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Chief of these was Captain Boelke, who came to his death in the latter part of 1917, after putting to his credit over sixty Allied planes brought down. A German account of one of his duels as watched from the trenches, will be of interest: For quite a long time an Englishman had been making circles before our eyes calmly and deliberately.... My men on duty clenched their fists in impotent wrath.
Captain Boelke, Germany's greatest airman, was killed October 28 in a collision with another airplane during a battle on the western front. He was 25 years of age, had been wounded several times during the war, and is credited with having brought down forty Allied airplanes.
The hunting methods of the hawk are the fighting methods of the airman. But his dives exceed in height and daring anything known to the feathered warriors of the air. Boelke, most famous of all the German airmen or for that matter of all aërial fighters of his day who in 1917 held the record for the number of enemy flyers brought down, was famed for his savage dives.
Scarcely five minutes pass before the telephone brings up this news: Lieutenant Boelke has just brought down his seventh flyer. Methods of air-fighting were succinctly described in a hearing before the Senate Committee on Military Affairs, in June, 1917. The officers testifying were young Americans of the Lafayette Escadrille of the French army.
Captain Boelke conquered his thirty-seventh and thirty-eighth foes. On October 27, 1916, French aeroplanes dropped forty bombs on the railway station at Grand Pré, eight on the railway station at Challerange, and thirty on enemy bivouacs at Fretoy-le-Château and Avricourt, north of Lassigny, where two fires were seen to break out.
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