Roy Brown, Wop May, and the Morning the Red Baron Fell Over the Somme

On the morning of April 21, 1918, over the Somme River in France, the German ace Manfred von Richthofen - the Red Baron - was shot down and killed while chasing a rookie Canadian pilot at treetop height. For decades the kill was credited to Canadian Captain Roy Brown of the Royal Air Force, but modern analysis of the fatal wound points instead to Australian ground gunners, most likely Sergeant Cedric Popkin firing from below. The Baron, the most feared pilot of the war with 80 victories, had broken his own survival rules by fixating on a single target and drifting low over enemy guns.

Who Was the Red Baron?

Manfred von Richthofen was, by the spring of 1918, the deadliest fighter pilot of the First World War. He flew a bright red Fokker triplane - three stacked wings, extraordinarily nimble - and had shot down 80 enemy aircraft, more than any other pilot on either side.

He was just 25 years old. His method was disciplined and merciless: he hunted the stragglers, the green pilots who wandered away from the pack. That patience was how he survived and how he ran up such a staggering score.

The Two Canadians Who Changed the Story

Across the lines that morning flew the young men of No. 209 Squadron, Royal Air Force. The RAF itself was brand new - barely three weeks old, formed on April 1, 1918 from the merged Royal Flying Corps and Royal Naval Air Service.

They flew the Sopwith Camel, a short, stubby fighter with a rotary engine whose gyroscopic torque made it lethal to learn but devastating in a right-hand turn. The Camel killed a frightening number of its own pilots before they ever met the enemy.

Captain Roy Brown, from Carleton Place, Ontario, was a flight commander worn down by combat. Chronic stomach trouble - worsened by the castor oil that rotary engines sprayed back into pilots’ faces - had him living on brandy and milk.

Lieutenant Wilfrid “Wop” May, from Edmonton, was a rookie on one of his first combat patrols. Brown, who knew May personally from back home in Canada, gave him one order: stay above the fight, watch, and keep clear.

What Actually Happened Over the Somme

The patrol collided with a swarm of German triplanes and dissolved into a swirling dogfight - dozens of aircraft, none more than a few feet from collision. From above, Wop May couldn’t resist. Blood up, he dove in, fired at everything, jammed and cleared his guns, and thrashed his way out the far side of the fight: alone, low, and slow - the single most dangerous place for a new pilot to be.

A red triplane peeled off after him. May ran for his life, diving down to the Somme and skidding just above the river and the trees, following the valley west with the most dangerous pilot in the world sitting on his tail. He later admitted he was so frightened he could barely work the controls and had given himself up for dead.

Seeing the red triplane latched onto the friend he’d promised to protect, Roy Brown rolled inverted and dove at full throttle. He came down steeply behind Richthofen, held him in his sights for a heartbeat, and fired a long burst.

The Baron flew on for a few more seconds, then settled his triplane down into a field near Morlancourt Ridge, close to Australian troops. It was almost a rough landing rather than a crash. When Australian soldiers reached the wreck, Manfred von Richthofen was dead - a single bullet had passed up through his chest.

Who Really Shot Down the Red Baron?

Roy Brown was credited with the kill, and for a long time that was the accepted story. But the evidence tells a more complicated tale.

As the red triplane roared over Australian positions at treetop height, ground troops were firing at it too - machine gunners and riflemen, including Sergeant Cedric Popkin with a Vickers gun and the crews of nearby Lewis guns.

The fatal wound doesn’t match Brown’s attack. The single bullet entered Richthofen’s right side, low, and traveled up and to the left. Brown was diving from above and behind; that geometry simply doesn’t produce that wound. The angle matches a shot from below and to the side - from the ground. The most careful modern analysis lands on Sergeant Popkin, firing from the Australian lines as the Baron passed overhead.

There was one more invisible factor: the wind. A stiff easterly had quietly pushed the entire running fight several miles west, deep over the Allied side of the lines. Locked onto the rookie in front of him, Richthofen chased a green pilot straight over enemy ground guns - low, slow, and breaking every rule he himself had taught. Today it has a name: target fixation. You lock onto the thing in front of you and the rest of the world, including the ground, disappears. It still kills pilots.

What Happened to Wop May

Wop May felt the pressure come off his tail, looked back, saw the red triplane go down, and flew home - not fully understanding what had happened. He lived.

He went on to become one of the great bush pilots of the Canadian north, flying mercy missions into the frozen wilderness. In 1929 he flew an open-cockpit aircraft through brutal winter cold to deliver diphtheria antitoxin to a remote settlement, helping save a town from an epidemic. A long, rich flying life - all of it downstream of the morning he was too green to follow orders and somehow survived.

A Funeral for the Enemy

The Australians buried Richthofen with full military honors. His enemies gave him a proper funeral and fired a salute over the grave - the customary tribute for a fighting man of his caliber, even one who had shot down 80 of their own. The wreath’s card read: “To our gallant and worthy foe.”

That gesture captures the strange, doomed chivalry of those early airmen - castor oil in their teeth, life expectancy measured in weeks, and a code that still held even in the worst war the world had yet seen.

Roy Brown never sought the glory or talked much about that morning. He returned to Canada, ran an airline, and died relatively young, his health never fully recovered from the war. Who fired the fatal shot will probably never be known with certainty - but the deeper truth of that morning is larger than one bullet.

Key Takeaways

• The Red Baron, Manfred von Richthofen (80 victories), was killed on April 21, 1918 over the Somme while pursuing rookie pilot Wop May.
• Roy Brown was officially credited, but the upward, right-to-left wound track points to a ground shot - most likely Australian Sergeant Cedric Popkin’s Vickers gun.
• Target fixation led the war’s greatest ace to chase a lone pilot low over enemy guns, a mistake that still endangers pilots today.
• An unseen easterly wind had pushed the fight miles west over Allied lines without Richthofen realizing how far he’d drifted.
• Wop May survived to become a celebrated Canadian bush pilot; the Australians buried Richthofen with full military honors as a “gallant and worthy foe.”