On a pale December morning in 1915 a lone Fokker Eindecker monoplane sailed high above the clouds, hunting for prey over the Vosges sector of the Western Front. Its young, inexperienced German pilot, his face greased for protection from the cold, felt snug in his thick flight suit and sheepskin-lined boots. Eyes alert, he carefully scanned the vast expanse of seemingly empty blue sky. Suddenly, a glint of silver caught the pilot’s eye, moving toward him from the west. It was the enemy.

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Instead of maneuvering above and behind his opponent, the novice pilot forgot all his combat training and simply flew head-on at the oncoming aircraft. As the enemy neared, the German recognized it as a French Caudron G.IV, a queer-looking machine with a twin-boom lattice tail section and a truncated tub between the plane’s two engines carrying the pilot and observer.

As the German pilot reached for the firing button on the joystick, his mouth became dry at the prospect of his first aerial battle. The Frenchmen flew directly at him, looming so close that the observer’s head was clearly visible. The German pilot poised his thumb over the firing button, muscles tense. The moment of truth: kill or be killed.

But as the two planes came within point-blank range of each other, paralyzing fear gripped the young German and he froze. He stared at his opponent, helpless. A second later, he heard popping noises and felt his Fokker shudder. Something slapped hard against his cheek and his goggles flew off. His face was sprayed with broken glass, and blood trickled down his cheek. With the French observer still firing, the German dived into a nearby cloud and limped back to his airfield. Once his wounds had been dressed, he secluded himself in his room and spent a sleepless night berating himself for cowardice and stupidity.

Such was the inauspicious beginning of one of the most remarkable flying careers of the first half of the 20th century. The young pilot’s name was Ernst Udet, and he would later become Germany’s second-highest-scoring ace of World War I, a gifted and celebrated stunt flier between the wars and a general in Adolf Hitler’s Luftwaffe. His was a boisterous and colorful life, an adventurous span of decades that would ultimately end in tragedy.

On an April Sunday in 1896, Paula Udet gave birth to a son, Ernst. He was what the Germans call a Sonntagskind (’Sunday’s Child’)–lucky, happy and carefree. When Udet was still a baby, his family moved to the Bavarian city of Munich, where the inhabitants loved to eat, swill mugs of beer, sing and dance–a perfect place for a Sonntagskind to grow up.

In school, Udet displayed a quick, agile mind. But his eyes glazed over when he was confronted with detail and routine. He loved to talk and got along with everyone despite a dislike of authority.

From early on Udet was fascinated with flying machines. With his school friends, he built and flew model airplanes and helped to found the Munich Aero-Club in 1909. The boys sometimes gathered around the nearby Otto Flying Machine Works to watch airplanes being built and tested, and visited an army balloon unit to gawk at training flights. Finally, Udet’s burning desire to fly drove him to construct a full-size glider with a friend. It was an ungainly contraption of bamboo and canvas, and when Udet attempted to fly it off a hilltop, he merely succeeded in smashing it to pieces. He finally got into the sky in 1913 when a test pilot working for the Otto Works took him up in a Taube monoplane. Udet was ecstatic.

But any dreams Udet may have entertained about a flying career were all but swept away by a rush of events. In July 1914, Gavrilo Princip, a Serbian nationalist, shot and killed Austria’s Archduke Franz Ferdinand and his wife in Sarajevo, resulting in Austria’s invasion of Serbia, which triggered World War I. On August 2, 1914, Udet tried to enlist in the army, but he was turned away because, at just over 5 feet tall, he was too short.

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