Richthofen's first victory

On the morning of 17 September 1916 the newly formed German fighter squadron Jagdstaffel 2 went into battle as a cohesive unit for the first time. It was led by its commander, Captain Oswald Boelcke, at the time the most successful fighter pilot in the world. Over the area of Cambrai one of his young pilots, Lieutenant Manfred von Richthofen, shot down a British two-seat aircraft. It was the first confirmed victory of the airman who a year and a half later had 80 to his name, more than any other pilot of the First World War.

Richthofen was 24 and had come to aviation by an unusual route. He was born in 1892 in Kleinburg near Breslau, today the Borek district of Wrocław, and spent his childhood in Schweidnitz (Świdnica). He served in the 1st Uhlan Regiment, in a squadron stationed in Ostrowo, today Ostrów Wielkopolski, and in the first days of the war he rode on patrols around Kalisz, which the Germans were occupying. In trench warfare the cavalry proved superfluous, so in May 1915 he transferred to aviation. As an observer he flew over Galicia during the offensive that began with the breakthrough at Gorlice, then on the Western Front. In the autumn of 1915 he met Boelcke by chance on a train and decided to become a pilot. In the summer of 1916 he bombed Russian positions and railway stations in Volhynia, around Kovel. There, in August, Boelcke visited him; he had been given the task of organising one of the first fighter squadrons and was choosing his own pilots. He asked Richthofen to come with him to the Somme.

Over the Somme the British air service then held sway, but the Germans were preparing a response. Boelcke’s squadron was formed at the end of August, and the new Albatros D.I and D.II biplanes, with two guns firing through the propeller, arrived only on 16 September. The next morning Boelcke led five pilots in close formation. According to the British official history of the air war, The War in the Air, at the same time eight B.E. aircraft of No. 12 Squadron were on their way to bomb the railway station at Marcoing, escorted by six two-seat F.E.2bs of No. 11 Squadron. The British dropped their bombs and set the station on fire, but over the target the Germans caught them. Four of the escorts and two of the bombers were shot down.

Richthofen attacked one of the F.E.2bs, flown by Second Lieutenant Lionel Morris with the observer Tom Rees. As he wrote in his memoirs, his opponent twisted and turned for a long time until he finally flew straight, whereupon Richthofen closed in so near that he feared a collision, and fired a short burst. The British aircraft’s propeller stopped. Morris, badly wounded, landed near Villers-Plouich, next to one of the German aerodromes. In his excitement Richthofen landed right beside it, nearly wrecking his own machine. Rees was already dead, and Morris died on the way to hospital. According to Richthofen’s memoirs, he placed a stone on the grave of the fallen. To commemorate the victory he ordered from a Berlin jeweller a silver cup engraved with the date and the type of the aircraft shot down, and he did the same after each subsequent victory, up to the sixtieth.

In the evening it turned out that each of Boelcke’s five pilots had shot down one aircraft that day, and for all of them except their commander it was their first victory over British airmen. The British official history acknowledges that this was a remarkable result, achieved on machines delivered the evening before, and that it immediately gave Boelcke’s squadron prestige. In the following weeks the new German fighter squadrons began to wrest air superiority over the Somme from the British.