History Revised

Not content with Sommerfeldt’s seventy-eight-page 1932 biography, five years later Göring commissioned his long-time aide Dr. Erich Gritzbach to write a larger work. It offered a briefer version of the 2 November 1916 aerial combat, and noted that Göring was a seasoned air fighter, credited with shooting down two enemy aeroplanes,⁶ a significant accomplishment for a wartime flyer. Gritzbach added:

‘At the Somme Sector, the enemy’s air force … [was] numerically superior to the Germans. In Göring’s area the crewmen of a British large aeroplane especially distinguished themselves by frequent flying and well-executed bomb dropping. For weeks [Göring] was on the look-out for the “fat crate”. On a hazy November day, he finally had the opponent before him.’⁷

Gritzbach described the remainder of the fight much as Sommerfeldt had, but eliminated the melodramatic landing in a cemetery, right near a field hospital. Indeed, the circumstances of Göring’s incredibly lucky return to within German lines were noted in the weekly report of the Kommandeur der Flieger der 1. Armee [Officer in Charge of Aviation for the 1st Army], abbreviated as ‘Kofl’: ‘On 2.11.16, Leutnant Göring of Jagdstaffel 5 attacked an enemy tractor biplane at 17.00 [hours, with] the enemy aircraft immediately going down in a steep dive. Before Ltn Göring could follow, he was attacked from the rear by six Nieuports. He was hit in the right hip, but managed to land safely at his own airfield [at Gonnelieu].’⁸

The Kofl report and other sources offer a more accurate – albeit less colourful – account of the event. For example, there is no mention of a two-engined British bomber, Göring’s allusion to the Handley Page 0/100 bomber, which, with its 100-ft top wing span,⁹ was one of the largest aircraft in World War I. The two-engined Handley Page came into service in late 1916, but at Dunkerque,¹⁰ far west of Jasta 5. While flying over the Somme Sector, Göring could not have encountered the distinctive-looking British warplane, which did not have side-mounted machine guns, as Sommerfeldt stated.

It is more likely that Göring fought with a much smaller opponent, a Royal Aircraft Factory B.E.2d of 7 Squadron, Royal Flying Corps. With a top wing span of thirty-six feet and ten inches,¹¹ this single-engine machine would have been the ‘tractor biplane’ noted in the Kofl report. British records show that 7 Squadron’s aerodrome at Warloy¹² was just over twenty-five kilometres due west of Combles, easily within range of where Göring pursued an enemy aircraft and was, in turn, attacked by six British Nieuport fighters.