• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 2228 0

of his youth in the woods that were a part of his family’s estate. Even now, when his friends in the squadron would take advantage of the tempting distractions of Berlin, Richthofen would go instead to the forests, would seek out the homes of those who enjoyed the land as he did. It was a treat for the local gentry to host this new kind of soldier, the man who flew the wondrous aeroplanes. He would spend long days stalking the deer and wild boar that filled the forests, but then, would surprise his hosts by not sharing the feast afterward. He rarely ate meat, saw nothing of reward in consuming the animal he had shot. He had always been an exceptional marksman, had no patience for sloppiness, for the men who shot at every movement, who would empty their rifles at a running beast. As his hosts soon learned, if he wasn’t close enough to bring the hunt to a perfect conclusion, he wouldn’t shoot. There was always tomorrow.

The sun was setting in front of him, and in the distance he could see a thick red fog, signs of some fight, artillery perhaps, or even other bombers. The smoke had spread skyward, shading the landscape beneath him, and he spent long minutes studying the ground for some glimpse of the fields where the fighting had been. It was always a curiosity to him, the networks of trenches, rows of barbed wire, so much confusion and chaos to those on the ground, so clearly defined and even beautiful from the air. It was an observation made by many others long before he had flown, and the sky over every battlefield was flecked with aircraft, many with no more weaponry than the simple camera. From the first days of the war, the aeroplanes had been used as a new and invaluable set of eyes, the observer’s job to photograph every square foot of ground, to give the commanders a view that no general could ever see. Some were used by the artillery commanders, to locate targets, signaling the men who aimed the great guns, guiding them to a perfect kill. But as the value of the cameras became known, so too did the urgency of killing the cameramen, and the observation planes had soon become equipped with machine guns of their own, to ward off the certain attack by the new squadrons of fighter planes. The use of aeroplanes was quickly becoming a war of its own, separate from the awful destruction that spilled out over the ground beneath them.

Even on the most routine missions, Richthofen had thoroughly enjoyed the godlike serenity, the strange feeling of dominance over all that was below. But all of that had become routine, and he wondered about the fighter pilots, the men who flew the new single-wing Fokker Eindecker, or the sturdy, tough Albatros, planes that were designed for only one purpose, to seek and destroy the enemy in the air. The names of the pilots were becoming familiar, the men who not only survived the new kind of war, but flourished, who consistently sent enemy planes out of the sky in fiery crashes. The legends grew first in the trenches, the foot soldiers who stared up in fascination at the spinning and swirling fights above them, who cheered the victor, even if they had no idea which side had prevailed. But headquarters knew, and the newspapers were given the names, and now every pilot of the war had learned of the men who were a new kind of hero.

The first had been Max Immelmann, the first German to conceive of the aeroplane as a bayonet in the air, who had mastered the maneuvers that had changed the way air battles were fought. They called his method the “Immelmann Turn,” rolling the plane over on its back, then curling up and over in a loop, so that the pursued was suddenly face-to-face with his pursuer. Immelmann had shot down an astonishing fifteen enemy planes, but in June, Immelmann himself had been shot down by the British, and the Fatherland had lost its first great warrior of the air.

Richthofen eased the plane into a slow circle, aimed for the leading edge of the wide, flat field. He knew the observer was terrified, the man comfortable with every part of the flight except the landing. Richthofen smiled,