WAR

to ask any spirited young man to stay out and watch. He followed the Hun down,
fired and missed, went on down into the scramble. Suddenly Fokker Triplanes
seemed to be coming at him "from all sides." He had the impression that he was
at the center of a ring of German machines that had only one target. He "seemed
to be missing some of them by inches." In his excitement he held his guns open
and fired one continuous burst, hoping to spray all of them, until his guns jammed.
So far he had forgotten everything he had been told. At this point he remembered
one thing—how to get out. He wrenched his machine into a spin and dropped
away toward the earth. He caught a quick glimpse of the sun as he leveled out
and promptly set a course west. He looked about as he headed home, saw no
machines pursuing him, and began to feel
pretty good that he had gotten away.
Leutnant Hans Joachim Wolff of Jasta 11 along with Leutnant Karjus doubleteamed
a Camel during the fight, then Wolff looked around quickly to check up on
his comrades. Wolfram was not in the fight, Weiss and Scholz were over Saillyle-Sec.
Where was the leader Chasing a Camel, heading west. Had the Rittmeister
forgotten the wind was blowing hard to the west today Most probably he had.
That wind could cause trouble .
. .
While Wolff was watching the Rittmeister press into enemy territory, getting
closer to the ground all the time, a Camel came up behind him and shot 20
holes in his machine. Wolff reacted instantly and so saved his skin, and then
looked again for the red machine, but it was nowhere in sight. Wolff began to
feel the first forebodings of disaster.
Roy Brown saw May drop away from the fight. Brown had shaken off
two pursuers on the fringe of the battle and was turning to wade in again. He
glanced in May's direction and saw that the Camel had leveled out low and was
heading west over British territory. He also saw that a red Triplane was sitting
on May's tail.
May didn't know he was being pursued until he heard the rip of machine
guns. Frantically he turned and dived, coming out directly over the village Vauxsur-Somme,
where the tiles were nearly blown off the roofs by the passing of his
machine and the red Triplane. They thundered over the village and skimmed the
hill behind it, the guns of the Triplane snapping short bursts at 30-foot range.
May turned as he reached the Somme and headed down the river valley.
The Rittmeister was behind and slightly above May, outmanoeuvring and outguessing
him at every turn, so that every evasion May tried brought him closer.
May was losing height, in a few seconds he would be trapped between the rows of
bare trees lining the banks of the Somme. He went around the right-angled bend
in the river, but von Richthofen beat him to it, cutting the corner by leaping over
a hill, and May was as good as in the bag.
When Brown spotted the red Triplane on May's tail his reaction was instantaneous
and unstudied—he headed for it. He put his nose down in a shallow
dive and covered the distance in a minute, sailing straight downwind from 1000
feet to about 200 feet, coming out slightly above and to one side of the Triplane.
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