Göring was a skilled fighter pilot who had no qualms about killing his adversaries and it is hard to imagine him letting an easy victory slip away by releasing a reconnaissance aircraft, laden with information that would surely have contributed to the destruction of German ground forces that he was defending. If circumstances allowed, Göring might have forced the French aeroplane to land within German lines, as he and his AEG bomber crew had done on 14 March 1916, which resulted in his second confirmed aerial victory. Moreover, Göring’s flight logs show he adhered strictly to the doctrine of flying only in the company of other fighters and not using the ‘lone wolf’ approach mentioned by Krause.

In the absence of more details about Niels Paulli Krause’s claimed aerial combat with Hermann Göring, this writer considers the Dane’s account to be a confabulation of unknown motivation. But once the story was out, it would have been consistent with Göring’s sense of self-grandeur to take credit for such a magnanimous role in this tale.

JG I Fights the Americans

Factual aerial combats continued after JG I moved from Metz to Marville, north of Verdun in the 5th Army Sector, on 7 October 1918. Three days later, five JG I Fokkers intercepted a flight of Spads from the American 147th Aero Squadron that were about to attack a German observation balloon at Dun-sur-Meuse. American Captain Edward V. Rickenbacker, commanding officer of the 94th Aero Squadron, USAS, led a second Spad flight against what he described as Fokkers bearing ‘the red noses of the von Richthofen Circus’,³² a name applied to JG I due to its colourful aircraft markings and mobility to move quickly from sector to sector.

German pilots had the initial success, as Leutnants Justus Grassmann and Wilhelm Kohlbach of Jasta 10 each claimed a Spad.³³ But then Rickenbacker set fire to Kohlbach’s aircraft and witnessed an amazing scene of aviation progress, as his adversary was saved from certain death by using a parachute:

‘… the next second …the German pilot level[led] off his blazing machine and with a sudden leap overboard into space let the Fokker slide safely away without him. Attached to his back and sides was a rope which immediately pulled a dainty parachute from the bottom of his seat. The [canopy] opened within a fifty-foot drop and lowered him gradually to earth within his own lines.’³⁴

After that fight, JG I’s air combat activity dropped drastically when over two weeks of rainy weather made flying more difficult. In any event, by this time ‘the German government … was convinced of the hopelessness of the situation’ and on 20 October accepted U.S. President Woodrow Wilson’s ‘Fourteen Points’,³⁵ including the evacuation of all occupied territories.

Dinners in Berlin

Hermann Göring and Ernst Udet departed JG I together on 22 October.³⁶ Göring headed to Berlin, his favourite city, for a short leave and then went on to the nearby Adlershof aviation testing facility for the third and final evaluation of new fighter aircraft. He must have known the trip was futile, as no one then believed that Germany would be able to fight much longer. Indeed, at this point it was all the German army could do to withdraw its forces in as orderly a manner as possible. Udet had been transferred to Flieger-Ersatz-Abteilung 3 at Gotha in eastern Germany, from which he would proceed to Berlin³⁷ and join Göring in inspecting the new aeroplanes – even though neither of them nor the aircraft would ever again fly over the Western Front.