HERMANN GÖRING
After their audacious attack against French bombers on 3 June 1915, Hermann Göring and Bruno Loerzer were welcomed warmly by their brother airmen in Feldflieger-Abteilung 25’s officers’ mess, just as Hauptmann Karl Keck and Offizierstellvertreter Adolf Schmidt had been. Granted, Keck’s use of a rifle had produced a more decisive outcome, but Göring’s action in forcing back the attackers – with a pistol – was cause for celebration.2 Even Göring’s detractors, who considered him a loud-mouth bluffer, recognised that this time the bluff paid off.
At 3:30 a.m. the following day, Loerzer took off with Göring in their Albatros B.I (B 990/14) to bomb Beaumont, immediately north of Douaumont. In addition to demonstrating their battle readiness to their adversaries, the pistol-armed Loerzer-Göring team would be in the air to greet any French airmen intent on carrying out a follow-up raid on Stenay. The mission turned out to be uneventful, but, that evening, when a Bavarian artillery unit alerted FFA 25 that French aircraft were approaching Stenay, Loerzer and Göring set out to find them. Their search was in vain,3 but they showed their comrades once again that they were eager to engage the enemy in the air. Consequently, when Oberleutnant [First Lieutenant] Dr. Kurt Wegener scheduled a flight to Freiburg to determine whether a captured French-made machine gun was suitable for mounting on his aeroplane, Göring was an eager companion. To Wegener’s dismay, the weapon, fully loaded with 600 rounds of ammunition, weighed fifty-five kilos, which was too heavy for his lightly-powered Aviatik B.II to carry in the air.4
On Thursday, 17 June 1915, Göring flew with the two-time air combat victor Offizierstellvertreter Adolf Schmidt – and in a much different aeroplane, an Albatros C.I two-seater. The newer machine was the sign of things to come in German reconnaissance aviation. The pilot sat in front and the observer in the rear and was armed with a ringmounted flexible machine gun that could be elevated and lowered and swung from side to side to fire in a wide defensive arc.
Before he became too enamoured of the new two-seater, however, Göring heard from other pilots about Dutch-born aircraft designer Anthony Fokker’s new single-seat Eindeckers [monoplane fighter aircraft]. It was only a matter of time before Göring followed Loerzer’s lead and become a pilot; thus, he was especially interested in the Fokker aeroplane’s advantages over the C.I biplanes. As General der Kavallerie [equal to a U.S. lieutenant general] Ernst von Hoeppner, the World War I commander of the German Lufstreitkräfte [literally air force], later wrote: