The title ‘The Red Baron’ may have been attached to von Richthofen by a newspaper editor who mistakenly translated the title in the corrected version of the book during the process of serializing it in English — a common practice at the time.

The proper translation was created from the original manuscript written by von Richthofen while recovering from wounds received in battle by English writer J. Ellis Barker, which was published in England late in 1918 after his death, under the title ‘The Red Battle Flyer’ — it was this version that was  later serialized.

as propaganda, was publicly repudiated by von Richthofen, who felt that it was too arrogant and presented an image of him that he believed failed to accurately reflect the man he had become — saying that he was “no longer that kind of person” when he was asked about it.According to letters and correspondence he wrote, von Richthofen preferred the title Der Rote Kampfflieger - where it is translated into English as "The Red Battle Flyer."

Richthofen was mortally wounded during his pursuit of low-lying Canadian fighter pilot Lt. Wilfred May of No. 209 Squadron Royal Air Force at just after 11 am April 21, 1918, when he was briefly hired by a another Canadian fighter pilot, Captain Arthur Brown.

A single bullet from a very short burst Brown aimed at the red plane struck von Richthofen in the chest while he was in pursuit of May’s Sopwith Camel somewhere over the Morlancourt Ridge, near the Somme River. Although mortally wounded, von Richthofen managed to land his plane in a field near the village of Vaux-sur-Somme, France before he died still strapped into the cockpit of his Fokker Dr.1.