Talking of books I am currently reading "Under the Guns of the Kaiser's Aces," by Norman Franks and Hal Giblin. The book deals with the careers of four German Great War fighter aces: Erwin Bohme, Max Muller, Adolf von Tutschek and Kurt Wolf who were all destined to be killed by British airmen. It also identifies the airmen and aircraft which they shot down.
I found Erwin Bohme's (pronounced "Burmah" incidentally,) story fascinating. He was born in 1879, he was one of six children; five boys and a girl and he proved to be a first rate scholar and sportsman. In his spare time he enjoyed, skiing, skating and mountaineering, all of which he practised to a very high standard. Having qualified as a civil engineer he took a job in Switzerland so thet he could go mountain climbing in his free time, then in 1908 he took on a six-year contract in East Africa. He walked across the Alps and down to the Italian port of Genoa and from there to what is now Tanzania. The contract involved building a railway then extracting timber from the bush which was loaded onto a ship and taken back to Germany where the timber was turned into pencils! I'd never looked at pencil manufacturing in quite that way either!
He returned to Germany in July 1914, doubtless with a fair bit in the bank, looking forward to climbing a few more mountains, but the First World War broke out. Bohme had completed his year of compulsory military service in 1899 and he went back to his old regiment where he enquired about pilot training. In 1914 he was 35 years old but he was accepted for pilot training and though the oldest man on his course, he was also the best pilot! So good in fact that he was held back for a year as an instructor and not sent to the Front until November 1915 where he flew a two-seater bomber/reconnaissance aircraft with an observer called Sanders, who at 47, was even older than he was! The squadron was commanded by the elder brother of the man who was the famous German pilot of the day, Oswald Boelke.
In the summer of 1916 the squadron was posted to the Russian Front. There it was visited by Oswald Boelke who was looking to set up the world's first fighter squadron. Prior to that date German squadrons had both single seater and two seater aircraft on the strength and pilots were expected to fly both. Oswald Boelke was introduced to all of the officers and later on, in a private discussion with his brother, he asked if there were any good pilots in his squadron. "Bohme's good," he replied "but the rest are pretty average." Oswald Boelke decided to invite Bohme to join his new squadron. They then set down to dinner. They were served wild boar. Oswald Boelke was very complimentary about the meal and his brother explained that they lived very well at the squadron because of all of the game shot by young Manfred von Richthofen who at the time had a reputation for not being able to land an aircraft without damaging the landing gear! As he was obviously a superb marksman Boelke decided ask von Richtofen to join his squadron as well and with that the fates of eighty men were sealed. Had they not sat down to a good dinner that night, Manfred von Richtofen might have spent the entire war as an unknown bomber/reconnaissance pilot.
The new squadron became operational in September 1916 flying the new Albatros D1 fighters. At the end of the following month Bohme and Boelke were attacking a British aeroplane when they lost sight of one another and Bohme's wheels hit the upper port wing of Boelke's aircraft which crashed to the ground and Boelke was killed. Bohme was very distressed, suicidal according to some reports but he carried on.
He was wounded in February 1917 and as part of his convalescence he was posted to a training squadron. In May 1917 he was invited to the celebration of his former employer's twenty- fifth wedding anniversary. He borrowed an aircraft and arrived by air with his brother Martin in the back seat. At the party he met his employer's eldest daughter Annamarie Bruning. There was an immediate attraction and they agreed to write to each other which they did frequently. In October 1917 he asked her to marry him and she accepted him despite her father's misgivings. He was 37 years old. She was at least thirteen years younger.
Bohme returned to the front and by 29th November 1917 he had been credited with 24 victories. In the morning he wrote Annamarie the briefest of notes and tucked it into his uniform intending to post it later. That afternoon with two of his comrades he attacked a 10 Squadron Armstrong Whitworth FK8 which was on a photo reconnaissance mission. The observer got off a burst from his Lewis gun and the pilot put the lumbering two-seater into a split S so that Bohme's Albatros overshot. He was able to get a two second burst into it from his front-mounted Vickers gun. Bohme's aircraft momentarily disappeared fom sight below the FK8's lower wing but when it was visible again it was "burning like a torch." It hit the ground in the British lines and once the fire had gone out, Bohme's body was buried with full military honours. But somebody stole his note to Annamarie. It was returned to her in 1921.
After the war, all of the combatant nations recovered their dead and most were moved into new, often very large cemeteries. The Germans were given comparatively little space in which to bury their dead so each German cemetery contains a mass grave containing thousands of corpses. I cannot recall seeing a mass grave in a British or French cemetery. Bohme's body was dug up and re-interred at Langemark Cemetery in a mass grave along with the corpses of 24,916 of his comrades. That must have been a nice job for someone! Werner Voss, who was the second most successful German fighter pilot when he was killed in September 1917 has also been laid to rest in that mass grave.
Sic transit gloria mundi.
As far as I know, Erwin Bohme was the oldest man to fly a fighter aircraft in the Great War. Two of his brothers, including Martin, were also killed in the war and all of the men who made up the pilots of that first fighter squadron were also killed in action.
Last edited by Telemaster Sales UK; 02-28-2023 at 03:19 AM.