“Combat Report: 1710 hrs, near Lagnicourt. Vickers two-seater. No details, as plane fell on the other side of line. When my Staffel was attacking enemy squadron, I personally attacked the last of the enemy planes. Immediately after I had discharged my first shots, the plane began to smoke. After 500 shots the plane plunged down and crashed to splinters on the ground. The fight had begun above our side, but the prevailing east wind had drifted the planes to the west. Weather: fine but cloudy.”

The commanding general of the air force, Ernst von Hoeppner, visits Fighter Squadron 11 in Roucourt. Richthofen’s aerial victory is the squadron’s 100th. Manfred von Richthofen had also achieved the squadron’s first aerial victory on 23 January 1917.

Testimonial of Carl August von Schoenebeck: The Lords (The English) have buried Manfred von Richthofen with all the military honor. We at the Geschwader Richthofen, and in particular we at Jagdstaffel 11, had lost a man with Richthofen who had taught us what the concepts of example and friend meant. We had lost our best comrade.

Testimonial of Herman Lohmeyer (mechanic of Oblt. Wolff, Jasta 11): …From there we moved on, to Cappy on the Somme where Manfred von Richthofen did not return from a front flight.

“Richthofen’s body is subjected to a forensic medical examination. It is clarified how the cavalry captain died: from a single shot that pierced his chest from the bottom right to the top left. The bullet was still in his clothing when it was removed.”

‘Public announcement of the death of von Richthofen (here in the Weimarsche Landes-Zeitung)’

“The obituary sent out by Jagdgeschwader I read: His love for his Fatherland, his heroic, modest way of thinking, his exemplary life as a German soldier were sealed with a hero’s death upon the battlefield by our admired and beloved commander, Royal Prussian Rittmeister Manfred Freiherr von Richthofen Knight of the Highest Order. On 21 April, he departed from us. Bereft and robbed of its leader, the Geschwader mourns the irreparable loss of its proud commander. Loved and admired by Germany’s people, respected by his enemies, he who was so accustomed to victory died undefeated, as a victor. To all of us, he was the model, the adviser, the friend whom we can never replace. With the solemn vow, ‘What you began — your life’s work — we will finish, and we must finish’, Richthofen’s brave fighting spirit shall live on in us for all time.”

‘We’re sitting at our afternoon tea, having a snack, when a telegram is handed to me. Before I open it, I have to sign my name to confirm receipt and state the exact time: 4.15 minutes. So I’m holding a telegram in my hands, which must contain an important message from the field. I have often acknowledged such telegrams. I have received joyful messages in this way – but I have also been informed of my sons’ wounds in this way. Not without palpitations I open it: ‘Manfred alive in English captivity. Major Richthofen’. My hands tremble; for a moment the room seems to spin. What had happened? Manfred had fallen into enemy hands? They must have recognised him, le rittmeister des quatre Esquadrilles rouge, immediately by the red plane. What might his reception by the English have been like? This restlessly creative spirit – now condemned to slow idleness! Suddenly and glaringly, this sentence stood before me: ‘The worst thing that could happen to me would be to end up with the enemy…’ Again I saw his foreboding, forward-looking gaze, again I felt the unspoken, withheld word. – What Manfred had feared had come true. But immediately another voice inside me spoke: ‘Of course it’s hard for him, hard for us – but we’ll see each other again after the war; he’ll stay with us. This thought came over me like a great comfort. The phone goes. The Schweidnitz ‘Tägliche Rundschau’ enquired whether it was true that I had received a telegram with unfavourable news about my son Manfred. I replied that the telegram was from my husband and contained a private message. As it still needed confirmation, I did not want the contents to appear in the newspaper. I go to my room, want to be alone, and keep repeating to myself: ‘We’ll meet again after the war.’ I lie on my bed, the trees creaking in the wind. Won’t this night pass? Restless dreams mingle with my half-slumber.’

Source: BArch PH 17-I/97 (page 5)” On 22 April 1918, the Governorate of Cologne informed the Commanding General of the Air Force of the Daily Chronicle’s report on Richthofen’s death in aerial combat and the favourable tribute paid to the fallen enemy by the war correspondent of The Times.”

‘A. Roy Brown, the Canadian captain whose bullet killed Manfred von Richthofen, said the following about the dogfight he had with Manfred von Richthofen and in which the German was killed: ’I had a school friend who was now in the same squadron with me. He was Captain May, and we were really good friends. On Sunday morning, 21 April 1918, we were in the air together. On the way home we came across a number of enemy planes. We got into a fight, and I want to say from the outset that after a few seconds I had given up hope of ever getting out of this battle alive. But I always looked over at Captain May to my delight, and my heart beat with joy in spite of all my distress when I saw that May had succeeded in shooting down a German aeroplane. May turned round immediately after his victory to fly home. I had urged him to do so because he was a novice and because a fight must have taken such a toll on him that there was no point in staying in the air for long afterwards. But the moment he shot off, I saw a red aeroplane throwing itself at him. That made me feel sick. But when I went to help him, I had to fight for my own life, because three planes came at me to crush me and I was in the crossfire of their guns. There was no way out! Anyway, I wanted to make it as uncomfortable as possible for them! So, peace and quiet! I can’t remember being afraid. If it was to be the end, well, at least I’d be in the driver’s seat of my old machine! I began to manoeuvre. Sometimes I was going here, sometimes there, somersaulting, spiralling, zigzagging, just not offering a fixed target! I tried every trick I knew, some of them were new to me, I had never tried them before. The thought of involving her in a collision quietly came to me. I let them come straight at me, then I did an ‘Immelmann’, upwards, then back. I reappeared from underneath them. I could just see two of them miss each other by a hair’s breadth. The third one would almost have been caught if he hadn’t made a wide berth.
I had time to catch my breath. While they were getting up, I tried to spiral upwards. Now they turned and came at me again. I held my course until they almost collided with me, then I tipped to the side and was now lying flat underneath them. Again, they narrowly avoided a collision. I tried with all my might to gain height. They lost sight of me as I straightened up.
My first thought was: where is May? I anxiously searched the sky for him, hoping to see him alive. At last I spotted him, heading towards Corbie, to the north of me, heading for home.
Then I realised he was being followed. Out of the haze, a bright red aeroplane shot after him, in such an advantageous position that could easily be his undoing. I continued to soar, possibly to bring quick help to May. He tried to escape, swerving now here, now there, zigzagging, but the red one kept right behind him. They were like two giant hornets chasing each other, forwards, sideways, round again. They made all their movements together. Every turn May made was repeated by his opponent. May didn’t seem to be inferior to him yet.
But I soon saw the German gaining ground. He gave up all manoeuvres and flew in a straight line, visibly reducing his distance. May still had the advantage, if he managed to maintain his speed… Suddenly I realised that he was trapped. He had tried every trick he knew, he was at his wit’s end. The red plane was barely a hundred feet away and on the same level as May; he could open fire at any moment. Luckily I had reached three thousand feet by now. I swivelled sharply round, turned, straightened up and then, head first, I shot towards the tail end of the red.
I had all the trump cards in my hand. I was on top of him and coming from behind. May twisted and turned like a fish on a fishing rod. The ‘Red’ was about to launch his first salvo when the moment came for me!
May had given up. ‘The end,’ he thought and sat up to receive the death blow. That’s when he heard my machine gun. He looked over his shoulder. ‘Thank God, Brownie!’
When he looked round again, the ‘red one’ had disappeared, over the edge of his aeroplane he saw it hit the ground low down.
Richthofen’s end was exactly like that of most of his victims. He had been taken by surprise, he was dead before he could recover from his surprise.
Everything had happened so accidentally, so easily. I had come down until my front end was over the end of his tail, then I fired. The bullets tore off his elevator and shredded the back of the plane. Flames showed where the bullets hit.
My aim was too short! I pulled gently on the controls… I lifted a little, war training exercise, now you can do it. A full salvo tore open the side of the plane. The pilot turned round and looked up. I saw his eyes light up behind the big glasses, then he collapsed onto the seat, bullets whistling around him. I stopped firing.
Richthofen was dead. It all happened in seconds, faster than you can tell. His plane shuddered, swayed, rolled over and crashed into the ground.
The Australians’ reserve trenches were only three hundred feet below us. It was a short crash, May saw it, Mellersh saw it too, and I saw it as I swung round.
Mellersh had a graze shot on his hand. Two enemies were after him. I set about helping him as quickly as I could. The Germans spiralled out of the fight and flew away. The fight was over, everyone had had enough. Tired, I returned to Bertangles. The many manoeuvres had taken their toll on the plane, the propeller hardly wanted to cooperate. But I reached the aerodrome.
The first person to greet me was May, who ran up to me and grabbed my hand. “Thank God, Brown, did you catch the red one? It looked bad with me, one second later and it would have been over with me.” He was glad to be alive. The name Richthofen was not mentioned with a single syllable. I didn’t say anything either. I had the feeling that that red fighter pilot had been Richthofen, the German eagle of the skies, but the thought of having defeated him seemed like immodesty to me.
Soon afterwards I sat down to write my report. I mentioned that I had destroyed a bright red machine. My logbook showed the following entry under that date: “Encountered large swarm of enemy aircraft and Albatros single-seater. Three machines chased me, so I took off. Gained height. Returned, shot down a completely red machine that was chasing May, sent him down. Observed by Lieutenants Mellersh and May, then attacked two planes pursuing Lieutenant Mellersh. Unsuccessful!”

Rrrrrrrrr…rrrrr, the telephone. The commander on the line. Simpsons, our chief engineer, left to answer. Came back! “Jeez, Brownie! Get ready for the medals!” ‘What for?’ ‘The old man says the red plane was Richthofen.’ I almost fainted. I had already had a feeling that it had been him, so Richthofen after all! The ‘Red Baron’, Germany’s most famous aviator!
It was a day of glory for the division. We were finally able to start eating. We had just finished the last course when Cairns, the commander, entered. We saluted and he came up to me, looking serious. There was no sign of any desire to congratulate me. His voice sounded cool: ‘So Brown, you claim to have shot down Richthofen?’ ‘No, not at all!’ ‘I thought so?’ “No, I only claim to have shot down a red-painted Fokker. I don’t know the pilot.” “Well, it was Richthofen! But the thing is, the Australian machine gun section says they shot him down from below. There’s also a report that he was brought down by an R.E. 8, and then your report. It looks bad enough!”
Then I took the car the commander had left waiting. I picked him up and off we went to the quarters of the 11th Australian Infantry Brigade. We drove without saying a word. Cairns didn’t talk much anyway, and I didn’t feel like chatting. We found the commander’s tent hidden on a hill in the middle of a copse. I think it was somewhere west of Corbie.
We found Richthofen. He had been laid down near a military hospital that was in flames. A few people were standing around. The sight of Richthofen as I approached gave me a shock. He seemed so small, so dainty. He looked so friendly, his feet were as narrow as a woman’s. They were in fine Uhlan boots, shiny and polished. There was an elegance about them that didn’t fit at all when they looked out from under the rough flying suit. His cap had been removed and his blond, silky hair, like a child’s, fell from his broad, high forehead. His face, particularly peaceful, had an expression of gentleness and kindness, of nobility.
And suddenly I felt miserable, unhappy, as if I had committed an injustice. No feeling of joy could arise that Richthofen was lying there, the greatest of them all! A feeling of shame, a kind of anger against myself, gripped me at the thought that I had forced him to lie there now, so quiet, so peaceful, without life. This man who had been so full of life only a short time ago. And in my heart I cursed the compulsion that drove me to kill, I gritted my teeth, I cursed the war!
If I could have, how I would have loved to call him back to life, but that is different from shooting a gun, I could no longer look him in the face. I walked away, not feeling victorious. There was a choke in my throat. I waited for Cairns to finish his examination. If it had been my dearest friend, I couldn’t have felt greater pain. Surely I would not have felt so miserable had I not had the misfortune to know that I had killed him.”

“The information which the Commander-in-Chief of the British Fourth Army, General Sir Henry Rawlinson, had received until now was a little confusing. General Sir John Monash, who commanded the 5the Australian Division, had been told that the Red Devil (as he was often called by the front line troops) had been shot down by an RE8 reconnaissance aeroplane. General Sir William Birdwood, who commanded the Australian Corps within the Fourth Army, had heard quite a different story. His aide, Captain McGrigor, made the following entry in his diary for the 22nd:

Great excitement yesterday afternoon as Baron von Reichtofen (sic), the great Bosche (sic) flyer who is said to have accounted for 80 of our machines, met his fate yesterday nere here, being brought down by machine guns of one of our batteries at about 500 feet up while swooping on the tail of one of our reconnaissance machines. He was killed dead having about five bullets in him, and there is no doubt but that he is the famous pilot all Bosche communiqués have been making so much of the last few months. There is a lot of dispute as to who actually shot him down, but the machine gunners of the battery have finally established their claim. Went over to see his plane in the afternoon, it was a red triplane, but owing to the crash and the multitudinous souvenir hunters who got at it before the flying people, there was really very little of it left. Crowds of French troops still on the roads behind us, all moving north. Rode over and dined with Jack Cunningham at No. 65 Squadron; the talk was all about Reichtofen’s death, and they all swear that he was brought down by a plane and not from the ground. Had a most cheery evening finishing up with a good game of poker, did not get back until 1.15.”

Below are excerpts of Norman Franks’ and Alan Bennett’s book ‘The Red Baron’s last flight’. The book contains much more detail than below, and remains the ultimate reference on the subject.

“On the morning of Monday 22 April, Colonel Thomas Sinclair, Consulting Surgeon, and Colonel John A Nixon (not Dixon, as sometimes recorded), Consulting Physician, both of the Army Medical Services and accredited to the British Fourth Army, arrived at Poulainville aerodrome…

…Colonel Sinclair and Colonel Nixon’s report, dated 22 April 1918, was as follows:

We have made a surface examination of the body of Captain Baron von Richthofen and find that there are only the entrance and exit wounds of one rifle bullet on the trunk. The entrance wound is on the right side about the level of the ninth rib, which is fractured, just in front of the posterior axillary line. The bullet appears to have passed obliquely backwards through the chest striking the spinal column, from which it glanced in a forward direction and issued on the left side of the chest at a level about two inches higher than its entrance on the right and about in the anterior axillary line.

There was also a compound fracture of the lower jaw on the left side, apparently not caused by a missile – also some minor bruises on the head and face. The body was not opened – these facts were ascertained by probing the surface wounds.”

Below are excerpts of Norman Franks’ and Alan Bennett’s book ‘The Red Baron’s last flight’. The book contains much more detail than below, and remains the ultimate reference on the subject.

“Colonel Barber and Major Chapman arrived at the tent hangar just as the medical orderlies were cleaning up after the examination by Colonels Sinclair and Nixon. The story of what happened next is best described in Barber’s own words in a letter to CEW Bean 17,5 years later.

October 23rd, 1935

My Dear Bean,

With reference to your letter of Oct. 14th, I was inspecting this Air Force unit and found the medical orderly washing Richthofen’s body, so I made an examination. There were only two bullet wounds, one of entry and one of exit of a bullet which had evidently passed through the chest and the heart. There was NO WOUND of the head but there was considerable bruising over the right jaw which may have been fractured. The orderly told me that the Consulting Surgeon of the army (the Fourth Army) had made a post mortem that morning. I asked him how he did it as there was no evidence. The orderly told me that the Consulting Surgeon had used a bit of encing wire which ha pushed along the track of the wound over the heart. I used the same bit of wire for the same purpose. So you see the medical examination was not a thorough one and not a post mortem in the ordinary sense of the term. A bullet hole in the side of the plane coincided with the wound through the chest and I am sure he was shot from below while bankingt. I sent a full report to General Birdwood at Australian Corps and I have often wondered what became of it.

With kind regards.

Yours sincerely

George W Barber

P.S. Of course a proper PM might have been made after I saw the body but I never heard of it and do not think so….

…In a letter to a Britisch Militery Publication circa 1930, Major General Barber supplid information identical to that given above but with one addition:

The report that it (the body) was riddled with bullets is absolutely incorrect. There was one bullet wound only and this was through the man’s chest. I formed the opinion that it had been fired from the ground and struck the airman as he was banking his machine, because the exit of the bullet was three inches higher than the point of entry.”

“SECRET

REPORT ON THE DEATH OF CAPTAIN BARON VON RICHTHOFEN at 62D.J.19.b.5.2 about 11 am wqst April 1918.

The following report is based on the evidence of eyewitnesses, written down immediately after the events.

Capt. Baron von Richthofen was flying a Single Seater tri-plane painted red and reported to be of a new pattern. When first engaged he was pursuing one of our own machines, reported to be a Sopwith Camel, in a W.N.W. direction, flying towards the wood in J.19c.    Here, according to a reliable witness , he was fired at by an A. A. gun of the 24th Australian Machine Gun Company. Richthofen’s machine seemed to move unsteadily for a moment, but still continued in pursuit of the British plane.

He had now left the Somme valley and come over the high ground North of Corbie. Both machine were flying very low, being not more than 150 feet up. They were coming swiftly towards the A guns of the 53rd Battery, 14th Australian Field Artillery Brigade, situated at I.24.b.9.5 and I.24.b.6.5. respectively. Richthofen was firing into the plane before him but it was difficult for the Lewis gunners to shoot owing to the British plane being directly in the line of fire. The accordingly waited their time until the British plane had passed. Richthofen’s plane was not more than 100 yards from each when they opened fire. The plane was coming frontally towards them so that they were able to open fire directly on to the person of the aviator. Almost immediately the plane turned N.E. being sti11 under fire from the Lewis guns. It was now staggering as though out of control. Further effective bursts were fired; the plane veered to the North and crashed on the plateau near the brickworks near J.19.b.5.2.

The aviator was already dead. There were bullet wounds in the knees, abdomen, and chest, The plane was badly smashed; it was a triplane painted dull Red, and was armed with two air-cooled machine guns.    It had only been assembled in March 1918.

The British plane was undoubtedly saved by the action of the Lewis gunners . It altered its course and circled back over the spot where the enemy plane had crashed.

The papers of the aviator were then taken to the HQ of the 11th Australian Infantry Brigade , They established his identity as Capt. Baron Mannheim von Richthofen, born 2nd March 1892 in Breslau, province of Silesia, Prussia. The machine was numbered D.R. 425.

Capt. Baron von Richthofen was a great adversary. The German Official wireless for the 21st April 1918, the very day of his death, contains the notice “Capt. Baron von Richthofen, at the head of Pursuit Flight 11, attained his 79th and 80th air victories” It was fitting that he should have fallen, in old Roman fashion, with all his wounds in front”.

After the machine crashed, a troupe of German planes flew over and circled above the spot until driven off by the A.A. guns. An Infantry guard was posted over the body and the plane, but they were relieved of their duty shortly after by the German artillery, who placed a ring of shells, bursting with instantaneous fuzes, around the plane.

The Lewis gunners who brought down the plane were : No. 598 Gunner W.J. Evans and No 3801 Gunner R Buie, of the 53rd Battery, 14th Australian Field Artillery Brigade, 5th Australian Divisional Artillery.”