made the transfer. Here he flew mainly escort duty for bombers
until his luck ran out, on November , ; he incautiously
tackled an English Handley-Page bomber without realizing that
it had powerful top cover from fighters. A machine-gun bullet
embedded in his hip, Göring nursed his crippled plane back to
his own lines and made a crash landing in a cemetery.
“Plane in need of repairs,” recorded the unit war diary.
The same was true of its pilot, and he spent four months in hos-
pitals at Valenciennes, Bochum, and Munich.
The legend would have it that he was ordered to report to
Böblingen to convalesce but returned directly to the front
claiming he could not find the town on the map. Be that as it
may, the more prosaic personnel records show him being posted
as a fighter pilot in mid-February to Bruno Loerzer’s
Fighter Squadron in the Upper Alsace. Ten days later, on March
, Göring signed this combat report:
Took off [in Albatros , No. D] March , ,
with First Lieutenant Loerzer on pursuit mission. At
about four-thirty I saw three Nieuports attacking two
German biplanes. I immediately closed on the nearest
hostile and loosed off a few short bursts at it. I then
attacked the second Nieuport, which suddenly lost
height and made off at low altitude.On April , the record shows, he shot a British biplane out
of a flight of four and saw it go down in flames northeast of Ar-
ras. Five days later he reported a dogfight with six Sopwiths over
St.-Quentin. He expended rounds of ammunition and had
the satisfaction of seeing one Englishman spinning out of con-
trol into the German lines.
On the twenty-ninth, Göring shot down a Nieuport,
watched it crash, and learned later that the British pilot, a Flight