Born on the first of August 1894, Kurt Wintgens belonged to a military family in Neustadt in Oberschlesien (now Prudnik, Poland). He began his military service when he joined the Telegraphen-Bataillon Number 2 in Frankfurt am Oder as a Fahnenjunker (cadet officer) in 1913.
Though still in military school when war came to Germany on his twentieth birthday, Wintgens was sent to the Eastern Front with the rank of Leutnant and won the Iron Cross, Second Class. On transferring to the German Air Service, Wintgens first flew as an observer, apparently alternating with telegraph duty. But in early 1915, he began pilot training at the Fokker school in Schwerin.
At the school, Leutnant Otto Parschau had already been brought in by the Fokker factory to prepare an example of an armed version of the A.III single-seat monoplane with IdFlieg military serial number A.16/15 (the very same “green machine” aircraft that Parschau had flown since the summer of 1914) for front-line trials. It was equipped with a Parabellum MG14 synchronized gun.
Wintgens specifically requested the chance “to fly in the field the smallest and fastest Fokker type with the Garros-installation, which enabled a built-in machine gun to fire through the propeller”. With that kind of background, he was selected (along with Leutnant Parschau) as one of the first Fokker Eindecker pilots, flying single-seaters that had been assigned to fly alone with various two-seater-equipped field flying detachments, starting with the Bavarian Feldflieger Abteilung 6b (then based near Saarburg).
In the early summer of 1915, the initial deployments of Fokker Eindecker fighter planes began. These were carried out only with single aircraft, with each one attached to established Feldflieger Abteilung two-seat observation aircraft units, each one normally equipped with six two-seaters apiece.
Wintgens was one of the very few frontline military fighter pilots to ever be allowed to wear prescription eyewear while flying in combat, as he wore “hard-bridge” style pince-nez glasses for vision correction, under his pilot’s goggles. A similar style of corrective eyewear was also worn in air combat by the 20-victory German ace Otto Kissenberth later in the war.
Wintgens holds a unique pioneering role in the history of aerial combat, being the first fighter pilot to down an enemy aircraft using a synchronized gun. On the first of July 1915, the Leutnant was flying the last-produced example of the five Fokker M.5K/MG production prototype Eindecker aircraft, with German military serial number E.5/15. At 1800 hours that evening, he engaged a Morane-Saulnier Type L “Parasol” two-seater. The French aircraft was most likely from Escadrille M.S.48, and flown by Capitaine Paul du Peuty, with Sous-Lieutenant de Boutiny as the observer. The French aviators reported that they were engaged by a “Fokker Monoplane” at 1,300 meters over the Fôret de Parroy, near the village of Lunéville. The French aircraft was armed with only a carbine, while the Fokker had a forward-firing, synchronized Parabellum MG14 machine gun. After a few minutes of combat with the Fokker, de Peuty was wounded in the lower right leg. The Eindecker seemed to have been hit by de Boutiny’s carbine fire. De Boutiny had exhausted all of his carbine ammunition, leaving his own aircraft defenseless, which gave the Eindecker the advantage. Shortly thereafter, the Eindecker likewise wounded de Boutiny in the leg. Despite their injuries, the French aircrew landed their Morane Parasol safely in friendly territory, although their own engine had been hit by dozens of shots from E.5/15’s machine gun fire, with the combat taking place in the Lorraine sector.
Leutnant Wintgens wrote a letter to a friend named “Karl” the next day with the details of the engagement:
Bühl-Saarburg
2 July 1915
Dear Karl:
Unfortunately I gave you the wrong address last time, for during my voyage to Mühlhausen I got a different destination and for the time being I am with the Bavarian (unit) Abteilung 6b. Up to now nothing of real interest happened. In Mannheim I had tested the machine and then from Strasbourg by air to the Front, where lately a (Morane) Parasol fighter monoplane à la Garros had made its presence felt.
I had flown to the Front a couple of times without seeing an opponent, until yesterday evening when the big moment came. Time: 6:00 o’clock. Place: east of Lunéville. Altitude: between 2,000 and 2,500 m. Suddenly I notice a monoplane in front of me, about 300 m higher. And at the same moment he had already dived in front of me, fiercely firing his machine gun decently. But as I, at once, dived in an opposite direction under him, he missed wildly. After four attacks I reached his altitude in a large turn, and now my machine gun did some talking. I attacked at such a close distance that we looked each other into the face.
After my third attack he did the most stupid thing that he could do — he fled. I turned the crate on the spot and had him at once, beautifully, in my (gun)sight. Rapid fire for about four seconds, and down went his nose. I could follow him until 500 meters, then, unfortunately, I was fired upon from the ground too hotly; the fight (now) being far over the French lines. Hopefully, I’ll soon meet a biplane.
Cordial greetings and so long,
Your friend,
— Kurt
SOURCE: Sands, Jeffrey, “The Forgotten Ace, Ltn. Kurt Wintgens and his War Letters”, Cross & Cockade USA, Summer 1985
However, because the Morane landed in Allied territory, Wintgens was not credited with an official victory. He would down another “Parasol” in similar circumstances three days later, again unconfirmed.
A fortnight after his initial success, Wintgens was posted to Feld Flieger Abteilung 48, based at Mülhausen im Elsaß (within the much-disputed Alsace border region of northeast France that had been annexed by the Reich in 1871). On July 15th, he scored his first “recognized” aerial victory, still flying his E.5/15 Eindecker, and once again downing a Morane Parasol – the very first “official” victory by an Eindecker pilot, and the first confirmed victory using a synchronized machine gun. Wintgens’ victory was the very first for his unit, and it earned him the Iron Cross First Class.
He followed up with two more confirmed victories in 1915, as well as one kill unconfirmed on January 24, 1916. Wintgens then suffered from a lingering case of influenza that kept him from flying. The Leutnant would not score again until May 20, 1916, when he shot down a two-seater Nieuport while flying for FFA 6. The following day, the twin engines of a Caudron G.IV he downed augered a meter and a half into the earth after a 4,000 meter crash!Needless to note, the crew did not survive.
On June 24, 1916, Wintgens (possibly flying a Halberstadt D.II) achieved his seventh confirmed victory when he confronted a Nieuport 16, flown by the then-wounded Lafayette Escadrille American pilot Victor Chapman, who had been wounded by fellow Eindecker pilot Walter Höhndorf just a week earlier. Chapman was killed in the crash, the first American fighting aviator in World War I to lose his life in an aerial engagement.
Shortly afterwards on the first of July 1916 (the same day the British began their “big push” on the Somme), Wintgens became the fourth airman to receive the “Blue Max”, after he had completed the required (at that time) eight victories over enemy aircraft. He continued to score throughout the summer and into the autumn. He continued to use the Fokker E.IV even as his contemporaries upgraded; Hans-Joachim Buddecke’s writings mention Wintgens blipping the Fokker’s rotary engine on and off as a signal to waiting squadron members that a flight had been victorious. As he entered September, Wintgens remained the third-ranking Eindecker ace, behind Oswald Boelcke and Max Immelmann, with some fourteen victories in the Fokker monoplane.
On September 25th, Wintgens flew his E.IV on patrol along with his friend Walter Höhndorf. It is claimed that they went to the assistance of a two-seater flown by Josef Veltjens, which was under attack by French scouts. After downing at least nineteen aircraft in air combat (with probables and force-downs, as high as twenty-two), Leutnant Kurt Wintgens was killed in action near Villers-Carbonnel… probably by French ace Alfred Heurteaux, who scored his eighth aerial victory. Heurteaux was most likely flying one of the early examples of the SPAD S.VII fighter.
Höhndorf rushed back to base to sorrowfully report that Wintgens’ plane broke up under the impact of “explosive bullets”. Josef Jacobs remarked in his diary that the recovery of Wintgens’ body from “no man’s land” was difficult. Buddecke blamed the crash on a severed elevator spar, and he also noted that Wintgens showed no bullet wounds.
Two days later, the Leutnant was laid to rest in the same French graveyard that already contained the body of his fellow Fokker Eindecker pioneering pilot, Otto Parschau.
Kurt Wintgens was only twenty-two years old…