the blue max

Lieutenant Bruno Stachel (Peppard) is an ambitious pilot who, in the spring of 1918 when World War I was in its final months, transfers to the German Air Service from an Imperial German Army infantry regiment, in which he had held the rank of corporal. He is trying to win the coveted Prussian military decoration, the Pour le Mérite, instituted in 1640 by Frederick the Great and better known as the Blue Max, for which he must shoot down twenty enemy aircraft. He will stop at nothing in his quest and to prove himself as good as the German pilot aristocrats in whose squadron he serves. First, he must overcome the disdain of his fellow pilots, but ultimately he fails by putting them at risk for his own purposes.

His commanding officer, Hauptmann (Captain) Otto Heidemann (Karl Michael Vogler) is a rather snobbish and condescending officer who considers Stachel to be a working-class upstart whose mannerisms and behaviour are incompatible with his idea that all airmen should share his own sense of chivalry.

Heidemann's dislike of Stachel is intensified in an incident when Stachel shoots down an enemy aircraft, which was allegedly surrendering, in full view of his comrades at his home base, killing both the pilot and the observer. When Stachel states that "the observer was going to open fire", Heidemann, implying that the lieutenant had simply murdered the crew in order to gain a "confirmed" kill retorted, "So, we are to assume (that) he was either very brave ... or very foolish!" During the funeral for the British airmen, Stachel expresses disgust at the hypocrisy shown by his fellow pilots and tells Leutnant Willi von Klugermann (Jeremy Kemp) that "if they kill me, I don't want anyone to salute". Willi replies, "They probably won't!"