and four days later, flying a Fokker distinguished by white en-
gine cowling and white tail, he poured two hundred rounds
into a Spad prowling at low level along the front lines “He
plunged vertically like a rock from thirteen hundred feet and
impacted at the northwestern corner of the horseshoe wood
south of Coroy behind our front lines. I circled several times
over the crash site.”
That was number twenty. On June , he destroyed an-
other Spad near Ambleny.
A few days later Richthofen’s successor was killed, and the
squadron’s adjutant, Lieutenant Karl Bodenschatz, formally
handed to Hermann Göring the wooden cane that symbolized
command of the famous fighter unit at a parade on July .
(Bodenschatz, a burly, talkative twenty-seven-year-old, had
been injured four times already in the Boelcke Fighter Staffel; he
would remain Göring’s chief aide until .) The days of easy
kills were now over. On the day after taking over, Göring at-
tacked a Caudron at point-blank range, and saw the bullets just
bouncing off the armor. On the sixteenth, he claimed his
twenty-second victory, sending another Spad spiraling down
into woods near Bandry. After that perhaps prefiguring his
later career, in which dazzling bursts of activity would give way
to a deadly lethargy Göring awarded himself ten days’ leave
and departed, assigning temporary command to Lothar von
Richthofen, Manfred’s brother.
When the world war ended the morale of these German aviators
was high. Lieutenant Göring refused to turn his equipment over
to the victors. Ignoring the armistice terms, he evacuated his
planes to Darmstadt and demobilized his men on the premises
of a paper factory at Aschaffenburg. At a farewell binge in the
town’s beer hall he spoke about Germany’s bitter lot with an elo-