|
My two cents.
Afternoon all:
In regards to Richthofen's final flight, I had always tended toward agreeing with the opinion stated by JFM, GMU and others. He did not "target fixate" as others had suggested and he was not mentally distraught. Fatigued, most likely, but not to the point it would hinder his judgement. If you look at his kills during the March - April timeframe it seemed that he was back to his old form.
I think the problem stems from the amount of time spent in many biographies going over the details of Richthofen's final flight. In a literary sense, it gives the reader the impression that the events took longer than they actually did. When I was a young boy reading about Richthofen, that was always the impression I came away with. In actuality, an explanation of the flight that may take fifteen minutes to read only took meare moments in real time. If you think about it in terms of actual time, the events happened very quickly and there was no hesitation or fixation in Richthofen's decisions. In the end, the war finally caught up with him. He was in the wrong place iat the wrong time through no misjudgement of his own, and it happened to many others, no matter what their skill or experience.
One thing that I did hear in one documentary that has always bothered me. NOVA did the documentary called Who Shot Down the Red Baron. This documentary had something in it that no other biography that I have read claimed. According to NOVA, Richthofen was still alive in the cockpit when the first Australian troops reached him. He was alive just long enough to say something in German to one soldier, then pass away from his wound. Has anyone else seen this documentary, or seen a refrence to this? Just curious.
Glenn
|