Göring’s Fourth, Fifth and Sixth Victories

Clear weather on Monday, 23 April 1917 favoured a major British infantry attack along a fifteen-kilometre line from Gavrelle to Croiselles²⁶ just west of Arras. The attack included a range of aerial activities, which had British squadrons up in strength from morning until evening.²⁷ To meet that challenge, Jasta 26 was ordered to advance its operations some fifteen kilometres northwest from Guise to Bohain,²⁸ which was an incremental step, but placed the unit closer to the fighting for Arras. During the move, Loerzer sent out a two-hour late afternoon patrol that departed Guise at 4:30 p.m. After flying westward to St. Quentin, then north to Cambrai, northwest to Arras and then southeast to St. Quentin, the patrol landed at Bohain at 6:30 p.m. It had covered nearly 200 kilometres during the flight and, about halfway through it, Göring shot down a rear-engined British F.E.2b. Although the aeroplane (serial number A.823 of 18 Squadron, RFC) returned to British territory, it was seen to crash by enough German witnesses for Göring to receive credit for his fourth victory. This aerial triumph was also noted in a new weekly publication that was instituted in March by the office of the commanding general of the Luftstreitkräfte.²⁹ Previously such successes appeared only in air activity summaries that the various army corps circulated within their own units. The new communication – titled Nachrichtenblatt der Luftstreitkräfte [intelligence summary of the air force] – assured that all air units would be made aware of the successes (and some failures) of their peers. Its recognition and motivational value to German airmen was as obvious as the highly-prized “Mentioned in Dispatches” (MiD) was to British Commonwealth military personnel.

Of course, there was more to that air action than the terse note in the Nachrichtenblatt and a description of the fight appeared in Göring’s combat report:

‘At 5:29 p.m., aerial combat with British lattice-fuselage two-seater from a [flight] of four [aircraft]. After a short fight I set fire to the opponent with [phosphorous] ammunition, [resulting in a] burning crash northeast of Arras at 5:30 p.m. Shortly thereafter, [I had] two more aerial combats with a lattice-fuselage [two-seater] and a single-seater. Without result. About 6:00 p.m. [I had] aerial combat with six [normal] fuselage biplanes which came from Guise via Hancourt.’³⁰

According to British records, the downed aeroplane was scrapped.³¹ The pilot, Second-Lieutenant Edmund L. Zink,³² was wounded in the shoulder during the fight, while the observer, Second-Lieutenant George B. Bate,³³ was uninjured. Bate was fatally wounded in another aerial combat six days later.³⁴ A British account of Zink’s and Bate’s air fight with Jasta 26 appeared in a post-war memorial book published by the observer’s school: