Death of Max Immelmann

On the evening of 18 June 1916, over the area of Lens in northern France, Lieutenant Max Immelmann was killed. Alongside Oswald Boelcke, he was the most famous German fighter pilot. His Fokker E.III monoplane broke up in the air in a fight with British aircraft and crashed to the ground. Immelmann was 25 years old and had 15 confirmed victories (some works count 17).

He came from Dresden, where he was born on 21 September 1890. Before the war he went through cadet school but left the army to study engineering; in 1914 he returned to the army and became a pilot. In the summer of 1915, in a flying unit near Douai, he received one of the first Fokker monoplanes with a gun firing through the propeller, and on 1 August he scored his first victory, opening the period the British called the “Fokker Scourge”. The German press called him the “Eagle of Lille”, and his rivalry with Boelcke over the number of victories became a public affair. In January 1916 the two of them were the first airmen to receive the Pour le Mérite. That spring, however, the Fokkers’ ascendancy came to an end, and Immelmann was fighting ever better British aircraft.

According to the British official history of the air war, The War in the Air, at about nine in the evening over Annay, north-east of Lens, Second Lieutenant George McCubbin of No. 25 Squadron, Royal Flying Corps, flying a two-seat F.E.2b with his gunner, Corporal James Waller, spotted three Fokkers. Two of them attacked another aircraft of the squadron. McCubbin caught them from behind, and Waller fired an accurate burst at one of them, which broke up in the air. Only a few days later did the British learn that it had been Immelmann. That day the squadron lost two aircraft, including the one the Fokkers had attacked, which had to land behind the German lines. McCubbin was wounded in the arm. He later received the DSO, and Waller the DCM.

The Germans did not accept this version. The airman’s brother and some of his comrades believed that the synchronisation gear had failed and Immelmann had shot through his own propeller, which happened in Fokkers at the time. Such a failure had happened to him before. According to another version, the aircraft was hit by German anti-aircraft fire. The dispute was never settled. For the German public the loss was enormous. Immelmann was given a grand funeral in his home city of Dresden, and according to British accounts one of the pilots of No. 25 Squadron dropped a wreath over a German aerodrome for “a gallant and chivalrous opponent”.

Immelmann’s death had immediate consequences. The Kaiser did not want to risk losing a second national hero and barred Boelcke from combat flying. Sent on a tour of inspection, Boelcke used this time to write down his rules of air combat and prepare a plan for forming separate fighter squadrons, which in the autumn of 1916 transformed the war in the air. Immelmann’s name survived in the name of a manoeuvre attributed to him, the Immelmann turn, which combines a climb with a change of direction.