Manfred von Richthofen

Manfred Albrecht Freiherr von Richthofen was born on 2 May 1892 in Kleinburg near Breslau into a Prussian noble family. 'Freiherr' is a noble title usually rendered in English as 'baron'. His father was a career officer; his younger brother Lothar also became a fighter pilot, with 40 victories. The family lived in Schweidnitz (Świdnica), where Manfred became a keen hunter.

At eleven he began cadet training at Wahlstatt and from 1909 attended the main cadet academy at Groß-Lichterfelde near Berlin. In April 1911 he joined the 1st Uhlan Regiment at Militsch as an officer candidate and became a lieutenant at the end of 1912. He thus grew up in the military culture of the Prussian nobility, with its emphasis on duty, rank and horsemanship.

When the war began in 1914 he served as a cavalry reconnaissance officer on the Eastern Front and then in France and Belgium. Trench warfare made cavalry almost useless, and in 1915 he transferred to the air service, first as an observer and, after meeting the famous pilot Oswald Boelcke, as a pilot. In August 1916 Boelcke took him into his new fighter squadron, Jasta 2.

On 17 September 1916 Richthofen scored his first confirmed victory over Cambrai; for each victory he had a silver cup engraved. In November 1916 he shot down the British pilot Lanoe Hawker. After his sixteenth victory he received the Pour le Mérite in January 1917 and command of Jasta 11, whose aircraft were partly painted red. During 'Bloody April' 1917 he shot down 22 British aircraft.

In June 1917 he took command of Jagdgeschwader I, a wing of four squadrons that could move quickly between sectors of the front and was therefore called the 'flying circus'. He followed Boelcke's rules: attack from a higher position, with the sun behind, and avoid unnecessary risks. Although he is best known for the red Fokker Dr.I triplane, he scored only 19 of his 80 victories in that type.

The air war of 1914–1918 developed at great speed, from reconnaissance flights to specialised fighters with synchronised machine guns. The press presented fighter pilots as 'knights of the air', an image that contrasted sharply with the anonymous mass slaughter in the trenches. The life expectancy of front-line pilots, however, was short.

In Germany an officially encouraged hero cult grew up around successful pilots, with postcards, newspaper reports and decorations. Richthofen's book 'Der rote Kampfflieger' (1917) was written at the direction of the press and intelligence section of the air service and heavily edited. Some passages nonetheless suggest growing disillusionment after his wound.

Militarily, Richthofen showed how a concentrated and mobile fighter formation could contest air superiority over a sector of the front. He trained a generation of German pilots, including Ernst Udet, and his 80 confirmed victories remained the highest total of the First World War. For a long time some authors claimed that his total had been exaggerated for propaganda purposes or that he had claimed victories of his squadron.

His name was used politically after his death: the Nazi regime named Luftwaffe fighter wings after him, and in 1959 a fighter wing of the West German Bundeswehr also received his name. In popular culture he lives on as 'the Red Baron', in films, books and comics, often detached from the historical context of the war and the losses on both sides.

On 21 April 1918 Richthofen was pursuing a Sopwith Camel flown by the Canadian pilot Wilfrid May at low altitude over the Morlancourt ridge near the Somme. He was fatally hit by a single bullet through the chest. The RAF credited Captain Roy Brown, but according to most historians and medical and ballistic analyses the shot came from the ground, possibly from the Australian machine gunner Cedric Popkin. A 1999 article in The Lancet suggested that his 1917 head wound had impaired his judgement.

Australian airmen of No. 3 Squadron buried him with military honours at Bertangles on 22 April 1918. His remains were later moved to the German military cemetery at Fricourt; in 1925 his brother Bolko brought them to Berlin, where they were interred at the Invalidenfriedhof. In 1975 he was moved to the family grave at the Südfriedhof in Wiesbaden.