Hermann Göring completed his pilot’s qualifications a week later, on 15 September, but was not returned to FFA 25 to fill the vacancy left by the loss of Schmidt and Wuthmann. The replacement of one aircrew was not a priority matter in view of the broad changes taking place in eastern France, where German units, in full expectation of an attack, were working with feverish energy to strengthen their defences’¹⁹. As an earlier part of those preparations, a multi-purpose reconnaissance and bombing unit, a so-called ‘carrier pigeon section’ named Brieftauben-Abteilung Metz (BAM), was formed on 17 August at a key aviation depot in Döberitz,²⁰ outside Berlin, for eventual use in operations in the Champagne and Verdun sectors. The BAM was not yet ready for deployment and, in mid-September, elements of the original multi-purpose unit, the Brieftauben-Abteilung Ostende (BAO), were transferred from Flanders to the German 3rd Army sector,²¹ to support German ground fighting in that area.

While those events were occurring, Göring was assigned for two weeks to the regional aviation depot Armee-Flugpark 5²² at the old fortress city of Montmédy, west of Stenay. He had no real duties at AFP 5 and, hence, no opportunity to make qualifying flights for his pilot’s badge. Soon he began to chafe at still having to wear ‘only’ an observer’s badge. Inactivity and Göring’s ever-busy mind were a bad combination; consequently, he caused trouble when his curiosity led him to enquire about the new Fokker monoplane’s rotary engine. He was familiar with the stationary engine, which was bolted to the aeroplane’s frame, with pistons driving a crankshaft that turned the propeller and powered the machine. But he had no experience with the rotary engine in which the crankshaft remained attached to the aeroplane and the cylinders and engine rotated around it; the propeller was bolted to the engine and the resulting rotation of both powered the aeroplane. Göring knew the lighter-weight rotary engine ran smoother and was cooled by its own motion, but he wanted to learn more about it.

Munich-based journalist Walter Zuerl, who in the 1930s wrote extensively about World War I flyers and heard many stories first-hand, related the following (never refuted) anecdote about Göring’s introduction to the rotary-engine Fokker aeroplane: