CHAPTER EIGHT

THE TEST OF COMBAT

‘The victory is finally mine and the Englishman is taken prisoner … But my strength is at an end, my knees shake, my pulse is pounding, my entire body is soaking wet because I had to work so hard during the battle.’¹

HERMANN GÖRING

By the time Hermann Göring arrived at Jagdstaffel 27, the unit had moved southward from Iseghem to an airfield at Bersée, outside of Lille, the key industrial city in German-occupied northern France. The movement of their air units was a consequence of the German high command’s receiving only scant information about Allied intentions following Britain’s disappointing results in the Battle of Arras.²

H. A. Jones, the official Royal Air Force historian noted why German planners were strengthening their air units in Flanders:

‘When the Arras offensive began to slacken [in late April], a general move north had begun. Between the 4th of May and the 7th of June, [General der Infanterie Friedrich Sixt von] Armin’s Fourth Army along the front from the River Douve to the sea was increased from fifteen air units (ten reconnaissance and artillery flights and five fighter flights) to forty-four (nineteen reconnaissance, eight protection [Schutzstaffeln], eleven single-seat fighter, and six bomber-fighter flights). These units represented a nominal strength of about 300 aeroplanes of which half were fighters. That is to say, the German air strength from Messines to the sea was approximately the same as the Royal Air Force strength available for the ten-mile front along the Messines ridge.’³

Messines, only eighteen kilometres northwest of the centre of Lille, was the focal point of the coming Allied offensive. For almost a year, British sappers had tunnelled to prepare for ‘the simultaneous explosion of nineteen great mines, containing 600 tons of explosives’ under the Messines ridge at 3:10 a.m. on 7 June 1917.⁴ The explosions and attendant artillery barrage led to the successful British infantry assault at Messines, and later Wytschaete, but German air operations were unaffected by that event.

Indeed, if one were to believe Hermann Göring’s 1930 account, all of the action in Flanders took place in the air:

‘Again it is a clear June day in the year 1917, not even a small cloud in the heavens. In the early morning hours, I gathered my officers and pilots about me and impressed on them all of the regulations about flying and fighting as a formation. Then I assigned each one his place in the formation and gave the final orders. I believed the new Staffel to have been sufficiently trained and I firmly decided to lead them into battle this day and … let them show proof of it.