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AND THE COPI LOT ORDERED TO KILL HIM. Copyright © 2012 by Stephen Frater. All rights re-
served. Printed in the United States of America. For information, address St. Martin’s Press,
175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010.
www.stmartins.com
Frater, Stephen.
Hell above earth : the incredible true story of an American WWII bomber commander
and the copi lot ordered to kill him / Stephen Frater. — 1st ed.
p. cm.
ISBN 978- 0- 312- 61792-9 (hardcover)
ISBN 978-1- 4299- 5682- 6 (e-book)
1. Goering, Werner, 1924– 2. United States. Army Air Forces. Bomb Group,
rd
303 — Biography. 3. Bomber pilots— United States— Biography. 4. Göring, Hermann,
1893–1946—Family. 5. Rencher, Jack P., 1921– 6. B-17 bomber— History—20th
century. 7. World War, 1939–1945—Aerial operations, American. 8. World War,
1939–1945—Campaigns—Europe. 9. World War, 1939–1945—German Americans—
Biography. 10. World War, 1939–1945—Participation, German American. 11. German
American soldiers— Biography. I. Title.
D790.253303rd.F74 2012
940.54'4973092—dc23
[B]
2011041352
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
1
“NOW T ERROR, T RULY”
The thundering ships took off one behind the other. At 5,000
feet they made their formation. The men sat quietly at their
stations, their eyes fi xed. And the deep growl of the engines
shook the air, shook the world and shook the future.
—John Steinbeck, 1942
Perhaps it was the scale, as well as the horror of it all, that still boggles the
mind. Before WWII no one had seen anything like the terrifying spectacle
of hundred-mile-long armadas of 2,000-plus bombers and fighters regu-
larly and methodically razing the continent. Day after day, night after
night, airmen took fl ight over Europe, bombing and strafi ng factories,
ports, and cities, killing hundreds of thousands of civilians in the process.
Between 1940 and 1945, the United States, with the help of more
than 3 million workers hustled onto assembly lines, produced 296,000
airplanes at a cost of $44 billion—more than a quarter of the war’s $180
billion munitions bill. The gross national product soared 60 percent
from 1938 to 1942. Five million new jobs were created. GM employed
half a million persons and accounted for a tenth of all war time produc-
tion. At the peak, Boeing was making sixteen new Flying Fortresses a
day, and its 40,000 employees literally worked around the clock. Boeing
lost $3 million in the five years before 1941 but enjoyed net war time
profits of $27.6 million. “Ford alone produced more military equipment . . .
than Italy.”
6
“ N O W T E R R O R , T R U LY ”
Of all branches . . . the Air Force must act with the least prece-
dent, the least tradition. Nearly all tactics and formations of
infantry have been tested over ten thousand years. . . . But the
7
HELL ABOVE EARTH
8
“ N O W T E R R O R , T R U LY ”
The men and boys, like Werner and Jack, who carried out these
attacks, almost on a daily basis, weather permitting, were truly a unique
breed of highly trained specialists utilizing the world’s most sophisti-
cated weapons platforms of the era. To combat the terror in the skies
they faced, and Nazi terror on the ground, they were ordered to create a
literal hell on earth for enemy military, industrial and, ultimately, civil-
ian targets.
Although they slept in clean sheets and ate hot meals every day
bomber crews flew, even while training, was like D-day, exacting tre-
mendous amounts of emotional uncertainty and trauma. Some men, like
Werner, accepted this, even thrived on and welcomed the adrenaline
rush. Werner knew death could come in a variety of ways: an unlucky
flak burst, Luftwaffe fighters that could appear anywhere at any time,
pi lot error while flying less than fi fteen feet apart. Even the air they
breathed four miles above the earth was deadly. Others suffered more as
their mission totals mounted; the risks of air combat harrowed them
fiercely as they neared the magic number that would allow them to re-
turn home, duty done.
Werner was an exceptional pi lot. Gifted. His nerves of steel, com-
bined with his unwavering ability to make split-second decisions, saw
his crew safely home, mission after grueling mission. But for Werner,
there was an added danger: he didn’t realize that at any moment his fam-
ily name could cost him his life.
9
2
THE BOT TOM RU NG
With the exception of the Civil War, the two greatest existential
threats to the United States were the Great Depression and WWII, the
latter being the greatest man-made catastrophe in human history. Hit-
ting back- to- back as they did, anyone coming of age between 1930
and 1945 was exposed to the political equivalent of crippling childhood
diseases: economic collapse and the rise of virulent, fascist militarism. The
adolescent body politic, weakened by the first, was more vulnerable to the
second. Like a teenager, America was headstrong, naïve, self-absorbed, in-
creasingly muscular yet unsure, untested, and often unwise. Before heavy
bombers and atomic weapons debuted in WWII, the rest of the world
seemed distant, uninteresting, and dangerous to most Americans.
Even after the European war broke out in September 1939, for the
fi rst two years, most Americans had no clear picture of, and often little
interest in, their nation’s unique and vital role in the preservation of
democratic freedom as a political system. “Let them fight their own
wars,” was a common sentiment promoted by those prepared to fi nd
accommodation with Hitler. The isolationists included the U.S. am-
bassador to Britain, Joseph P. Kennedy; Nazi sympathizer and Fascist
anti-semitic Charles Coughlin, who had an audience of up to 30 million
listeners, about a fi fth of the country; Senator Alf Landon; and, most
notably for air-war planners, aviator Charles Lindbergh, who before
Pearl Harbor was the influential face of nearly 1 million members of the
America First Committee, probably “the foremost non-interventionist
[and] anti-war orga ni zation in American history.” President Franklin
10
THE BOTTOM RUNG
11
HELL ABOVE EARTH
• • •
New immigrants always faced the hardest challenges, and so it was for
the family of Karl Frederich Goering in Salt Lake City, Utah, during the
Roaring Twenties and Great Depression. Karl’s second son, Werner, was
born eleven months after his family emigrated from Germany. In 1914,
when WWI broke out in Europe, Karl Goering was a thirty-nine-year-
old, balding, overweight bank accountant who spoke passable English.
He had not served in the military as a youth and seemed destined for a
respectable, humdrum petit bourgeois existence. Lacking any semblance
of martial bearing, Karl was assigned safe, boring garrison duty in Co-
logne, a heavily fortified supply and transportation hub close to the
Western Front where Germany was entangled in meat-grinding trench
warfare with the Allies.
Cologne was targeted for some of the fi rst Allied aerial bombings
during WWI, but it never amounted to much since even the largest En-
glish biplane biplane bomber, the Handley Page 0/400, introduced in
1918, only carried about a dozen inaccurate two-hundred-pound bombs.
Yet the experience profoundly affected Karl. Facing a scarlet sunset one
evening atop a hill overlooking the city, he had a vision of Cologne con-
sumed in flames. Werner recalled hearing his father tell the story in 1932
when he was eight years old. A dozen years later, Werner led bombing
raids on Cologne that turned his father’s apocalyptic premonition into a
smoldering reality. His grandmother still lived in Cologne.
After WWI ended, in 1918, Karl worked in a Cologne-based bank
for five years, as did Joseph Goebbels, an embittered young man with a
Ph.D. in German literature from the prestigious University of Heidelberg.
Goebbels, despite his sterling academic credentials, had failed completely
as an author and was forced to take a job as a lowly bank clerk. (He devel-
oped his thesis, eighth-century romantic drama, under Professor Fried-
rich Gundolf, a noted Jewish literary historian.) In a few years he would
become the best-educated top Nazi in the Reich.
Karl was enticed to the New Zion at Salt Lake by Mormon mission-
aries in Germany, yet as a banker and an accountant, he could not have
missed the unmistakable implications of the postwar economic collapse
of Germany triggered by the massive fi nancial reparations demanded by
the Allies in the Treaty of Versailles. The Allies initially demanded, in
12
THE BOTTOM RUNG
1921, that Germany pay $31.5 billion. The fi nal adjusted installment was
only settled by Germany in 2010, nearly a century after the war started.
John Maynard Keynes, a British Treasury delegate at Versailles,
published The Economic Consequences of the Peace in 1919, in which he ar-
gued for a more generous peace. The harsh reparations, to be paid to the
Allies in gold, coal, and steel, engendered the widely held belief in Ger-
many that the treaty was in fact a Carthaginian peace. Compared with
the $13 billion Marshall Plan, which the victorious United States insti-
tuted in more than a dozen European countries after WWII, for enemies
and allies alike, Versailles proved to be a shortsighted and ineffective
dev il’s bargain.
Field Marshal Ferdinand Foch of France, who felt the restrictions on
Germany were too lenient, declared, “This is not Peace. It is an Armistice
for twenty years.” He proved to be off by “only 65 days.” The reparations
undermined Germany’s postwar economy, the Weimar Republic, and
added fuel to the spark lit by nascent fascist movements that arose im-
mediately after Versailles and culminated in Adolf Hitler’s ascension to
power fourteen years after the treaty was signed.
Karl, his wife, Adele, and their ten-year-old son, Karl Jr., sailed from
Hamburg to the United States on the German ocean liner Bayern, and
were processed at Ellis Island on April 19, 1923. In the 1930 U.S. Census
they were registered as residents of Salt Lake City.
When Karl and his family left Germany, they joined the tail end of
the largest wave of immigrants in U.S. history up to that time. From 1820
to 1920, 5.5 million Germans immigrated to the United States, more than
from any other country, including 4.4 million Irish, 4.1 million Italians,
and 3.7 million Austro-Hungarians—including their minorities of Slavs,
Poles, Czechs, and a half dozen other, smaller ethnic groups.
Arriving in Salt Lake City in 1923, Karl Goering found menial work
as an employee of the Mormon Church. At fi rst, he worked as a com-
mon laborer, landscaping church property. For the nearly fi fty-year- old
overweight former bank clerk, pulling weeds and cutting lawns in Utah’s
blazing summer desert was a rude awakening to the reality of being an im-
migrant. As Karl’s family settled into the large German American commu-
nity in Salt Lake City, he let it be known that his younger brother Hermann,
a famously decorated WWI fighter ace and successor to the Red Baron,
was a close adviser to the strongman then rising in the fatherland, Nazi
13
HELL ABOVE EARTH
Party leader Adolf Hitler. The Goerings took special pride in the eminence
of Werner’s famous uncle, Hermann.
For nearly two decades, from 1923 to 1939, the Utah Goerings, like
many other German Americans, believed the Nazis were good for Ger-
many. Werner read about Hermann’s rise as Hitler’s right-hand man when
the world press ran articles about the handsome, aristocratic, and heroic
former fighter commander and ace who had risen above all competitors
in the führer’s favor. When Hitler became chancellor of Germany in
1933, Reichstag president Hermann Göring was featured in a January 30
Associated Press article and accompanying photograph published world-
wide. In the picture, Göring, Hitler, and Vice Chancellor Franz von Papen
are all seated. Göring is on Hitler’s right and is the fi rst name mentioned
in the photo caption. About a half dozen other long-forgotten members
of Hitler’s newly appointed cabinet stand in a semicircle behind the three
leaders.
Compared to the economic chaos of the Depression, Germany’s
resurgence and low unemployment during the 1930s was envied world-
wide. Fascist economies in Germany and Italy weathered the Depression
better than democracies did. There was no avoiding the fact that a sig-
nificant number of German Americans applauded Hitler and the Nazis
for their economic policies. Karl felt a vicarious pride, and possibly a bit
of envy. He sent congratulatory letters to Hermann and received replies.
Werner recalled that the German community in Salt Lake City was “ec-
static” about the fatherland’s accomplishments during the Depression.
14