The film Les chevaliers du ciel (2005) was a sort of French version of Top Gun. Although it was released nearly a century after the death of Manfred von Richthofen, it’s the Red Baron more than anyone else who is responsible for the movie’s title, which translates as The Knights of the Sky (but was saddled with the awkward title Sky Fighters on its release in English).
Richthofen is the iconic fighter pilot. Credited with eighty kills, he was the leading ace on any side during the First World War. And it’s been his enduring reputation that has fueled a sense that rival fighter pilots were engaging in something more noble than the brutality of war.
It’s astonishing to think that he was a pilot for only two years and that, during his uncertain first flight at the controls, he crashed his aircraft. The machine was left looking, he thought, like a battered old school bus, and he was upset at being the butt of jokes from the other students. He got the hang of flying two days later. Any doubt about his skill in the cockpit had evaporated long before he scored his first official kill in October 1916, six months after he joined his first squadron.
Born in 1892 into an aristocratic family in what is now Poland, Richthofen learned to ride and hunt at a young age before beginning military training when he was 11. In 1911 he joined a cavalry regiment, but with the outbreak of hostilities in 1914, it was clear that his unit was of no use whatsoever in a modern war. He was bored rigid, his main excitement coming from shooting wild pigs. When he was transferred to the supply branch, he requested a transfer to the Imperial German Army Flying Corps, complaining that he hadn’t gone to war “in order to collect cheese and eggs.”
Manfred Albrecht Freiherr von Richthofen. The Red Baron. Just 25 years old when he was killed in combat in April 1918.
Soon after he qualified as a pilot, Richthofen’s squadron was sent to the Eastern Front to drop bombs on the Russians. Still dissatisfied, he hankered to fly on the Western Front. A meeting with Germany’s leading ace, Oswald Boelke, who was looking for recruits to form a new fighter unit, provided the chance he was looking for. Although Boelke died in a midair collision, he continued to act as an inspiration to Richthofen. Following his late CO’s rules for combat, Richthofen began to rack up some impressive numbers. By January 1917, his sixteen kills had earned him the Pour le Mérite medal, known as the “Blue Max,” and command of his own squadron. In fostering his unit’s esprit de corps, he encouraged pilots to paint their aircraft in bright colors. After forcing down a British Vickers two-man reconnaissance plane, he was thrilled to learn from the crew that his red-painted Albatros DIII was well known to them: they called it Le Petit Rouge (The Little Red). They had also treated him like the sportsman he knew himself to be. It was exactly the way he wanted to be perceived.
A replica of Richthofen’s iconic red Fokker Dr.1 triplane. Although slower than contemporary fighters—and prone to structural failure—the Dr.1 offered exceptional maneuverability.
Despite his success, Richthofen didn’t feel he’d found the ideal aircraft. He wanted maneuverability even at the expense of speed. It wasn’t until he recovered from a bullet, which grazed his skull, that he settled on the Fokker Dr.1 triplane, which instantly comes to mind at any mention of the Red Baron. In this iconic fighter he scored nineteen of his eighty victories, but it was also the machine in which he died, aged just 25.
Richthofen returned to the cockpit just three weeks after having bone splinters removed from his skull following the injury that nearly killed him. Afterward he was to suffer debilitating headaches, but the leader of the multicolored squadron known as the “Flying Circus” had become a talismanic figure in Germany. Accepting that, even embracing it, he believed he had no choice but to fight on. Initially, he struggled to find form, and while he never fully recovered from the head wound, through March and April the following year he added a further seventeen victims. To one of the men who survived being shot down, as he was recovering in hospital, Richthofen sent a box of cigars.
The Red Baron was shot through the chest on April 21, 1918, while trying to claim his eighty-first victim. At the time, his death was credited to a young Canadian Sopwith Camel pilot, Captain Arthur Brown, but it now seems more likely that the bullet that killed him was fired from the ground.
I prefer it this way. It seems fitting somehow that Manfred von Richthofen, the most famous fighter pilot who’s ever lived, was not defeated in the air.
Richthofen was buried by the British near Amiens, and the formalities reflected his significance: six RAF officers acting as pallbearers, a fourteen-man firing party, and a bugler sounding the “Last Post.” Photographs of the service were taken, developed, and, the next day, dropped over his home airfield with a note:
TO THE GERMAN FLYING CORPS:
Rittmeister Baron Manfred von Richthofen was killed in aerial combat on April 21st, 1918. He was buried with full military honours.
From the British Royal Air Force
In a brief autobiography written in the weeks when he was recovering from his head wound, he said he hoped that the British wouldn’t give up their attempts to catch him. If they did, he said, “I would miss many more opportunities to endear myself to them.”
The irony is that, for all his ruthless efficiency as a fighter pilot, he had already done so. While the British may have wanted the Red Baron gone, his enemy also had the greatest respect and admiration for him as an adversary.
