Manfred von Richthofen

Manfred von Richthofen, the Red Baron, remains the most famous fighter pilot who ever lived, the ace-of-aces of the First World War with eighty confirmed victories, flying his blood-red Fokker at the head of the squadron enemies nicknamed the Flying Circus. Born into Prussian nobility in 1892, a Freiherr who began as a cavalryman before transferring to the air in 1915, he carried the temperament of a Taurus Sun: earthy, foundational, immovably sure of his values. Once a Taurus forms an opinion, the universe itself could not talk him out of it, and that bull-headed steadiness became the patient, deliberate hunter's discipline that made him deadly and, curiously, methodical rather than reckless. Placed in the third house, his Sun shone through skill of the hands and the go-getter's craft of the pilot.

His Cancer Moon, the luminary at home in its own sign, ran doubly deep and intuitive, and sitting in the seventh house it bound his psyche to his men and to a homeland he served as national hero. A Capricorn Ascendant gave him the old soul's stoic, boss-like mask, the patient crocodile who waits. Shot down over the Somme in 1918, he was respected even by those he fought.