A bluff
Event ID: 540
29 April 1917
Source ID: 55
“A glorious, hot April morning! We are standing in front of our birds, waiting for a report. Then the telephone rings. Busy air traffic south of Arras! A nod to the launch officer, the alarm bell rings, and suddenly the place comes to life! The mechanics rush from all corners to the machines lined up next to each other to start them up. The pilots also rush over. Which lead aircraft? – My brother! – Go! We arrive south of Arras at an altitude of about three thousand metres! Nothing to see! But there are three Englishmen. And now we are amazed! The three attack us, swooping down on us from a great height. My brother takes on the first, Wolff the second, and the third attacks me. As long as the Englishman is above me, he shoots. I have to wait until he reaches my altitude to be able to shoot at all. So now he’s close to me. Just as I’m about to shoot, he tries to trick me and starts to spiral down. I think: You can do that too! I spiral down ten metres to the side as well. Now he’s flying straight again. I’m already behind him. He hardly notices when he starts turning wildly. We have a westerly wind, so the battle that started at the front has to continue on this side. So I follow him. As soon as he tries to fly straight ahead, I fire a few warning shots. Eventually, I get bored. I try to hit him in the curve and shoot and shoot.
Meanwhile, we have reached an altitude of about five hundred metres behind our front lines. I force the Englishman to continue turning. When turning, you descend deeper and deeper in aerial combat until you have to land, or the only option left is to try to fly straight home. My Englishman decides on the latter. A thought flashes through my mind: Now your time has come, you poor fellow! I am sitting behind him. At the necessary distance,
about fifty metres, I take careful aim and press my machine gun buttons. What’s this? No shot comes out. I think: jam, reload, press the machine gun buttons again: no shot! Desperate! So close to success! I look at my machine guns again. Damn it! I’ve used up all my ammunition except for the last shot. I’m holding the empty belts in my hands. A thousand shots! I’ve never needed that many before. You mustn’t let him get away under any circumstances, was my only thought. To have fought a red plane for almost a quarter of an hour and then to escape would have been a triumph for the Englishman! I fly closer and closer. The distance between my propeller and the Englishman’s rudder is constantly decreasing. I estimate: ten metres, five metres, three, now only two metres! Finally, a desperate thought occurs to me: should I knock off his rudder with my propeller? Then he will fall, but I will probably fall with him. Another theory: if I turn off the engine at the moment I touch him, what will happen? My Englishman looks around, sees me directly behind him, gives me a horrified look, turns off his engine and lands in a nosedive at about our third position. Down on the ground, he lets the engine continue to run slowly. When you have to land on enemy territory, you try to destroy your aircraft by burning it. To prevent this as a pursuer, in such cases you shoot near the landed aircraft until the occupants run away from it. So I fly so close around his head that he realises I’m watching. The Englishman jumps out of his plane, waves to me, then raises his hand and allows himself to be arrested by our rushing infantry. As I saw later in another case, I would certainly have crashed if I had hit the Englishman in the air with my propeller running. In his defence, I must say that he could not have known that I had no more cartridges. One cartridge would have been enough to hit him from such close range. All he had to do was turn around, and I would have had to break away. He had fired at most fifty shots at me, and I was completely defenceless without cartridges. But the mission was a success, and that’s what matters. The next day, I flew to the unit that had recovered the aircraft, a Spad, a very good English single-seater fighter at the time, looked at the machine and searched and searched for hits. With my thousand shots, I must have hit it at least once! I asked if the occupant had been wounded, to which I promptly received the answer: ‘No!’ Not a single hit could be found on the entire aircraft! Not even the axle was bent, which can easily happen with a bad landing or on unfavourable terrain! Now I had to laugh. So the
Englishman had actually landed out of fear of me!
Today, my list of successes reads: ‘On the morning of 29 April 1917, near Izel, a Spad single-seater, occupant an English officer.’ I didn’t speak to him because our airfield was far away from his landing site. So he never found out that I had run out of ammunition and that he had landed out of fear. When I got back to my squadron, I said to myself: You can’t tell anyone that you didn’t hit a single target with a thousand shots!
My brother and Wolff had shot down both of theirs. I don’t know if I ever told anyone in the squadron, I was so ashamed of my poor shooting performance at the time. On this occasion, it is quite interesting to mention how many shots are generally needed to shoot down an Englishman. When I flew with my brother for the first few times and watched, I didn’t even notice that my brother had started shooting when the Englishman was already falling. In general, my brother hadn’t even needed twenty shots. But you can’t take that as the rule. You usually attack an Englishman from behind so that you can shoot in the direction of flight. If the Englishman flies steadily straight ahead and a good shot is sitting behind him, the Englishman will fall with the first shots. But if the enemy starts to turn so that you can’t get him in front of you, flying straight ahead, then you either never hit him or only by chance.”
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