One Boelcke FAA 203 protégé who got off to a dramatic start was Oberleutnant Hans Berr, a former two-seater pilot, who flew a Fokker to score his first two aerial victories, on 8 and 14 March 1916.³⁶ On the latter occasion, FAA 203’s Leutnant Kommos and Vizefeldwebel [Sergeant-Major] Paulisch each scored their first victories.³⁷ Another FAA 203 Fokker was flown by Leutnant Bruno Loerzer, who was assigned to the unit on 9 January³⁸ (and would be joined by Göring seven months later³⁹), and shot down enemy aircraft on 21 and 31 March.⁴⁰ Loerzer also became an early casualty for the unit when he was shot and wounded in the right shoulder during an aerial combat over Verdun on Monday, 3 April.⁴¹ He was posted out for treatment and ended up at a facility in his hometown of Berlin.

Boelcke was also joined by FFA 25 Fokker pilot Leutnant Werner Notzke, with whom he operated out of Sivry airfield, less than twenty kilometres north of Verdun.⁴² Their early flights were ‘untiring [in their] …faithful watchfulness and protection of the tasks of our artillery-spotting, photographic and visual reconnaissance aeroplanes against the masses of enemy fighter [aircraft],’ noted Hauptmann Leo Leonhardy.⁴³

But even the most skilled airmen met with sad accidents, as happened with Notzke on Good Friday, 21 April 1916. While Göring, Kulenkampff and Boje were patrolling along a line of German tethered observation balloons, flying in AEG G.II [G 49/15],⁴⁴ one of their escorts, Notzke, was back at his base, trying to resolve a problem with his machine gun. The wind was up, Leonhardy reported, and the twenty-one-year-old Notzke misjudged his distance during a test flight and ‘flew into the anchoring cable of an observation balloon and crashed to his death’⁴⁵ near Sivry airfield.

Nine days later, early on the morning of 30 April, the four-man crew of Göring, Schaesberg and the gunners Flörke and Boje set out on their first combat flight in the new AEG G.III [G 54/15]. For reasons not made clear in his report, Göring felt compelled to make an emergency landing in a meadow near Mouzay, south of Stenay.⁴⁶ Upon landing on the soft ground, the aeroplane nosed over and was badly damaged. Göring’s dignity may have been bruised, but none of the crew was injured.

Not so fortunate that day was Rittmeister Erich Graf von Holck, who flew one of FAA 203’s Fokker single-seaters. Holck was as bold and supremely confident a pilot as Göring, but over-extended himself on this occasion by making a one-aeroplane attack against three French Caudron two-seaters over Verdun. His demise, which demonstrates the perils of courage, was witnessed by an AEG G.II pilot, Leutnant Manfred Freiherr von Richthofen (later better known as the Red Baron). Richthofen was bucking a head-wind trying to reach the beleaguered Fokker and come to its aid when he observed:

‘Then I saw, to my horror, that the attacker became the defender. The Frenchmen, whose strength had meanwhile been increased by at least ten aeroplanes, were forcing the German lower and lower … The Fokker [pilot] defended himself desperately … [as] the enemy had driven him down to at least 600 metres. Then suddenly … he disappeared in a dive into a cumulus cloud … When I returned home … I learned that the unfortunate pilot was Holck, my old comrade in arms … who had become a fighter pilot shortly before the Verdun offensive. Graf von Holck had plunged straight down with a shot through the head …’⁴⁷