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Aviation History
1937
1937 - 0598.PDF
226 FLIGHT. MARCH II, 1937. IN SEARCH Qf GERMAN AND ITALIAN AVIATION -PART V Two striking impres sions, from the German official publication Die Deutsche Luftwaffe of Heinkel He.51s. m formation. This is the type with which the Richthofen Squadron is equipped. THE RICHTHOFEN SQUADRON VISITED How the German Air Force of To-day Works, Plays and Rests By CAPTAIN NORMAN MACMILLAN, M.C., A.F.C., A.F.R.Ae.S., F.R.S.A. TWENTY years ago I used to meet the Richthofen Squadron above the battlefields of Flanders. How well 1 remember the vivid colourings of their camouflaged Albatros D.V. fighters, with their round, streamlined fuselages, V-struts between biplane wings, and big, vertical water-cooled cylinders protruding above their tapered noses! Sometimes there were Fokker triplanes, too—blunt-nosed, square-tipped, ugly insects of the war. We knew they were a good crowd, those fellows of the Richthofen Squadron. In our Mess—a marquee pitched at one corner of a tree- bordered meadow near Cassel—we used to speculate about them after dinner, weaving stories round them in our 4. efforts to visualise them as men. Sometimes, in a dog-fight, we flew so close together that we could see each other's features for a fleeting second, recognising an expression that, perhaps, mirrored our own : tense, alert, concentrated. Sometimes we knew (or thought we knew) individual machines—Richthofen's, his brother Lothar's, that of Voss or Schaefer. But mostly we felt that we fought "just machines." When one of our own aircraft went down, spinning, falling in zigzag curves, or leaving a growing spume 01 smoke behind a red and brightening flame, we thought of the man we knew. He was a comrade of days, weeks or (more rarely) months, but his loss was personal. When the same fate befell an opponent we did not know the man. To us it was an aeroplane that went down—an Albatros, a Fokker—with the personal factor missing. On both sides of that long, ambiguous line that was the air battle screen of the armies of the Western Front it was the same. To all British and German pilots, the things we shot down were Camels, Albatroses, Nieuports, Fokkers— not men. Perhaps that is why there is a feeling of camaraderie among the surviving pilots of the Great War, irrespective of their nationality. We did not think cf killing one another. We wanted but to down machines and not be downed ourselves. In this view of one of the Richthofen Squadron's HeinkeU, the bomb-like auxiliary fuel tank between the undercarriage legs is just discernible. Now, twenty years later (and perhaps alone among the pilots who flew wing-tip to wing-tip with me in 4-> Squadron), I have seen the Richthofen Squadron at non - lunched with them in their Mess.
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