Greatest Mysteries of the Great War
The World’s Greatest Aviator, Baron Manfred Albrecht Freiherr von Richthofen’s mysteries?
Hold the phone!
There is another mystery besides who was the one to bring down the World’s Greatest Aviator?
Corporal E. J. McCarty
With the passing of Corporal E. J. ‘Ted’ McCarty’s mother in 1935, the definitive answer to the first mystery will never be explained.
Ted the medical orderly of No. 3 Squadron who had helped perform the autopsy (and had surreptitiously claimed the very bullet which had passed through MvR’s body). The bullet lost in 1935 “when his mother died and he burned all sorts of papers and the bullet was lost in the debris”.
As most afficionados of MvR appreciate, we will never know who’s bullet brought down the World’s Greatest Aviator. Absolutely, it was not from the guns of Canadian pilot Roy Brown. Today, we know it was either the braggart Sergeant Cedric Popkin (firing a Vickers machine gun), or the ever-humble Gunner Robert Buie (firing a Lewis gun). If examined by a forensic technologist, simple to attribute the bullet to either the Vickers or Lewis gun, not both.
Most traveled remains
CEFRG not the first to point out the corpse of MvR perhaps the most-traveled remains in history. First buried in Bertangles Communal Cemetery, 22 April 1918. Then, to Deutscher Soldatenfriedhof Fricourt in 1925, and later the same year, exhumed under the direction of MvR’s brother Bolko, and returned to Germany for a state funeral in Berlin. MvR remained here by the Berlin Wall, until after it’s fall, when a new autobahn over the area forced the exhumation of most remains in the cemetery. Finally, MvR’s family had their wish, and the World’s Greatest Aviator now rests in the family plot at Südfriedhof Wiesbaden (photo from 22 April 2018 – the 100th anniversary of his first burial).
CEFRG now forced to admit it is the skull of MvR, not the entire remains, which is the most-traveled skull in history!
What?
Yes, for at least fifty years, MvR’s remains disassociated.
Have the remains been united since?
This is the second mystery regarding the World’s Greatest Aviator that also, may never be fully qualified.
P. J. Carisella
Author P. J. Carisella recovered the remains of MvR (less the skull) from Bertangles Communal Cemetery in 1969.
If this story is hard to believe, his attempts to return the remains to Germany even more unbelieveable.
Eventually, a Colonel at the German Embassy in Paris accepted Carisella’s requests. Firstly, to return the original plate from the cemetery at Bertangles (which unknowingly at the time, placed in the hands of MvR’s mother at the state funeral in Berlin).
Secondly, P. J. Carisella asked that MvR’s remains forwarded to his personal friend, Baron Bolko von Richthofen. Carisella had just seen Bolko at the anniversary observances in Neuberg, Germany.
Mysteries
Were the remains of MvR ever forwarded to Bolko?
What became of the remains, were they ever reunited?
Did the state secretly reunite the remains to save face?
CEFRG has been contacted in the past by a member of MvR’s family, and hopes she will do so again, and perhaps allow us to resolve this mystery.
MvR – Baron Manfred Albrecht Freiherr von Richthofen, the Greatest Aviator the world will ever know!
