On a cool spring morning, the fog has lifted over the Somme valley where a young digger watches, entranced, as an aerial dogfight unfolds in the skies above.
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It’s 10 o’clock on April 21, 1918, and Frank Wormald has a perfect vantage point from the Morlancourt Ridge, standing alongside his mates Bob Buie and Snowy Evans as they train their Lewis guns on the unmistakable big red triplane. It’s not every day you get a crack at the Red Baron.
The ace German fighter pilot already has 80 kills under his belt as he leads his “flying circus” in a heart-stopping aerial combat with Captain ‘Roy’ Brown’s 209 RAF squadron. The sky is thick with bullets fired from above and below.
Half an hour later Baron Manfred von Richthofen’s glorious career would be over, gunned down behind Australian lines in northern France.
Frank Wormald, the 21-year- old digger from Warrnambool had become an unwitting witness to one of the greatest controversies of the Great War. Just who shot the Red Baron?
As theories abound even today, ensuring the truth was told became an all-consuming passion for Frank in the last 20 years of his life.
He died in 1992 aged 95, but his quest to perpetuate the real story, crediting Bob Buie with the Red Baron’s demise, lives on through his family.
On Saturday, his granddaughter Jenny Burchell and great-granddaughter Emma Burchell, will be at Morlancourt Ridge. At 10.30am, they will look to the skies as Frank did a century ago, honouring his memory and reliving a remarkable moment in time.
For the Warrnambool mother and daughter, it will be an emotional tribute as they contemplate the extraordinary war services of a brave young soldier who to them was simply ‘Grandad’.
“Grandad spent so much time trying to make sure that the story was told accurately, it is important for us now to ensure that happens,” Mrs Burchell said.
In his memoirs, Frank writes of seeing Richthofen slump after a tracer bullet from Buie’s gun struck him in the chest. Along with an infantry officer, Frank was first on the scene where the pilot was found dead, hanging by his harness in the upturned plane.
“We undid the buckle and helped the Baron to the ground. We laid him out, one could see he was shot through the chest.”
Frank also tells of souveniring a black cross from one of the plane’s canvas wings. Unfortunately, it was lost when the kitbag it was packed in disappeared in the days before he returned home.
His story however, lives on, soon to gain a royal audience. The Burchells have been invited to meet Prince Charles after attending the battlefields Anzac Day dawn service at Villers-Bretonneux next week.
“He (Frank) was a royalist, so to realise that not only are we here on the centenary at Villers- Bretonneux with so much recognition from around the world for the huge sacrifices that were made, but to also think that Emma and I, and so a small part of him, are among a select few to meet Prince Charles . . . he would be just astounded,” Mrs Burchell said.
Frank Wormald enlisted in 1916 as “a naïve, 17-year- old country kid who’d never been out of the district”. Four years later after serving with the 53rd battery artillery in the desert heat of Egypt and the mud and blood of the Western Front, he returned home a battle-hardened 22-year-old.
“I cannot imagine the absolute horror of what he went through, and to see his mates being blown up, he lost so many, and he came so close to being killed himself so many times,” Mrs Burchell said.
She and Emma will retrace the battle sites of her grandfather’s war service, including Fromelles, Ypres, Passchendaele and Villers-Bretonneux, and lay tributes at the graves of his fallen mates.
In spite of what he endured, Mrs Burchell said her grandfather seemed to take his wartime experiences in his stride, returning to Australia in 1919. When debate raged in the 1970s over who had rightful claim to downing the Red Baron, Frank began writing his memoirs.
He became something of a minor celebrity, giving many media interviews in a bid to give Bob Buie his due.
Jenny Burchell says it is thanks to her grandfather’s memoirs that she now has the tools to ensure his legacy will live on.
“I just feel so pleased that his memory and his stories will go on in our family for generations.”