Victory 59

"The Rittmeister forgets paragraph II of the army order and takes off on 26 August; at 7.30 in the morning he shoots down a Spad between Poelkapelle and Langemarck over the front lines. It was his 59th aerial victory and the report of it was not without anger: "During a fighter flight with four men from Squadron 11, flying at an altitude of 3,000 metres, I saw a single Spad below me above a closed cloud cover. The enemy was apparently hunting low-flying artillery planes. Emerging from the sun, I attacked him. He tried to evade by diving, but I got a good shot at him and he disappeared through a thin wall of cloud. As I chased after him, I saw him plummet vertically under the cloud cover and then burst in the air at an altitude of about 500 metres. Due to the new, very bad F.B. ammunition, my pressure line, intake manifold, exhaust etc. were shot up again, so that I would not have been able to chase an opponent who had just been shot sick, so he would have got away, and I had to see that I got as far away from the front as possible in gliding flight‘.’