From the PBS website there is a transcript of the program. It's too long to post all here but I posted the part about how one person claimed he was alive after the plane landed.
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/transcr..._redbaron.html
NARRATOR: Von Richthofen's body was taken to an RAF base at Poulainville where several medical examinations were carried out. They showed that he had been mortally wounded by a single .303 bullet that entered several inches below the right armpit and passed up through the chest, emerging just below the left nipple. Both Allied aircraft and ground gunners used the same .303 ammunition.
The direction, distance and timing of this fatal shot are vital clues that have been constantly debated. Starting from the medical reports, author and aviation historian Norman Franks has been re-investigating the mystery.
NORMAN FRANKS (Aviation Historian): Once we looked at the pathology, we interviewed two or three eminent pathologists, and they said that the sort of wound that he would have suffered would have given him no more than 12 to 20 seconds of life once he was hit—just enough to get down.
ALEX IMRIE: I've spoken...I've asked a few pilots about this—those that were there—and one in particular, Rudolph Stark, a Bavarian, he was flying that morning, and he reckons that Richthofen was still alive when he landed because he said the triplane was so touchy to fly, it was absolutely impossible for it to land smoothly on its own.
NARRATOR: Although mortally wounded, had von Richthofen somehow managed to wrestle his aircraft safely to the ground? Eighty years after the event, an important new piece of evidence surfaced in a letter from the son of an Allied soldier who claimed to be the first to reach the crashed triplane.
SON OF GUNNER ERNEST TWYCROSS (Excerpt from 1973 letter): My father's officer sent my father down to take the pilot prisoner, which my father did. My father was the first man to the aircraft and the pilot tried to say something in German to my father. The pilot then sighed and died.
BRADLEY M. KING: This added a whole new dimension to the final moments of Richthofen's life and confirmed that the aircraft came down intact. It was practically flown down. Richthofen was still alive, which nobody had known about before.
NARRATOR: If von Richthofen was still alive on the ground, the shooter must have fired at him no more than 20 seconds or so before he landed. Was Captain Brown at the right spot and at the right angle to have fired the fatal shot?
A second new piece of evidence now emerged. It was a large collection of correspondence from the 1930s between a former World War II RAF officer and surviving witnesses of the Baron's last flight. It had lain neglected for 60 years.
In the collection was a letter from an Australian engineer called Darbyshire who was watching the action from the Somme canal. Crucially, he was in a position to see both von Richthofen and Captain Brown.
SERGEANT GAVIN DARBYSHIRE (Excerpt from 1937 letter): I turned to look at the two leading planes just going over the ridge, heard a burst of gunfire, and the Fokker stopped in its stride and did the first half of a loop, then straightened out and fluttered down out of sight as if doing a pancake landing. By this time the third plane was just approaching the ridge. I was amazed later to hear that the Hun was brought down by a plane, as the chaser was not firing at the time the German stopped.
NARRATOR: Darbyshire's statement was a vital clue.
NORMAN FRANKS: He saw the triplane coming back over the ridge rear-up and then crunch down in a forced landing. That, to us, indicated when he was hit, which was way past Brown's attack.
NARRATOR: After the war, Captain Roy Brown chose not to make further statements about his attack on the Red Baron.
DENNY MAY: Roy was quite convinced he had shot that red triplane down. He never wavered from that. If there was any reticence, it's just that he hated the war. He was a sick man at this point. He was looking out for his men, worried about them all, and not wanting to become a hero in anybody's eyes. He was just doing a job.
NARRATOR: When contacted in the 1930s, Roy Brown continued to refuse to answer any direct questions.
CAPTAIN ROY BROWN (excerpt from letter): There is no point in my making any statement when official records are in existence.
NARRATOR: Captain Brown probably fired on von Richthofen from behind and above left. But as the medical reports showed, the Baron was hit by an upward-traveling shot to the right side. After more than eighty years, most of the evidence fails to support Brown's claim. So who did fire the fatal shot?
Ballistics tests can reveal the effect of a bullet fired from different ranges. When a human body is hit there's an explosive effect called hydrostatic shock—the closer the range, the greater the wound damage.
PETER FRANKS (Ballistics Consultant): If the bullet had struck von Richthofen at close range, I would have expected a more explosive-type wound. Now the evidence is that the wounds were actually probed by the medical staff after he had been shot down, and they were actually able to follow the bullet-path through the body.
NARRATOR: A low-damage, low-velocity hit would indicate a long range shot. Moreover, one of the medical orderlies actually found the .303 bullet that had killed the Baron.
PETER FRANKS: The fact that the bullet was found intact inside the clothing of Richthofen is another indicator that it was a long range shot. And I would say that would be probably 600 yards plus.
NARRATOR: Australian Gunners Buie and Evans were in range and could have hit von Richthofen, as they claimed, some 20 or 30 seconds before he is known to have died. But, by their own testimony, they were firing face on to the triplane so they could not have hit von Richthofen on the right hand side.
NORMAN FRANKS: So we asked our gun expert, what do we need to look at? He said, "Have you got somebody who knows what they're doing, 600 yards away, and he's firing at Von Richthofen's right side?" We said "yes." He said, "There's your man."
NARRATOR: Perched on the slope was the Australian gunnery sergeant, Cedric Popkin. He had followed the fight and now swung his Vickers gun through 180 degrees in case the red triplane re-appeared. He was in luck.
NORMAN FRANKS: In our view and final analysis, the best candidate for bringing down von Richthofen was Cedric Popkin, Australian Sergeant machine gunner.
NARRATOR: Though he was their greatest foe, the Allies buried Manfred von Richthofen alongside their own dead on April 22, 1918, with full military honors.
BARON HERMANN VON RICHTHOFEN: It is very sad and ironic that he was killed at the height of his competence and success. On the other hand, he would not have survived as a kind of symbol for chivalrous warfare as he has in being killed.
NARRATOR: With the new evidence about von Richthofen's death, we may be closer to the truth, but eyewitness testimony always leaves room for doubt. The circumstances surrounding the Baron's death will continue to be shrouded in mystery.
DENNY MAY: I don't think that the world will ever know for sure who shot the Red Baron down. That's a question that will go on in the minds of people for years and years and years.
NARRATOR: In death, Manfred von Richthofen became an icon of a period that saw the dawn of aerial combat and modern warfare. His legend grew, not merely because of his 80 victories, a score which would not be beaten until World War II, but because his dashing career recalls a brief era of innovation and heroism, although it came at unthinkable cost to human life.
SUZANNE FISCHER: I think the Red Baron's real achievement was his legacy of squadron tactics. And it wasn't just that he developed them, but he actually wrote them down so that people could use them and still do use them today. His other achievement was his love of technology and pushing to get the best aircraft produced as quickly as possible.
NARRATOR: In four short years, aerial combat had evolved from an amateurish sport to a deadly efficient killing operation. But now the evidence of von Richthofen's death suggests a final irony. If he indeed was killed in action by an old fashioned gun from the ground, the Red Baron may never have lost a dogfight.
