HELL ABOVE EARTH: THE INCREDIBLE TRUE STORY OF AN AMERICAN WWII BOMBER COMMANDER

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

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

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

First Edition: March 2012

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 ”

Across Nazi-occupied Europe, a calculated mixture of incendiary

and high-explosive bombs obliterated buildings that had stood for centu-
ries. Fire-driven, oxygen-sucking winds whipped flames into pyres of
biblical proportions; some were hundreds of feet high and as wide as city
blocks— convenient homing beacons for subsequent waves of bombers.
Automobiles and streetcars melted in temperatures above 1,000 degrees
Fahrenheit. Asphalt ignited and flowed like lava. People who sought
safety in water towers, ponds, and fountains were trapped and “boiled
alive.” Others, who sought safety belowground, suffocated from a lack of
oxygen.
In 1945, Newsweek, referring to civilian bombing, published an
article entitled “Now Terror, Truly.” Dresden historian Marshall De Bruhl
wrote that “in less than fourteen hours, the work of centuries had been
undone.” The scene was similar in all major German cities. Most of
Berlin was demolished. Toward the end, it was ceaseless: almost three-
quarters of all the Allied bombs dropped on Europe fell during the fi nal
twelve months of the war. By May 1945, up to 80 percent of most of
Germany’s urban centers were wiped out and up to 650,000 civilians lay
dead, 16 percent of them children. Another 800,000 were wounded. In
France, 70,000 civilians died, in Italy another 50,000. England, by com-
parison, suffered 60,000 civilian deaths at the hands of the Luftwaffe.
During the war, the Allies killed “two or three German civilians by bomb-
ing for every German soldier they killed on the battlefield.” It was liter-
ally hell on earth.
The air battle over Nazi-occupied Europe was a different kind of
fresh hell. It lasted about three years for the Americans and about double
that for the English. It was the longest battle of the war, during which an
average of about 115 Allied airmen died daily, as did about 650 civilians,
including women, children, pensioners, and slave laborers, most of who
died following the United States’ entry into the war.
In his 1942 book, Bombs Away, Stanford University dropout John
Steinbeck neatly summed up the challenge facing bomber crews and
their commanders.

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

Air Force has no centuries of trial and error to study; it must

feel its way, making its errors and correcting them.

The errors and corrections were recorded in blood. About 26,000

men and women died in aircraft accidents during the war. In the British-
based U.S. Army’s Eighth Air Force alone, another 26,000 Americans, or
12.3 percent of the third of a million men who flew, were killed in
action— more than the total U.S. Marines death count for the entire war.
Only the United States’ Pacific submariners suffered higher fatality
rates—more than 20 percent. Yet in total numbers, the Eighth Air Force
alone lost more than seven times the global number of U.S. submariner
fatalities. The Mighty Eighth suffered 26,000 combat deaths out of its
350,000 officers and men who flew. By comparison, the U.S. Navy suf-
fered 37,000 deaths out of the 4.1 million who served in the WWII Navy.
The battle also cost the British Royal Air Force 56,000 dead. If wounded
and captured airmen totals are included, the Eighth Air Force had “the
highest casualty rate in the American Armed Forces in WWII.”
Allied saturation bombing shattered not only Nazi Germany’s in-
dustrial spine but also American notions of isolationalism in a rabid war.
It washed away all naivety regarding the human and moral costs of in-
dustrial war in which the cogs of the machine are not only soldiers but
also the civilians supplying their material needs. Air war was, in large
part, about the substitution of capital for labor— of machinery for men. A
single crew of trained fl iers could hope to kill a very large number of Ger-
mans even if they flew only twenty successful missions before being
killed or captured themselves.
The men who devastated Nazi Germany from the air are dying daily.
With them dies the personal experience of setting a continent aflame. Few
other men in history have deployed such devastating force for as long as
the crews of the U.S. Army Air Force did over Europe: 1,042 days, from
1942 to 1945. The air battle over Europe, one of the longest and costliest
of any war, heralded not only the nearly complete devastation of the
world’s cultural cradle but also the controversial decision by Western de-
mocracies to engage in industrial-scale terror bombing on civilian popu-
lations. It neatly ushered in atomic-age rationale for a new corps of battle
planners, such as Maj. Curtis E. “Old Iron Ass” LeMay, to whom the
wholesale destruction of cities was a near-daily personal routine.

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

Delano Roosevelt (FDR) was privately convinced that Lindbergh was a

Nazi. “If I should die tomorrow, I want you to know this,” Roosevelt
exploded to Secretary Henry Morgenthau in May 1940, “I am absolutely
convinced that Lindbergh is a Nazi.”
Polls taken in July 1940, ten months after the European war started,
showed only eight percent of Americans supported war against Ger-
many; immediately prior to Pearl Harbor, another poll confi rmed what
Franklin Roosevelt already knew: more than three-quarters of Americans
remained opposed to another war with Germany. The nation of immi-
grants, with German Americans representing a fifth of the population,
hoped and prayed they’d left thorny Old World rivalries and grudges be-
hind, and focused on securing their personal patch of grass in the vast
fields of opportunity that America offered. Roosevelt was forced to resort
to blatant yet, in retrospect, forgivable and essential lies about the United
States’ likely entry into the war so as to secure his third term in 1940. Dur-
ing the run-up to the war and the all-important and unprecedented third-
term 1940 elections, FDR’s ability to juggle the fears and outright opposition
of isolationists, his own military, the industrialists, and his Republican
opponents in Congress—all simultaneously—surely ranks among the great-
est of all of the master’s political conjuring feats.
The large industrialists, almost all Republicans, who ran the com-
panies FDR needed to kick-start the enormous military production runs
were wary. The men running U.S. Steel, General Electric, General Mo-
tors, and Ford distrusted Roosevelt and saw an enormous one-customer
arms market as both a danger to the profits that they enjoyed in making
refrigerators, toasters, and automobiles; as well as a possible Trojan horse
for a creeping form of socialism in which the government dictated both
production and profit. His 47 percent to 42 percent win over Wendell
Willkie, the isolationist Republican candidate, confi rmed that FDR’s sly,
misleading, and cynical pragmatism trumped truth as total war loomed.
He was the genial aristocrat with the common touch, the Hudson Valley
gentleman farmer, the Wall Street lawyer, and the stamp collector who
knew his country’s industrial capacities were all that stood between free-
dom and global tyranny. This president, at this time, saw the future as
few others could and did what was needed to save the world from a form
of tyranny that could well have snuffed out the torch of liberty across
the globe.

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