Manfred von Richthofen emerged from the Great War as its most celebrated fighter pilot. Today he is a household name if only because of his on-going duel with Snoopy, the over-imaginative beagle from the famous comic strip, "Peanuts", and from seeing his nick-name, the Red Baron, emblazoned on boxes of frozen pizza. So what do you want? Immortality is immortality!
As a student of Oswald Boelcke, Richthofen was trained under Boelcke's concept of unified fighter planes fighting as a unit; when this concept caught on the days of the romantic "lone wolf" hunter were over. Having learned this system, Richthofen was not of the "lone wolf" breed, rather, he was a calculating and calmly intelligent killer; this explains what might be called his longevity. He taught his pupils Boelcke's concept and the Allied pilots soon realized just how good a teacher Richthofen was.
He had his own style of fighting, to be sure, but it was of the calculating nature in which when he made his decision to attack, he had figured out that the odds were with him (as best that they could be). He often picked on the slow-moving observation planes, but it must be noted that those slow moving planes were doing a job that was crucial to the war effort and by downing them, as cowardly as it might appear, was the fighter scouts main priority! Richthofen was also known to wait until a dogfight was in motion before picking out a lone straggler and attacking it. He seems a humorless man; in many of the books I have on him it is always remarked upon by the author when they show a photograph of the Red Baron smiling!
He is credited with downing 80 enemy planes while his younger brother, Lothar, downed 40! As with Mick Mannock, Richthofen’ s death came when he, himself, broke one of his cardinal rules. On April 21, 1918, von Richthofen was engaged in a dogfight when he noticed a lone Sopwith Camel exit the melee. Richthofen might have been thinking that this departing plane was doing so because he was a rookie (which was, indeed, true!) Richthofen took off after this poor kid and got right on his tail. The rookie pilot, Wilfred May, did everything he could to try and shake the big all-red triplane off his tail; but nothing worked. At one point they were flying so low to the ground that May almost scraped Richthofen off on the bell tower of a local church! Although Richthofen stayed right on May's tail he couldn't knock the kid down.
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