Like Thiepval and Combles, Fricourt was heavily fortified in its cellars and subterranean passages, with concrete bunkers on the surface. It constituted a strong point of the famous "Fricourt salient" and the Germans saw Fricourt as a cornerstone of their defensive system. Their faith proved unfounded, for the village fell to the British on 2 July 1916.

Of the 17,000 soldiers, about 1,000 of died in the autumn of 1914 and the ensuing trench warfare; about 10,000 during the Battle of the Somme (July-November 1916); and the final 6,000 in the Spring Offensive and the Allied counter-attack, Hundred Days, that followed it, in 1918.

The cemetery was established by the French military authorities in 1920 and concentrates graves from "some 79 communes in the regions around Bapaume, Albert, Combles, the Ancre valley and Villers-Bretonneux". About 5,000 of the bodies are mostly in shared double graves; the remainder lie in four communal graves.

Manfred von Richthofen was a pupil at the Silesian military school at Wahlstadt from the age of 12. From here he moved on to the Lichterfede military academy at Potsdam, from where he graduated as on officer in the Uhlan cavalry in 1911. When war broke out in 1914 von Richthofen was called to the french front and, like many cavalry officers, requested a transfer to the airborne troops.

Initially an observer, he flew for the first time in july 1915 then joined the Jagdstaffel II, where he took command in 1917 before forming a new unit, the Jagdeschwader I, a mobile fighter group which shifted constantly along the Western Front.

At the end of march 1918, the squadron was based at Cappy. On 21 april, engaged in action with two Canadian aircraft, von Richthofen did not realise that he was flying over the Australian lines : the Australian machine gunners found him in their sights. He was killed in full flight, his aircraft crashing near Corbie at the site known as the briqueterie, or "brick-works". The Australian buried him at Bertangles with full military honours. The body was transfered to the German cemetery at Fricourt in 1925, buried later in Berlin, and found its final resting-place at Wiesbaden.

Van Richthofen became the terror of the skies between 1914 and 1918, being responsible for bringing down eighty Allied aircraft on his own. His nick-name was derived from the blood-red colour of his triplane.