The Red Battle Flyer

The most celebrated fighter pilot of the Great War tells his own story, in his own words. Manfred von Richthofen, the Red Baron, was twenty-six years old when he was shot down over France in 1918, but by then he had already become a legend. This memoir captures the man behind the myth: a Prussian nobleman who traded cavalry horses for a red Fokker triplane, who describes the strange beauty of dogfights at dawn and the intimate horror of watching a man fall burning from the sky. Richthofen writes with disarming frankness about the thrill of the hunt, the camaraderie of his Jasta, and the celebrity that made him a target. He reflects on the chivalric ideals that bound pilots together, even as they tried to kill each other, and the darker truth that being the best meant watching better men die. This is primary source history at its most raw and immediate, a window into a vanished world of leather jackets and wooden aircraft where death arrived at three hundred miles per hour.