Dunadry man at centre of death probe

AND that moment eventually came.

On April 21 1918, whilst airborne over the Morlencourt Ridge near the River Somme, Baron von Richthofen was fatally injured whilst being pursued by a Sopwith Camel flown by Canadian Captain Arthur ‘Roy’ Brown.

A .303 calibre round struck Richthofen in the chest and his plane smashed onto the ground - and when Allied troops rushed to the scene, they found the Baron dead in his cockpit.

His nose and jaw had been broken on impact when his face slammed into the butts of his airplane’s machine guns.

But, given the high-profile status of the downed airman, debate soon raged as to who was responsible for clipping the wings of the dreaded enemy pilot.

Two Australian anti-aircraft machine guns on the ground had been firing on Richthofen’s triplane at the time of Brown’s pursuit, meaning there was some confusion as to who fired the fatal shot that sent the iconic red aircraft into its death spiral.

Captain Norman Clotworthy Graham from Dunadry, a medical officer serving with the Royal Army Medical Corps, had just returned from a stint in hospital to recover from wounds sustained at the front when he was posted to the RFC Medical Service.

A former student of Queen’s University, the captain had already been awarded the Military Cross for his actions in September 1916, during the Battle of the Somme.

His citation in the London Gazette explained that ‘for several days he was constantly tending the wounded under heavy shell fire. He refused to leave the lines when the battalion had been relieved until he had attended to the wounded of many other units. During the whole time he ‘had hardly an hour’s rest’.

Only one day into his new posting with the RFC, in the words of Alvin McCaig the local man ‘became a central figure in one of the most famous incidents in the war’ when he was called upon to conduct the initial autopsy of the Red Baron.

He submitted his findings in a report co-written by Lieutenant GE Downs.

“We examined the body of Captain Baron von Richthofen on the evening of the 21st instant,” his report read.

“The entrance wound was situated on the right side of the chest in the posterior fold of the armpit; the exit wound was situated at a slightly higher level near the front of the chest, the point of exit being about half inch below the right nipple and about three-quarter of an inch external to it.

“From the nature of the exit wound we think that the bullet passed straight through the chest from right to left, and also slightly forward.

“Had the bullet been deflected from the spine the exit wound would have been much larger.”

“The gun firing this bullet must have been situated in the same plane as the long axis of the German machine and fired from the right and slightly behind the right of Captain von Richthofen,” Captain Graham concluded.

“We are agreed that the situation of the entrance and exit wounds are such that they could not have been caused by fire from the ground.”

Meanwhile, the RFC organised a full military funeral for Baron von Richthofen, with men of No. 3 Squadron serving as pallbearers.

Other Allied squadrons nearby presented memorial wreaths, with one inscribed, ‘To Our Gallant and Worthy Foe’.

Later contradictory analysis muddied the waters as to who killed the Red Baron, however, with controversy surrounding who killed the Baron continuing on to this day.

Captain Norman Graham survived the war, and was Mentioned in Despatches by the Commander in Chief of the Army, Field Marshall Sir Douglas Haig, for his outstanding service.

He remained in France as the medical officer for 59th Squadron of the newly re-designated Royal Air Force until August 13th, 1919, at which point he returned home to Northern Ireland.

After the war, Graham taught Bacteriology as a lecturer in Queen’s University.

The Muckamore home that was mentioned on his discharge papers from the armed forces would later become Clonlee nursing care home.

The deployment of aircraft during the First World War revolutionised the face and nature of warfare, even if their use was far more limited than seen just over twenty years later, when huge fleets of droning bombers levelled cities with ease and the RAF’s ‘Few’ valiantly repelled the Nazi’s Luftwaffe in the skies above Britain.

Even so, the oft-overlooked sacrifices of Antrim’s First World War airmen – intrepid pilots flying new, ill-tested and highly unsafe machines into battles that only a few years prior must have seemed plucked from science fiction – should not be forgotten.