homepage Forums Air Combat & Civil Aviation Rise of Flight - The First Great Air War Walkin' thru ROF (Sept. Pics)

Beolke collided with Bohme after they tried to avoid an Allied aircraft that was evading MVR. I think the Jasta was already engaged with the enemy, MVR hadn't broken ranks and gone chasing.
Bohme was Beolke's wingman and was flying very tight to him. The actual collision, according to Boelke, was very light. It was the crash landing and Beolke not being strapped in that killed him. Or so they say.

Bohme carried the guilt for Beolke's death not MVR. Boelke was MVR's mentor and much admired by the flyer. He had no guilt over the accident just a great sense of loss and throughout his carrer he tried to emulate Boelke's style of leadership.

I just finished MVR's autobiography a couple of months ago, it still fresh in my memory, bloody good book too!

As a side note and an interesting fact.

MVR's head wound in 1917 was recorded as a hit from a FEE gunner, when in fact the unofficial story is that the FEE opened fire at an unrealistic range and had no chance of hitting MVR. But the fact that the FEE opened up spooked one of the Jasta 11 flyers who in panic returned fire over MVR's shoulder. It is thought that the actual bullet that grazed MVR's skull came from behind!

Nice artwork but the faces look definitely Russian. Which would be nice if this was a game set in the Eastfront or October revolution, but it isn't. They should have hired an artist with a feeling for western style. Unimportant as this sounds, I think it would bother me.

Boelke was one of Richtofen's first kills.

...said the 12 year old producer of Flyboys

Yes I got it Dart

Ming

They should have hired an artist with a feeling for western style. Unimportant as this sounds, I think it would bother me

It will bother lots of us westerners mate but the presentation I'm going to think of as being from an alternate universe, and maybe there'll be a mod later so that one day it'll look and feel like a proper WW1 sim. As westerners see WW1 I mean, duelling scars and handlebar moustaches and dreams of Blighty

By 'Russian' I think you mean what we'd call Slavic perhaps, with the easterner's more Asiatic look and dark hair and so on. Noble peoples and I suppose they had their WW1 too. But I would have thought that a more western for want of a better less emotive word, a more western approach to the presentation would seem more romantic even to easterners. For want of a better word again

Surely they have photographs of the main participants, incidents, battles. I'd start there rather than in Moscow. But being almost entirely uninformed about WW1, I hope that there were Russian pilots flying. For the Germans probably as important Russian officials were being looked after by Kaiser Bill at that time

Wait I'm remembering what set me off on this one- the Chinese guy on the right of a photo of Richthofen's funeral. "...a member of the Chinese Labour Corps, transported from China to the Western Front". Transported from China? WTF was going on. I'm getting Boxer Rebellion, no idea what that's all about

Ming

IMO the pilot in the middle of the second image looks like a Frenchman.

I think he looks like American ace Douglas Campbell, in France, during WWI.

Another Ebay album showing some French people (not pilots), just to show that the Flyboys style was just deeply fake (argh, I just hate this movie):

http://cgi.ebay.de/Lot-de-23-Photos-Arme...1QQcmdZViewItem

Some examples of German looking pilots:





(Otto Kissenberth)



(Fritz Pütter)



(Heinrich Bongartz)


.....

(Karl Menckhoff)



(Karl Schäffer)



(Bruno Loerzer)



(Heinrich Kroll)

.....

(Otto Bernert)



(Oswald Boelcke)



(Kurt Wüsthoff)



(Karl Allmenröder)


....

(Olivier Freiherr de Beaulieu-Marconnay)



(Albert Dossenbach)



(Kurt Wintgens)




So you understand why the crappy "Fly Boys" style must be avoided at all costs, because it was so fake in the external look (making men of the beginning of the 20th century look like US teens) and so wrong in the spirit (1).

Frankly, have a look at Olivier de Beaulieu-Marconnay, he does not need to be "flyboyzed" to have such a great style!



(1) hard to explain it, but these pilots on both sides of the front were men of the old tradition, coming from the old world. Best way to know what I mean, read books of Ernst Jünger or Maurice Genevoix or have a look at this clip from "The great Illusion":

http://fr.youtube.com/watch?v=U2rI_7qVC30

"IMO the pilot in the middle of the second image looks like a Frenchman. "


I will post later a good pic about French pilots (by the way, Jean Reno looks totally wrong for a French pilot of that time).

In the meantime, two good pics of Böhme and Immelman:

Btw, the "big moustaches" "errolflynesque" style should also be let out, as it was simply not real.

For most German aviators, but the French pilots would proudly take exception!

I was of course speaking of the caricatural "big moustaches" seen in bad films or parodies:

http://www.filmreference.com/images/sjff_03_img1367.jpg

This thread needs more chart!



This chart clearly demonstrates that thicker, fuller, 'staches reached a height of popularity at the end of 1915 - beginning 1916, unfortunately the decreasing average age of airmen as a result of losses on both sides thereafter led to a commensurate thinning until late 1917.

Further research may break down these figures on a national basis.

LOL...that is Cold!

I wonder what would have been the correlation with going bald and the combat stress they endured.......wait, don't answer that!

Of course, this chart is very funny :-)

But there is a "but": the "fun" factor is often what can spoil a great thing in just an average thing for the masses. There are for instance so many examples of what the "fun factor" can do in aircraft restorations to prefer some kind of reasonable elitism, for not throwing in the end "pearls to pigs" ;-)