by Richard Fox
“Sir?” a small voice said from the edges of his misery.
“Sir, would you mind?” Savage had a Sanke card and pen in hand. Manfred pressed a knuckled against his temple and the pain subsided enough to feign normalcy.
“What’s the matter, Savage? Afraid I won’t come back?” Manfred said, a half smile on his face.
“Right, never mind, sir. Good hunting.” Savage pocketed the card and spun the Fokker’s propeller to life.
Manfred’s flight of five Fokkers hugged the cloud ceiling as they flew west. Wolfram had stayed on Manfred’s wing as ordered, the neophyte pilot mirroring every twitch of Manfred’s plane.
Through a gap in the clouds, Manfred saw Fokkers and Sopwith Camels swirling in battle hundreds of yards above them. Manfred wagged his wings and led his flight towards the dogfight.
They cut through the rump of a cloud, and ran into a pair of Camels heading straight for them. One of the English planes dove on Wolfram’s Fokker, tracer rounds flashed past his cousin.
Wolfram didn’t react, his Fokker waddling on its axis. Manfred knew what was happening, in his first air combat all of Wolfram’s training had come to the fore at once, leaving him unable to make a decision. Manfred had seen it countless times in the planes he had shot down.
Anger blossomed in Manfred’s heart. Wolfram was nearly helpless against the Camels. He would die just like that pilot that came down on the day his father visited. He thought of Wolfram lying before him, bleeding to death and struggling to comprehend why the greatest ace in Germany had failed to protect him.
The Camel assaulting Wolfram sliced through the air above Wolfram’s Fokker and broke off the attack.
Manfred didn’t look to the rest of his flight. Didn’t check to see if Wolfram was injured. Didn’t locate the Camel’s wingman. The rage in his heart and growing pain in his head drove him into pursuit.
His red Fokker caught up with the Camel and he fired a quick burst from his Spandaus. The Camel spun out of control and fell in an ugly spiral. Manfred followed the plane down, sure that he had hit the pilot. He wanted to see the plane a twisted wreck of wood and flame against the ground.
Manfred glanced over his shoulder and couldn’t find the rest of his flight. He looked back to the Camel and ground his teeth in anger as it came out of the dive and retreated west.
He wasn’t going to let this one get away so easily.
He kept after the Camel and followed it over the English lines.
The Camel had frustratingly good luck to dance out of Manfred’s line of fire just as he closed, each miss stoking his rage. Manfred closed farther and fired again. The left Spandau seized up with a crunch as a round misfired. A split cartridge in the chamber took the weapon out of the fight. He had one functioning gun, enough to take down the Camel.
The Camel tried to throw off Manfred’s aim by zig-zagging and Richtofen realized he was dealing with an amateur. Someone more experienced with the Camel would have known he could simply outrun the Fokker by going full throttle. Even with a single gun, Manfred knew he had nothing to fear from his prey.
The Camel dived towards a river and flew a few feet over the water. Manfred fired again; white geysers of water marked his missed shots. He looked ahead and saw the river bend around a forest. If this pilot was a rookie, Manfred guessed he’d follow the bend of the river and that gave him the chance to close the distance between him and the Camel.
Manfred broke off his chase and flew over the forest. The Camel had stuck to the river’s path as expected, and Manfred’s shortcut brought him right on top of his target. He was close enough to see his target look over his shoulder, shock on his face.
Manfred fired and his remaining gun jammed after two shots. He re-cocked the weapon and got two more shots before it jammed again. The firing pin must have broken. He slammed a fist against the machine gun again and again in frustration, his headache flaring with each blow.
Bullets snapped past him and struck the river.
He glanced over his shoulder and found another Camel behind him, flames shooting from the guns as it swept past him.
The grip of anger subsided as he looked around. He was alone. Defenseless. Far behind enemy lines. How had this happened to him? Manfred’s only hope was to run.
He thought of Lothar, Wolfram, Udet. All the men who counted on him. Who needed him. He’d left them all behind in a fit of rage and pain.
He took his plane into a flat turn and ran straight into a headwind.
Sergeant Cedric Popkin of the Australian army swung his Lewis gun on its swivel and took a bead on the red Fokker. He held his fire as the Fokker came up in a loop. He waited until it was at the apex of the loop, when the airspeed would be the slowest, and opened fire.
He burned through an entire magazine of bullets, as the Fokker turned over and flew past him. He ripped the magazine off and slapped another into the gun. He was about to pull the charging handle, when he saw the Fokker spin to the ground and land with a thud. The Fokker’s engine quit as it rolled to a stop fifty yards away.
Popkin picked up his rifle and ran toward the downed plane. “Come on!” he ordered the two soldiers in his charge.
He drew down on the Fokker and slowed to a walk a few yards away. Dust billowed in the air from the rough landing; one of the Fokker’s wheels had snapped off and lay broken in the dirt.
“Hands up, you!” Popkin said. The pilot lay against the controls, motionless.
Popkin poked the pilot with his rifle. No response.
Wolfram landed at Cappy and scanned the planes readying for their next sortie. Manfred’s all-red Fokker was absent.
Lothar ran up to Wolfram’s plane. “Where’s Manfred?”
“I was going to ask you the same thing,” Wolfram said.
Lothar slammed the phone against its cradle.
“Nothing from Bapaume,” Udet said. He made an X on a chalkboard next to the airfield’s name. The chalkboard had every airfield within range of Manfred’s Fokker, and more than one beyond it. All had more than one X next to their name.
Metzger glanced out the window; the sun had risen on the first full day of Manfred’s disappearance.
“Maybe he’s with the infantry somewhere. Shouldn’t we call the units along the Front?” Metzger asked.
“I tried. It’s chaos all up and down the Front. Von Hoeppner knows he’s missing,” Lothar said. “And he would have gotten word to us by now.” Lothar sat down in a chair and rubbed his face. He hadn’t slept the night before, his every waking moment dedicated to finding his brother.
“Plane on approach!” someone shouted from outside.
“Manfred?” Lothar shot to his feet and out the door.
He ran to the airfield and spotted a double-winged plane in the air. He’d shot down enough Sopwith Camels to know one when he saw it. The Camel flew over the airfield and tossed something over the side.
Lothar and the rest of the pilots ran to where the object landed. They poked around the grass until Wolfram shouted.
Lothar snatched the letter, tied to a hunk of brick, out of Wolfram’s hands and ripped the letter open.
The Flying Circus crowded around Lothar, waiting for him to speak.
Lothar looked up from the letter, tears pouring from his eyes.
“He’s gone.”
Katy –1925
Katy was no one. One of tens of thousands who came to see the funeral. Just another woman in mourning black. She didn’t mind the veil; it hid her tears.
A proper funeral had to wait. Germany couldn’t rush something so important, something that had to be done right. After the years of revolution, counterrevolution, the flu that killed as many as the Front, the embargo and starvation that continued long after the armistice so the English could secure their position at Versailles, the turmoil of Germany ripped apart and humiliated by that treaty—after all had passed, this funeral could happen.
Manfred’s remains had been disinterred from a military cemetery in France and t
aken a long, winding route through the country. The German nation bade farewell to its hero city by city until the coffin made it to Berlin
Katy waited for hours along the road leading to the Gnadenkirche cathedral where Manfred would lay in state. The procession passed slowly, an honor guard of eight Pour Le Merite winners escorted Manfred’s coffin carried by a horse-drawn artillery caisson. An officer in an Uhlan uniform carried the Ordenskissen, a black pillow bearing all of Manfred’s medals and awards.
Behind the coffin walked von Hindenburg, president of the Weimar Republic. Kunigunde von Richthofen walked beside him, alone but for a son and daughter that Katy hadn’t had the chance to meet. Manfred’s father died of pneumonia in 1920, Lothar in a plane crash two years after that.
Planes flew overhead, trailing black pennants.
The crowd was stone silent as the coffin passed. The soft pad of boots and clink of horseshoes marked the passing.
After the procession delivered the coffin to the cathedral, a choir sang the “Song of Good Comrades,” the final hymn for the fallen hero.
After, most of the crowd broke away. Katy found her way to the line to view the casket, and stayed in line for hours, shuffling forward a few feet at a time until she finally made it inside, the sun setting over the Berlin skyline.
Manfred’s pallbearers stayed on as an honor guard around the coffin. A pile of wreathes laid before the lacquered wood. A simple wooden cross with Manfred’s name and a burial serial number lay atop the coffin, the original grave marker from his burial in France, where he’d lain surrounded by fallen Germans. Katy thought Manfred would have preferred to stay there, with the soldiers he died for.
She took a thin diary from her pocket and flipped it open. A single red poppy, the one Manfred gave her the day he fell in the rose garden, lay pressed between the pages. She dropped the poppy onto a growing pile of flowers, and continued past the coffin.
She stepped out of the church and into the early evening air, the scent of coal and burning wood replacing the fragrance of flowers around Manfred’s coffin. She pulled her veil over her face and struggled with where to go next.
Seeing Manfred one last time brought no solace. Some wounds were too deep to heal.
THE END
FROM THE AUTHOR
Thank you for reading The Red Baron. I want my next book to be better than the last, and for that, I need your help. Please leave an honest review on Amazon or Goodreads and let me know which parts you liked, and where I could improve.
This telling of Manfred’s story is fiction, and parts of his historical record were compressed, omitted and otherwise jumbled for the sake of telling the story. If you, dear and gentle reader, came across a technical error or inaccuracy (How many wings on the Sopwith Pup?), please drop me a note at [email protected] and those errors will be corrected in future editions.
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Also By Richard Fox:
The Eric Ritter Spy Thriller Series:
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THE SOCOTRA INCIDENT
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THE BELTWAY ASSASSIN
An assassin murders one of the shadowy Directors of the Caliban Program-a covert arm of the CIA that operates beyond the bounds of law and morality. As the targeted killings of America’s elite continues in Washington DC, the investigation falls to two men.
Eric Ritter
The CIA operative must infiltrate the highest levels of the US government to find out who set the assassin loose, and how deep the conspiracy against the Caliban Program goes. His partner in the investigation is a man he betrayed on the battlefields of the Iraq War:
Greg Shelton
A rookie FBI Agent forced to assist Ritter by a deep secret-he owes his new career to the Caliban Program, and that career ends the moment he steps out of line. Shelton must play along with the investigation until he can find the right evidence to expose Ritter for the criminal he suspects he is, and free himself the CIA’s clutches.
The race to capture the assassin, a master bomb maker as insane as he is deadly, will take Ritter and Shelton from the seedy underbelly of the nation’s capital city to the gilded halls of power where a far deadlier game plays out on the world stage.
