Real Red Baron

[tinsnips]

My wife is a distant relative of the Red Baron for real. We live 20 miles from Theodore Rosevelts old ranch . I know the man well that owns it now have done work there quite a few times. There is a sign in his yard stating it was Teddys home place.

[Bob in Revelstoke]

Those rotary engines are amazing. I recall having read stories by the old pilots that they used castor oil for lubricant. They also remarked they didn't suffer from constipation as the result of oil being sprayed back from the exhaust.

[Ballistics in Scotland]

I'm pretty sure that you are correct that Leutnant Voss was the first to fly the F1. However, I'm also pretty sure that von Richthofen flew F1 102 and Werner Voss was issued F1 103.

That is true, and shot down two aircraft in it, although it was on evaluation. Only two triplanes had the F designation, that and F103, which very likely was flown by Voss. The 17 is just a year number.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fokker_Dr.I

It is a marvellous piece of film, and I am sure authentic, although I don't believe any combat footage of WW1 aircraft is. I think that is Manfred von Richthofen. It certainly looks like the Richthofen nose, and although his brother Lothar served in the same unit, the others seem to be treating him like a superior.

Various accounts suggest he was an impassive or even cold man, admired and valued rather than loved. He was an extremely good shot and tactician, but had considerable difficulty in qualifying as a pilot. The triplane, with everything close to its centre of gravity and the rotating engine facilitating a fast banking turn in one direction, was highly manoeuvrable, and his late use of this type may have been because in a tight dogfight, he needed all the help he could get.

It is also often suggested that he (and no doubt his propaganda-conscious superiors) cultivated his score of victories at the expense of his men. He certainly had a small silver cup made to commemorate each one, although I don't suppose he knew in the early days how many that would be. In this he contrasts strikingly with the future Reichsmarschall Goering, his successor, who was boastful only on trivia. Goering's score almost ceased as he saw his main duty as developing the skill and confidence of his pilots.

I owed a favour to a friend who is a private pilot, so I gave him a bound volume of "Popular Flying" magazine, April 1933 to March 1934, edited by Captain WE Johns of the long-running "Biggles" series of semi-juvenile novels. I wish I had had more time to read it, but one edition had an article by Captain Goering describing a combat in which he shot down a well-known British pilot. It is accompanied by a note from Johns, saying that publication didn't imply endorsement of Captain Goering's political views.

There was a degree of camaraderie among opposing pilots which makes the presence and attitude of a British prisoner in the film quite unexceptional on either side. It was a point of honour to find and entertain a shot-down enemy in the mess, until his coach turned into a pumpkin at midnight, and not to fire on the enemy's wreath-dropping flight when someone well known had died. Maybe it came from flight itself being an enemy of all pilots in the early days.

Goering may have become worse than some of the real crazies, for he behaved nearly as badly while not being far enough round the bend to be an excuse. But he seems to have liked people - convenient people - and had a perfectly sincere belief that pilots had to be treated well. Squadron-Leader Lamason and Wing-Commander Yeo-Thomas (the spy the Gestapo named after The White Rabbit in "Alice in Wonderland" because he kept turning up) had the unusual distinction of spying for the Luftwaffe from within the Buchenwald concentration camp, and reporting the illicit detention of airmen there. The Luftwaffe still had enough power to bully the SS and get them out.

I can date almost to the hour, 0100 on the 1st January 1979, when a friend told me of a curious incident in Singapore. A Royal Air Force squadron invited the German military attaché, Richthofen's nephew, to a dinner. Only at a fairly late stage did they tell him that it was their squadron who shot his uncle down. Actually it is now considered more likely that one of several Australian ground machine-gunners did it. My friend wasn't quite himself at the time, considering that the New Year was an hour old, but 209 Squadron being in Singapore checks out, at just the time Lothar's son Wolf-Manfred was the right age and had the necessary silver spoon in his mouth.

I know very little about Wolf-Manfred, but I have read something by a girl who knew him in his youth, and quoted him as saying Lothar really shot down more enemies than Manfred. Judged against time spent in front-line service, at least, it is surely true. Lothar was a highly competent air fighter, much more aggressive than his brother, but became a troubled man. His brief command, between Manfred and Goering, was unsuccessful, and 1922 brought the birth of Wolf-Manfred, his divorce and death in a civil plane crash.

I think everyone but Manfred and the propagandists agreed that he shouldn't have been back in combat after his head wound, and his injury was only part of it. Even in 1940 the need for rotation wasn't well understood by the Luftwaffe, and in WW1 pilots simply got used up, with their achievement and safety drastically diminishing. He had surgery to remove bone splinters, and Surgeon-Colonel La Garde (of the Chicago stockyard trials which led to the .45ACP) held that trephination (i.e a holesaw job) was always advisable in such cases. Manfred appears to have been extremely gloomy close to the end, and even reading between the lines of his edited or censored book, seems to think that the First World War wasn't a good idea. In his last fight it seems that he spent far too long within range of ground machineguns, which at the time were much more dangerous than anti-aircraft shells.

I've seen the engine of the fatal triplane, in the Imperial War Museum. It is basically the French Le Rhône engine, and it is said that some were made in Sweden under a licence that wasn't meant to cover sales to enemies of France. So they put a plate saying beute, or "captured" on each one. I think manufacture by Oberursel in Germany was more common. I think the man in the film is oiling the valves rather than priming, as the fuel came via the crankcase like a modern twostroke. The lubrication worked on a total-loss system aided by centrifugal force, so the valve rocker bearings were dry until it started coming through. At the time only castor oil would work well across the necessary temperature range, and the inadequacy of the mineral substitute available in Germany probably contributed to the replacement of the rotaries by inline water-cooled engines. Manfred was a strong believer in the Fokker DVII, the inline-engine biplane which he never saw in service, but which has good claim to be the best all-round WW1 fighter.

The triplane was replaced because it was slow, with a record of top-wing failures, some but not all of which were caused by poor factory work and moisture. It climbed extremely well, but most fighters could outdistance it, especially in a dive. In fact the designers wanted it to have no interplane struts at all, but were overruled by the air service. This would have improved the speed slightly, and the wing failures weren't the kind it would have increased.

These are pictures of a model in the RAF Museum on the former Hendon aerodrome, showing the construction of the wings. It was the front and rear, not the strong box-spar or its steel tubing cabane struts, that failed. We think of those as the days of wood and fabric, but most if not all Fokkers had steel tubing fuselage framing.

[woodbutcher]

Hi BIS.Thanks for a great write up.
Good luck.Have fun.Be safe.
Leo

[Plate plinker]

Agreed best post ever by BIS. Hats off to you.

[Ballistics in Scotland]

Thank you for those kind words, but when you get interested in things like this, you find that people who lived a century ago wrote it for you.

[GOPHER SLAYER]

Manfred has ben quoted as saying, if you kill someone, even in war, it is still murder. I have read two books about The Red Baron and both stressed the fact that he was an avid hunter and would often write in his dairy," I was keen for the hunt". I read the book that stated, only Manfred's skull was returned to Germany in 1924 for burial. The man who wrote the book said he asked the groundskeeper in France if he could dig up what remained in the grave. The groundskeeper didn't care so he dug up the remaining skeleton, put it in a box and took it to the Germen Embassy. He said he didn't know what became of the bones after that. Manfred was a cavalry officer when WWI started and soon found that horses were of little use against machine guns so he transferred to the Air Corps. He was also sick of slogging around in the mud. He was not well suited to flying and it was a struggle at first but he persevered and became one of the best pilots of the war. After loosing many friends and became reluctant to make new ones. This is common among survivors as a war progresses whatever service they are in.

[Ballistics in Scotland]

Manfred has ben quoted as saying, if you kill someone, even in war, it is still murder.

Harry Patch, the last surviving combat soldier of the First World War, also said that war was when nations do murder. I don't quite agree, and I doubt if he invariably did, but when a nation claims self-defence, the story had better hold together. It is fascinating to think that his friend Henry Allingham, although really a Royal Naval Air Service mechanic, did fly in combat, armed at first with a rifle and later a machine-gun. I don't think he ever hit anybody though.

We would have to look to the early days of steam and of computing, to find very young men bringing about such astonishingly rapid advances in an industry. Sir Thomas Sopwith continued to work as a consultant in his company until he was 92. and lived to see his contribution to vertical takeoff fighters pay off in the Falkland Islands. It is something of a myth that the wartime Spitfire was a private venture by Supermarine. There was simply a brief hiccup in government funding. But the VTOL project was carried at Hawker Aviation's risk for rather longer, and Sopwith was chairman of the board that did it.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harry_Patch

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henry_Allingham

I think most modern pilots would be very wary of an invitation to fly an aircraft of 1912 or so, but would beg for the chance with one of the late WW1 period. In fact the triplane wasn't a primitive machine, with its thick, self-supporting wings and an absence of bracing wires. An early prototype was found to require undesirably heavy control pressure, which Fokker solved by lobes of the ailerons coming around the wingtip, ahead of the pivots, to partly balance the effect of air pressure at speed. It might be that this contributed to strain on the rear of the wing.

[GOPHER SLAYER]

There is a fabulous Air & Space Museum in San Diego's Balboa Park. It is well worth a visit. It tells the story of man's efforts to master flight from the earliest days. There are all types of planes as well as the stories of the men who help develop them. I remember stopping to read some of the story of Sir Thomas Sopwith. There was so much to see I couldn't spend a lot of time reading. It was great to stand next to a restored RR Merlin Engine. That engine installed in the P51 Mustang did much to win the war in Europe during WWII.

[popper]

I do remember reading about the RAF aces of WWI ( along time ago) IIRC it was a short book title 'hat in the ring' but that is Rick.., there was another one also, poor memory. Most good ones seemed introverted, many didn't live past their mid 20s. IIRC one RAF guy got 21, then lost it. Lots of superstitions, anything to bring them back home. I imagine the mixture feed was some what boosted by the rotary.

[smokeywolf]

While my father spent thousands of hours doing gunsmithing and saddle making as a sideline, he made his living and spent more than half of his adult life in aerospace. Worked for Northrop, Lockheed and I think Grumman for a short time. He had a lot of knowledge and stories.
He also was heavily into control line and RC planes at different times in his life.

I have two radial engines, a 3 and a 5 cylinder. The 3 cylinder is close to 3 cu and the 5 cylinder is 3.25 cu. Also have a V-Twin, an inline 2 cylinder witch is in the D.VII, a horizontally opposed 4 (3.2 cu), 3 or 4 horizontally opposed 2s and 2 or 3 single cylinder engines.

[Ballistics in Scotland]

In the 1980s LK Blackmore made a model of the Bentley Rotary engine, which has kept some popularity as a project for the advanced model engineer. You can still buy the book and the plans. But if you start, you will probably curse me before you finish. I doubt if many people run theirs. Even with modern alternatives to the laxative, rotary engines are messy. Bentley's book, "WO" is also worth reading.

https://www.google.co.uk/search?q=%2...w=1242&bih=508

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bentley_BR1

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bentley_BR2


In 1978 on a Saudi Arabian airbase I knew an ex-RAF technician, close to retirement, who had worked in the Battle of Britain. He had married a German fighter controller (female in those days) and considered the Spitfire a horrible aeroplane to work on, because it had compound curves everywhere, but it produced good aluminium men. For mass production the P51 had its points. He used to turn Bedouin into mechanics capable of exceeding standard RAF times for routine operations, though diagnosis of unidentified problems was rare. His first work on real aircraft during his apprenticeship was on a Sopwith Snipe, although I think it must have been a museum exhibit. Even he wasn't that old.

[Ballistics in Scotland]

I found it! Here is Captain Goering's article, very unclearly printed I'm afraid.

http://www.popularflying.com/Covers/16/

He must have been a remarkable pilot. Aerial machine-guns often have a higher cyclic rate than ground ones, and yet the time to hit a man ten times must have seemed like forever in close combat. From the date it would have preceded the triplane period of the Richthofen Circus. Ascendency switched from side to side very quickly then, and this came into the period when the Albatros DIII outclassed the Sopwith Pup.

Post-war American tests revealed that the top wing of the Triplane had a much higher coefficient of lift than the others, and I have just thought of a possible reason. A moving airfoil doesn't push the aircraft up. It sucks it, because it develops low pressure on top and normal or higher pressure above. An adequately strong and streamlined triplane has to have the wings too close together for this to work. The Fokker DVIII parasol monoplane, very like a triplane with its only wing a larger one strutted above the fuselage, and non-improvised aileron balancing, wasn't a bad move. In the early stages of the Spitfire project RJ Mitchell considered a monoplane with high, gull-shaped wings to give that sort of pilot visibility.