THE RED BARON’S FIRST VICTIMS
Families of First World War flying ace Manfred von Richthofen and two British airmen he killed will meet next month to mark the centenary of their deaths
WHEN Manfred von Richthofen took off in his Albatros III biplane on the morning of September 17, 1916, he didn’t have a kill to his name. The man who was to go down in history as the Red Baron, the First World War’s “ace of aces” with 80 air combat victories, was yet to down a single enemy warplane.
But at 11am over the British airfield at Le Hameau in north-west France von Richthofen engaged with a two-seater FE2b piloted by 19-year-old 2nd Lieutenant Lionel Morris, with Captain Tom Rees, 21, manning the plane’s Lewis machine gun in the cockpit in front of him.
It was an unequal dogfight from the start. The FE2b – top speed 91mph – was no match for the much faster Albatros with its twin machine guns. “My Englishman twisted and turned, flying in zigzags,” von Richthofen wrote later. “I was animated by a single thought, the man in front of me must come down whatever happens.”
The Red Baron’s determination eventually paid off. “In a fraction of a second I was at his back with my excellent machine,” he wrote. “I gave a short burst of shots with my machine-gun. I had gone so close that I was afraid I might dash into the Englishman. Suddenly I nearly yelled with joy, for the propeller of the enemy machine had stopped turning. Hurrah! I had shot his engine to pieces. The enemy was compelled to land, for it was impossible for him to reach his own lines.”
Von Richthofen’s burst of machine-gun fire killed Rees and left Morris badly wounded. Despite his injuries the British pilot succeeded in putting down his stricken plane at the nearby German airfield of Flesquieres.
Von Richthofen landed alongside his victims’ aircraft to observe Morris being lifted out of his cockpit and transferred to the ambulance in which he died. He said later: “I honoured the fallen enemy by placing a stone on his grave.”
This epic duel is to be commemorated by an extraordinary dinner next month, exactly 100 years after it took place. The event will bring together representatives of the Rees and Morris families and introduce them to Baron Donat von Richthofen, 69, a descendant of Manfred, who – despite his nom de guerre – was not actually a baron.
THE dinner has been arranged by Dr Christopher Barnett, the headmaster of the £35,000-a-year Whitgift School in Croydon, who found Morris was an old boy in the course of organising an exhibition to commemorate the 100th anniversary of the Battle of the Somme.
“We looked at all the 252 students and members of staff from the school who died in the Great War,” he says. “It transpired that this fellow was the unlucky first victim of the Red Baron.
“I took a flight in France down the line of the trenches in a small single-engined aircraft at the same sort of height and speed as Morris had to recreate what he had done in the minutes before he was shot down. We filmed it and we’re hoping to show this at the exhibition.”
The dinner will be held at the exhibition site and the plan is for all parties to drink a toast of reconciliation from a silver goblet that is a replica of the ones the Red Baron would order from a Berlin silversmith to commemorate each of his kills – something he did as a gesture of respect as much as celebration.
Von Richthofen accumulated 60 in all before his supplier ran out of silver but all but two of them have disappeared over the years.
“We got a London silversmith to recreate an exact replica of the number one cup from the dimensions of the number 11 cup which is in New Zealand,” says Dr Barnett.
The school also commissioned a painting depicting the dogfight by Croydon-based artist Alex Hamilton. Dr Barnett reckons Morris’s “clapped-out technology” was no match for the Red Baron.
“They were kind of sitting ducks up in the sky,” he says. “There was only likely to be one outcome particularly because von Richthofen went on to be probably the top flying ace of all time. He was like a Grand Prix driver – if you’ve got the guts and the ability then you’re really going to shine. He was fearless.”
While Morris and Rees were cut down in their prime, von Richthofen went on to establish himself as the most prolific fighter pilot of the war. By January 1917 he had totted up 16 kills and been put in charge of his own squadron which became known as the Red Baron’s Flying Circus thanks to its flamboyantly painted fleet. Shortly afterwards, in a month that the British referred to as “Bloody April”, he shot down 20 planes.
Two months later he got a taste of his own medicine after a fierce dogfight with an RFC squadron pilot. “Two of them came at us head on and the first one was von Richthofen,” the RFC airman said later. “I kept a steady stream of lead pouring into the nose of that machine.”
Von Richthofen suffered a head wound in the subsequent crash and the German high command attempted to ground him fearing a propaganda coup for the Allies if he should be killed in action.
But von Richthofen – who was known as Der Rote Kampfflieger, or the Red Battle Flyer, by his adoring German public – insisted on getting back in the air. His luck ran out in April 1918 when he was shot in his cockpit and crashed to his death. He was just 25.
Another former pupil of Whitgift School played a key role in the controversy that followed. George Barber was assistant director of medical services with the Australian Army when the Red Baron’s corpse was brought in for a post-mortem.
“Von Richthofen had been in a dogfight with a Canadian called Roy Brown who was given the credit for shooting him down because it was more glamorous to suggest the Red Baron had been taken out by an Allied plane,” says Dr Barnett.
“But Barber said the Red Baron was killed by a shot from the ground. His findings were suppressed so he didn’t get the credit for identifying the fact it was ground fire that did for the Red Baron. Roy Brown became the hero.”
Remembering 1916 – Life On The Western Front runs until April 2017 at the Whitgift Exhibition Centre, Whitgift School, Haling Park, South Croydon CR2 6YT. 10am5pm, seven days a week. Tickets: £7 adults, £5 seniors, £3 children. Visit remembering1916.co.uk