This victory was credited to him, but not others. On July he
engaged a Spad, lost sight of it as hot oil sprayed into his face,
then believed he saw it crashing west of Ypres; but he was denied
the credit. Nine days later he attacked a patrol of Sopwith sin-
gle-seaters and shot one down on the second pass:
Immediately after that I had to take on a second hos-
tile, which I forced down to about six hundred feet,
but my engine had caught some bullets and suddenly
began to race; it just spun in its mounting, and my
plane at once went into a spin. I put the plane down
behind our third line of trenches and flipped over.
The second hostile therefore got clean away...
[signed] .He was allowed the next claim, a Martinsyde destroyed south of
Paschendaele on the twenty-fourth. That was number ten. On
August he downed his eleventh, another Sopwith:
At : .. I attacked an enemy force of nine single-
seaters with my squadron. They were fast biplanes. I
dived on the leading hostile... closed right in to
about feet and opened fire. Suddenly flames and
thick smoke belched out of the plane and the hostile
spiraled down into dense cloud. I plunged in after
him, but could not find him beneath the clouds as
there was a lot of haze at the lower levels. I had clearly
seen the plane on fire. Fired rounds.
[signed] .It pained Göring that his slim-waisted aviator’s uniform
still lacked the highest Prussian decoration the blue-enamel
cross of the Pour le Mérite, the “Blue Max,” but as a fighter ace
he was still way down the “league table.” On November , ,