: History

[16 Illustrations, portraits of the author, author's unit and plane.]
In the small city of Wiesbaden in southwest Germany, a small headstone proclaims that the incumbent of its grave is Rittmeister Manfred Freiherr von Richthofen. Small fanfare and panoply for the far-famed and feared Red Baron; a hunter even during his childhood, he took to the skies above France and Flanders in 1915 following service as a cavalry officer. In the air he hunted his prey, almost exclusively British pilots, and by the time of his death in 1918 was credited with some 80 air combat victories. He was only 25 at the time of his death.
American author Floyd Gibbon's biography seeks to give a fuller and more realistic portrait of Manfred von Richthofen than is widely known; to his German countryman he seemed to be a superhuman hero of the skies; to the Allies who opposed him, he seemed a ruthless bogeyman. The truth is far more complex than this as the author explains in great detail, using von Richthofen's own autobiography and other contemporary sources in order to produce a portrait of the greatest World War One Ace.

THE RED KNIGHT OF GERMANY

CHAPTER I

TO KILL and kill and kill was the cry. To burn, to destroy, to devastate, to lay waste. Men heard the madness and knew it for madness and embraced it, some with fear and some with joy. Kill or be killed. Survive or perish.

Pink, yellow, and green patches on maps personified themselves. The personifications glared at one another, then snarled, then cursed. Millions of hearts heard and beat faster. Males strutted; females loved them for it.

It was the march beat of tramping feet. It was the sharp staccato of steel-shod hoofs. It was the whir and growl of speeding motors. It was the shriek and roar of troop trains frontward bound.

His mother had not raised him to be a soldier.

She had made him wear curls and dressed him in white pretties. He had looked like a girl, and hated it.

Then came killing time—war.

He killed a hundred men in individual combat: shot them, burned them, crushed them, hurled their bodies down to earth.

He became the terror of the battle fronts. He grinned at grim death in a hundred duels above the clouds. He fought fair, hard, and to kill, and the better his foeman fought to kill him, the better he liked him for it.

He shot down eighty fighting planes. He matched his life against that of any man. He fought, not with hate, but with love for fighting. It was his joy, his sport, his passion. To him, to dare and to die was to live. He had the courage to kill and be killed, and war was his hunting licence. On home leave from man-killing at the front, he hunted and killed deer, elk, boar, bison, and birds, and brought their heads to his mother’s home.

He was courageous and knew it, gloried in it, flaunted it with his challenge to the world of his enemies. He made them know him—he put his name on their lips—his name that was unknown, unheard of, when he started the war as a second “looie.”

Wounded and decorated, he became the guest of kings and queens. Boys and the youth of a nation made him their idol, cheered him, followed him on the street.

He was young and blond, shy and handsome, proud and serious. Girls by the thousands worshipped his picture and filled his mail with letters by the sackful. One of them he loved. He wanted to make her his wife, but he did not want to make her his widow. He knew he was going to be killed.

He won the admiration and respect of his enemies. His instinct and duty it was to kill them; he did. Their duty and instinct it was to kill him; they did.

In one of the greatest air battles in the history of the world, he went down, still fighting, still killing. He died a national hero at the head of his fighting men in the service of his country. He was buried by his enemies with respect and military honours in unstinted recognition of his great courage, his sportsmanship, and his tireless, relentless spirit.

His name was Manfred von Richthofen.

Into the grisly story of the World War there came a refreshing gleam of the chivalry of old, when the pick of the flower of youth on both sides carried the conflict into the skies. Into that Knighthood of the Blue, Richthofen has been given a place of highest merit by those he fought with and against.

His life and death, his victories and his defeat, his loves, his hopes, his fears bring a new record to the halls of that same Valhalla in which rest the spirits of Guynemer, Hawker, Ball, McCudden, Immelmann, Lufberry, Quentin Roosevelt, and many others who fought aloft and died below with hearts that held emotions other than hate.

Young blood, hot and daring, raced through their veins, even as the wined steeds they rode raced on the wind to conquest or disaster. With keen young eyes, glinting along the barrels of their jibbering machine guns, they looked at close range into one another’s souls as they pressed the triggers that sent one another tumbling down to death.

Some went down like flaming comets, burned beyond recognition before the charred remains struck the earth thousands of feet below. Some plunged earthward through the blue in drunken staggers as their bullet-riddled bodies slumped forward lifelessly on the controls. Some fell free from shattered planes at fearsome heights, poured out like the contents of a burst paper bag, and some, hurtling down in formless wrecks, buried themselves in the ground.

This was the death that Richthofen dealt out to his adversaries in the air—it was the same death they dealt to him. As he had given to many, so he received. As he fought, he died.

How many did he kill? The list is long and appalling. It is a string of victories, a chaplet in which the beads of glory and tragedy succeed one another to defeat and the grave. It has never before been compiled, and it has only been after weeks of research through the musty files and papers of the German archives in Potsdam that I am now able to set forth for the first time the date of each one of these combats and identify to some extent the airmen that fell before the German ace of aces.

Richthofen’s officially confirmed victories in the air and a list of the casualties inflicted by him appear in the Appendix.

On the day after his eightieth victory—April 21, 1918 —he died as he dove upon the British flyer selected for his eighty-first victim. Strapped to the pilot’s seat, his body sown with lead, the Uhlan of the sky came down between the blazing lines before Amiens. With only a dead man’s hands on the flying controls, the bright red Fokker tri-plane of the ace of German aces landed on an even keel in front of Australian trenches. He was twenty-five years old.

To his country and the cause it was soon to lose, the loss of Richthofen was great. Ludendorff, when he heard the news, said, “He was worth as much to us as three divisions.” His mother had not raised him to be a soldier, but in the military estimation of his fighting worth he was placed in the balance against thirty thousand bayonets.

The mother lives to-day in the little town of Schweidnitz in German Silesia—lives in the large, cold, silent rooms and hall of the big white house that once re-echoed to the shouts of the boy who wore curls and looked like a girl. Dearer to this sad-faced, gray-haired woman than Ludendorff’s high valuation of her son; dearer than the rows of ribbons and decorations and the acknowledgments of comrades and former foes, are three golden ringlets of fine-spun hair in a plain white pasteboard box and a mother’s memories of the cherubic head that bore them.

Although Prussian junkers from a fighting stock that won its title of baron far back in the Seventeenth Century, the Richthofen family took little part in subsequent wars. They were landowners, squires of county seats who worked their estates with thrift and efficiency and found their sports in hunting and riding. Some held small government posts, but they always returned to the fields and forests and the country houses they loved.

And in the family of Schickfuss, from which came the mother of the famous ace, it was the same. Conservatives to the bone, it was their aim to work hard, respect order, and find their fun in hard riding and hard hunting. Old Uncle Alexander Schickfuss, after shooting the feathers and horns off all kinds of Silesian fauna, packed up his guns and sought the huntsman’s joy in the wilds of Africa, in Ceylon, and in Hungary.

In the saddle and on the hunt, it was the same with Richthofen’s father, with the exception that he became the first of the line to enter active service in the army. As an officer of a Uhlan regiment, he evidenced a high sense of duty as a soldier, but the greatest record. he has left is on the walls of the Schweidnitz home in the shape of four hundred mounted deer heads and stuffed birds, all brought down afield by his gun. He served through the war as a major of reserve, but died shortly after the Armistice.

From this line of modern primitives came Manfred von Richthofen, born May 2, 1892, in Breslau. Organization, reputed to be the forte of his country, was not inborn with him. He was essentially an individualist. The spirit of the hunter, the stalker, was strong within him, and with it ran pride of conquest, the natural outgrowth of strong competitive and combative senses.

He felt strongly the same urge that drives the city-bred man to the wilds for relief from the pressure of organized life, to feel once more the discipline of nature instead of that of steel and asphalt and traffic regulations. The hunt was his life and the trophy was his prize. Richthofen was like his father and, no doubt, like all his forbears in the matter of trophies. The hunter must show the prey he ran to earth.

Since Stone Age days, man’s abode, whether a cave or a tree nest, has been littered with the bones of those he slew in hunt or combat. Armorial halls festooned with captured standards, or walls studded with antlered or feathered heads, are expressions of the same strain. And so were the tons of German helmets that two million A. E. F.’ers brought back from France.

It was no different with the individual air fighters of the World War—the man-birds who hunted in the clouds. The boyhood bedroom of Richthofen in Schweidnitz remains to-day, with the exception of its owner’s portraits, just as the victorious ace arranged and decorated it his last trip home before his death.

Its walls are covered with the linen scalps of fallen foes. They are the gaily painted red, white, and blue numbers and symbols cut from fighting planes that went down in defeat under the guns of Richthofen’s red Fokker. To anyone who knew the war, the bedchamber is a “room of dead men’s numbers,” but it is not that to Mother Richthofen, whose son told her that the stripes of fabric placed on the walls were taken only from vanquished planes whose occupants survived the fight that forced them to earth behind the German lines.

The chandelier hanging from the ceiling over the centre table is the rotary motor of a French plane which the ace brought down near Verdun. Richthofen had it remade with electric bulbs on each cylinder head, and, in order to support the unusual weight, he had to reinforce the rafters in the ceiling, from which it is suspended on chains. The table itself is made from parts of broken propeller blades of all kinds. The night lamp on the bed table is formed from the metal hub of an airplane’s undercarriage wheel.

The centrepiece on the table is a flying compass, and the wall table under the large portrait is loaded down with silver cups commemorating battles in the sky.

Among all these gruesome trophies, each representing a death struggle in midair, one holds the position of honour over the bedroom door. It is the machine gun from an English plane that sent many German flyers to their death. It is the weapon of the first English ace, Major Lanoe Hawker. Hawker was one of the best flyers in the Allied ranks. He had received the Victoria Cross and many decorations, and had a long string of air victories to his credit. Richthofen himself had been decorated and had brought down ten enemy planes. It was a meeting of champions of the air. It was a battle of eagles, each determined upon the other’s death, and it took place high over the battle lines between Bapaume and Albert, in full view of thousands of mud-grimed soldiers who watched the combat from their trenches.

Richthofen wrote the account of that fight for publication in Germany during the war, and his publishers, Ullstein & Company, have given me permission to reproduce it in English for the first time. Here it is:

I must confess that it was a matter of great pride to me to learn that the Englishman I shot down on November 23 119161 was the English equivalent of our great Immelmann. Of course, I did not know who he was during the fight, but I did know from the masterly manner in which he handled his plane and the pluck with which he flew, that he was a wonderful fellow.

It was fine weather when I flew away from our airdrome that day. I was in the best of spirits and keen for the hunt. Flying at an altitude of about ten thousand feet, I observed three English planes. I saw that they saw me, and from their manoeuvres I gathered that our hopes for the day’s fun were mutual. They were hunting bent, the same as I. I was spoiling for a fight, and they impressed me much the same. They were above me, but I accepted the challenge. Being underneath and in no position to attack, I had to wait till the fellow dived on me. It was not long to wait. Soon he started down in a steep gliding dive, trying to catch me from behind.

He opens fire with his machine gun. Five shots rip out, and I change my course quickly by a sharp turn to the left. He follows, and the mad circle starts. He is trying to get behind me, and I am trying to get behind ‘him. Round and round we go in circles, like two madmen, playing ring-around-a-rosie almost two miles above the earth. Both of our motors are speeded to the utmost; still neither of us seems to gain on the other. We are exactly opposite each other on the circumference of the circle, and in this position neither one of us can train our single forward shooting machine guns on the other.

First, we would go twenty times around to the right, and then swing into another circle going round twenty times to the left. We continued the mad race, neither gaining an advantage. I knew at once that I was dealing with no beginner, because he didn’t appear to dream of trying to break off the fight and get out of the circling. His plane was excellent for manoeuvring and speed, but my machine gave me an advantage by being able to climb better and faster. This enabled me at last to break the circle and manoeuvre into a position behind and above him.

But in the circling fight, both of us had los...

Table of contents

• Title page
• TABLE OF CONTENTS
• THE RECORD OF A “BEST-SELLER”
• CHAPTER I
• CHAPTER II
• CHAPTER III
• CHAPTER IV
• CHAPTER V
• CHAPTER VI
• CHAPTER VII
• CHAPTER VIII
• CHAPTER IX
• CHAPTER X
• CHAPTER XI
• APPENDIX - TABLE OF RICHTHOFEN'S VICTORIES AND FINAL DEFEAT
• ILLUSTRATIONS