THE RED BARON'S VICTORY CUPS
______During World War One the skies first filled with fighter planes. One of those pilots who took the skies became famous for the color of his bloody aircraft: the Red Baron. By the time he met death himself this German ace would shoot down 80 Allied airplanes.
______Baron von Richthofen was a minor German noble and began his military career as a cavalryman of the 1st Uhlan Regiment. Eventually he transferred into the German Air Service, but only served as an observer on both the Eastern and Western Fronts. It was not until December of 1915 that he qualified as a fighter pilot.
______Von Richthofen soon became an ace and shortly after that the commander of his own squadron, "The Flying Circus," in which all the aircraft were painted garish colors. Richthofen, naturally, chose red for his own aircraft.
______Baron von Richthofen became something of a celebrity in Germany and a subject of terror amongst the British and French pilots he flew against. It was said that just the sight of his blood-red plane was enough to send newbee pilots into a panic... which might explain how he was able to stay in business so long.
______The Red Baron, as he became known, had a hobby. He liked to collect souvenirs from aircraft he shot down, whenever possible. He had cuttings of fabric from airframes (with unit numbers and other markings), pieces of struts and propellors... he even removed a machinegun from one plane downed and had it mounted above the door of his home! These haphazard trophies must have insulted his Prussian sense of order, because he began to have silver "victory cups" made by a jeweler to commemorate each of his "kills". About two inches high, each cup had the date of his victory and details of it engraved on it. No doubt the sight of the rows of cups he had arranged in his drawing room would have had a chilling effect on enemy pilots, were they ever able to see them.
______The Red Baron never had all 80 victory cups made (silver was getting scarce in Germany towards the end of the war) but he did keep the ones he had in a special glass case in his trophy room. In time, his home became a museum to the man who was the top-scoring ace of World War One.
______Eventually the Red Baron himself would go crashing down to the Earth, but not before he became something of a legend. Since his death in 1918 he has had squadrons named after him in World War One, World War Two and during the Cold War (in the Bundesrepublik's Luftwaffe), he has had several films made about his life, been immortalized in a couple of songs involving a dog and has, strangest of all, had a pizza named after him.
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WHEN DID THE LAST IMPERIAL JAPANESE SOLDIER SURRENDER?
