Although Manfred von Richthofen (the Red Baron) was seriously wounded on July 6, 1917 (bullet grazed his skull), he refused to take a safe job away from combat. He felt it would be wrong to take advantage of his fame when every other soldier, who did his duty just as much as he, had to continue fighting at the front. So he went back into combat, with a groove in his skull and splinters of bone sticking into his brain, painful migraines, etc., until he was finally killed on April 21, 1918. I wrote an informative speech in 1997 about the Fokker Triplane aircraft, the type in which he was killed. Here are colorized photographs of his triplane and of him playing with his dog.
Richthofen was shot in the head during aerial combat in July of 1917. Paralyzed and blinded, his plane fell from the sky. As Dale Titler wrote in his excellent book, The Day the Red Baron Died:
…In a moment he recovered the use of his arms and legs, but not his sight. He fumbled blindly for the ignition switch, found it, and killed the runaway engine. He twisted his head to find the sun, but could not. Everywhere it was black. He tore off his goggles. Still there was no light. He was completely blind. Recalling that horrifying experience he later said: “At that moment the idea struck me: This is how it feels when one is shot down to his death!”
These actual words of Richthofen (translated into English of course) set the meter and tone of the rest of the song. I started with this quotation, and wrote all the other lines to match it. This quotation can be found in many sources, but I quote the Dale Titler book here because this particular paragraph also mentions some of the other details of this incident which I describe in my song. The title of Dale Titler's book refers to April 21, 1918, which is when Richthofen was finally killed.
The verse music has a cool six note riff, with the B note ringing out like the buzz of an aircraft engine. The first and third parts of the chorus have a pause between the A and D; the second and fourth parts have no pause between the A and D.
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