young man with the penetrating blue eyes and square jaw. He
was good at his job, as the excellent reconnaissance photographs
testify clear, dramatic pictures of the enemy airship hangar at
Verdun, the spreading maze of enemy trenches, the enormous
craters left by tunnel mines. On June , when enemy planes
bombed the headquarters at Stenay, it was Loerzer and Göring,
now flying a -horsepower Albatros, who although unarmed
managed to force one of the raiders down. “The two officers
were rewarded,” the war diary records, “with an invitation to
His Imperial Highness the crown prince.”
The legend has it that he took flying lessons at his own ex-
pense, but once again the personnel file is more mundane. It
shows that he was posted to the flying training school at
Freiburg (where he first met Loerzer) at the end of June ,
and returned to the Fifth Army in mid-September. He flew his
first operational sortie as a fighter pilot on the third day of Oc-
tober a -minute patrol after which he nonchalantly wrote
in his report that he had “fought off seven French planes one
after the other.”
The planes were primitive, the pilots daredevils and
gladiators; their life expectancy was not long, but if they shot
down an enemy officer the man might be dined for days after-
ward in the German messes. There was a chivalry toward a de-
feated foe then that did not recur in other arenas or in later
wars.
On November , , Göring was credited with his first
official “kill,” a Farman shot down at Tahure. For the Fifth
Army’s great assault on Verdun, which finally began three
months later, he flew fighter No. G, one of the big three-
hundred horsepower AEG planes. In this fast, heavily armed
fighter, with its superior rate of climb, he shot down a French
bomber on March . His observer’s action report reads: