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Boelke's method, its audacity and fierceness, placed him first in the list of airmen with killing records. Captain Immelman, also a German, who rolled up a score of thirty enemies put out of action before he himself was slain, followed entirely different tactics. His battle manoeuvre savoured much of the circus, including as it did complete loop-the-loop.
His experience as a fighting aviator in France had made Hippy somewhat callous to bullets, as well as an expert in ducking. In the present instance, Lieutenant Wingate made so many ducks and dives, side-slips and Immelman turns that the mountaineer, crack shot that he was, found himself unable to score a hit. The darkness, too, prevented his getting a good sight at the man he was trying to shoot.
Before Immelman's plane could get into firing position, Ball drove his machine into a loop, getting above his adversary and cutting loose with his gun and smashing Immelman by a hail of bullets as he swept by. Immelman's airplane burst into flames and dropped. Ball, from above, followed for a few hundred feet and then straightened out and raced for home.
Ball, thousands of feet above us and only a speck in the sky, was doing the craziest things imaginable. He was below Immelman and was apparently making no effort to get above him, thus gaining the advantage of position. Rather he was swinging around, this way and that, attempting, it seemed, to postpone the inevitable. We saw the German's machine dip over preparatory to starting the nose dive.
Punctually both flyers rose from their lines and made their way down No Man's Land. Let an eye witness tell the story: From our trenches there were wild cheers for Ball. The Germans yelled just as vigorously for Immelman. The cheers from the trenches continued; the Germans increased in volume; ours changed into cries of alarm.
Beyond Seaford, he picked up Cap'n Mike's shack across the road from the old windmill. "Let's see if Mike's home," he said, and stood the wagon up on a wing. He leveled off in time to buzz low over the old shack, which was not as shabby as it looked, and neat as a ship's cabin inside, then he pulled up into a screaming Immelman and looked out.
Captain Ball was desirous of wiping out this record and the audacious German at the same time, and so flying over the German lines he dropped this letter: CAPTAIN IMMELMAN: I challenge you to a man-to-man fight to take place this afternoon at two o'clock. I will meet you over the German lines. Have your anti-air craft guns withhold their fire, while we decide which is the better man.
One of the last of the air duels to be fought under the practices which made early air service so vividly recall the age of chivalry, was that in which Captain Immelman, "The Falcon," of the German army, met Captain Ball of the British Royal Flying Corps. Immelman had a record of fifty-one British airplanes downed.
Boelke was killed before the air duel vanished to be replaced by the battle of scores of planes high in air. Immelman survived longer, but with the incoming of the pitched battle his personal prowess counted for less and his fame waned. In July, 1917, arrangements were complete in the United States for the immediate training in the fundamentals of aviation of ten thousand young Americans.
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