During a late morning patrol two days later, Göring came close to success near Mülhausen, the city near which he had been stationed just before the war. His flight attacked a two-engined French Caudron and two Nieuport fighters that had penetrated German anti-aircraft fire outside the city. Approaching the Caudron at 4,000 metres’ altitude, Göring forced it down to 1,800 metres and was about to close in for the kill when, at the edge of his field of view, he caught sight of another aeroplane. He wisely hesitated when the other fighter entered the fray. Early Nieuport and Albatros D.III aeroplanes were similar in appearance, as both were sesquiplanes (biplanes with lower wings shorter and narrower than the top); in fact, the evolution of the Albatros D.II to the D.IIII design was inspired by captured Nieuports and the greater manoeuvrability offered by their narrower bottom wings.¹⁹ As he later reported, he stopped firing ‘because of confusion [between] an Albatros with the Nieuport, [and, consequently] the heavily damaged Caudron escaped’.²⁰

Göring did not determine the identity of the other aeroplane, but, in any event, he would not have wanted to shoot down one of his comrades. After that incident, however, it would be another month before he succeeded in claiming another enemy aeroplane.

Meanwhile, on 11 April, Jasta 26 was ordered to relocate to an airfield east of Guise,²¹ in the Somme Sector. The prospects for air combat success were much higher in the new area, where German air units were using the vastly superior Albatros D.III fighters to inflict huge losses on Britain’s Royal Flying Corps and Royal Naval Air Service. In that month alone – which has become known in aviation history as “Bloody April” – Britain lost one-third of her airmen then at the front, 912 pilots and observers in fifty squadrons.²² Conversely, German airmen increased their scores significantly. Probably the best known example of German success in April 1917 was that of Rittmeister Manfred Freiherr von Richthofen, commanding officer of Jasta 11, who in that month added twenty-one enemy aeroplanes to his personal victory list, which rose from thirty-seven to fifty-two confirmed aerial victories.²³ Richthofen, who five months earlier trailed behind Göring in aerial kills, had become Germany’s undisputed ace of aces.

Overall, Germany was in a much better position in early 1917 than it had been a year earlier. Its army had the advantage of having withdrawn behind strong defensive positions to reorganise its forces in anticipation of an impending British offensive. The air force had superior aircraft with which its pilots could fight or withdraw at will, generally over their own lines. Conversely, Major-General Hugh M. Trenchard, general officer commanding the Royal Flying Corps in France and Belgium, had to conserve his forces for the offensive, continuously and effectively countering German air units while trying to disrupt German communications.²⁴ Further complicating these difficulties, Trenchard’s airmen had to meet these challenges in a month that was unusually stormy, with many snowfalls.²⁵