Reconnaissance was their principal duty. Goering, photographing and sketching the enemy positions and gun emplacements, was in his element. His skill and accuracy became famous. Based now on Stenay, in northeastern France, he photographed the chain of forts surrounding Verdun. With Loerzer flying low, he strafed men on the ground with his pistol. They would fly over enemy positions, guiding and directing the bombardment by the guns. The Crown Prince invested both Goering and Loerzer with the Iron Cross, first class, for their work. The task of photographing from these primitive planes was extremely difficult and dangerous, and Goering had to lean right out of the cockpit, bracing his mountaineer’s legs against the opposite side of his seat, for the underwing of the plane prevented a direct view to the ground below. He would stretch out from the plane, holding the heavy camera and exposing plate after plate with the lens pointed vertically downward.
This was Goering’s occupation during the spring of 1915. Soon he was learning Morse in order to send messages down to base. His first message to a battery commander below is reported to have been “You can stop firing; you won’t hit the bloody target anyhow!” The observation was not even put into code. Another exploit occurred on the occasion of a French air raid on the Crown Prince’s headquarters at Stenay, which coincided with a visit to her husband by the Crown Princess Cecilie. The raid was effective, and Goering and Loerzer set out alone and without orders to avenge the Crown Princess’s honor. Goering shot up a French plane with his pistol and dropped his small but effective bombs (called “airmen’s mice”) on the sheds of the French airdrome. It was this raid that was said to have inspired him with the idea of carrying an improvised machine gun on the plane. He was the first German airman to do so.
When better German aircraft came into service, in particular the Aviatik, Goering felt an urge to pilot his own plane. There is no doubt he had enjoyed the exercise of his skill as an observer, and also the special control it gave him over the work of officers of superior status to his own. He knew that they depended on him for guidance as he flew above their heads, assessing the position like a general in command and signaling his “instructions” to the ground. He and Loerzer attended staff conferences which would normally have been closed to such junior men—but their advice was sought and the photographs they had taken needed their expert interpretation. In this way Goering became known to Crown Prince Friedrich Wilhelm himself. It did not take Goering long to realize that the future of the war for him lay in the air, and that it was necessary for him to become a pilot. He went back to the flying school at Freiburg, where he gained his wings in record time and boasted that he never crashed a machine. In October 1915 he became a Jagdflieger, a “pursuit flyer,” or fighter pilot. Goering and Loerzer were members of Jagdstaffel 5, a section of the new armada of twin-engine fighter planes which Germany was putting into the air on the western front.
The British had just introduced the huge Handley-Page bomber to meet the rapidly evolving strategy in air warfare. One misty November day the new pilot saw a black giant flying ahead in the clouds, and without thought he plunged in to secure a closer view and, if possible, wing the aircraft with his machine guns. He was alone; he had taken no heed, as his fellow pilots had done, of the fact that there were British fighters in the vicinity. Goering moved in close, marveling at the great machine with guns set in its tail as well as amidships. He put one gunner out of action and then another, for the maneuverability of his aircraft was far greater than that of the Handley-Page. He set one of its engines on fire. Then suddenly he was being strafed by a descending swarm of Sopwith fighters, who turned and twisted about him. His engine was hit and his tank was holed; then he was wounded and his senses began to leave him as his machine stalled and faltered. With fuel pouring into the cockpit, he did what he could to control the plane, which was falling now toward the enemy lines and would soon be in range of the machine-gun fire from the ground. The fighters had gone, but his plane was spinning down through mist and cloud. It was the machine-gun fire from below that shook him into action. He put the plane’s nose up and hedge-hopped back into German territory with what was left of his fuel and crash-landed into the cemetery of a church that was being used as a hospital. He was operated upon for a serious wound in the hip from which he might easily have bled to death had expert care not been immediately available. They counted sixty bullet holes in the fuselage of his plane.
Goering was immobilized for the greater part of a year. While he was convalescing he had his first recorded love affair, with a girl named Marianne Mauser, the beautiful daughter of a well-to-do farmer near Mauterndorf. Her parents were undistinguished, but even so they did not permit the young couple to reach the point of an engagement. Herr Mauser regarded the matter shrewdly: a flyer might be a romantic figure, but his expectation of life, unfortunately, was short.
While Goering slowly recovered, the new concept of the “air ace” was being created on the battlefronts. The fighter pilot who faced death in a deadly duel of wits with men as skilled in endurance as himself, and who flew high above the mud and degradation of earthbound warfare, became a new hero whose photograph stole the publicity. The names of Richthofen and Udet became admired alike by the Germans and the Allies, because their exploits or those of their comrades made exciting news. Loerzer was appointed commandant of Field Squadron 26, based at Mulhouse, where Goering joined him again on his discharge from hospital in 1916. In Aachen one bright day, Loerzer saved Goering’s life when he was being set upon by three French fighters; once more he only just made the ground with a machine punctured by bullets, its undercarriage in fragments. But Goering had done the same for Loerzer on a previous occasion. This was the quick-witted war of the air, with its own comradeship based on a mutual trust in skill.
By 1917, Goering’s reputation as a fighter pilot was fully established. In addition to the Iron Cross, he was to be awarded the Zaehring Lion with swords, the Karl Friedrich Order and the Hohenzollern Medal with swords, third class, all prior to his final award, Pour le Mérite. In May he was put in command of Squadron 27, which needed an improvement in morale. Goering was now responsible for both administration and strategy; he had to show inspiring leadership. He set about the immediate strengthening of the squadron, working day and night to ensure efficiency first on the ground and then in the air. In the summer the two squadrons, 26 and 27, were operating alongside each other, flying from the same airdrome on the Flanders front—at Iseghem, near Ypres. The air attacks on the Allies were now built up into a major offensive; Goering’s squadron in particular had to help in the protection of the other planes, attracting enemy fire away from them. The Allies, meanwhile, were redoubling their efforts in the air, and the Germans countered by forming specially large composite squadrons, called Jagdgeschwader (pursuit squadrons), equaling four of the others; the first of these was commanded by Manfred von Richthofen. Goering and Loerzer were among those whose squadrons were merged to create the third of these major formations.
As the final great offensive of March 1918 developed, Goering was recognized as an outstanding officer whose leadership had an invigorating effect on men whose morale was flagging. He was moved to any area where difficulty of this kind was being experienced. Life in the air was brief and hazardous. After April, when Richthofen was killed in action, his promotion was rapid. One morning in May, when Goering was in the cockpit ready to take off on a mission, his adjutant came running toward the aircraft waving a paper. Against the roar of the engines he shouted that the Emperor had awarded him the Pour le Mérite. The decoration was the highest that could be given; it was awarded not for some single action of outstanding bravery but for continuous courage in action.4
Captain Reinhardt, a celebrated pilot, had been chosen to succeed Richthofen as squadron commander. One day in May he too was killed, while testing a new plane in which Goering himself had just flown. It was then, on July 7, that Goering was chosen to command Richthofen’s famous squadron, now gravely depleted. On July 14, the day he
assumed his command, the men of the squadron went on parade to meet him. Karl Bodenschatz in his book Jagd in Flanders Himmel remarks how tough he looked. “You could see this,” he says, “in his movements and the way he spoke.” Lieutenant von Wedel introduced him to the men, and Goering replied in a “strangely insistent tone of voice,” the words informal and unprepared. He said it was a special honor to be made commandant of such a unit as this, and he spoke of the men who had died in order to make the fame and spirit of the squadron what it was, a spirit they would all need to remember in the grave days ahead. Then Lieutenant Bodenschatz, as adjutant, gave Goering the Richthofen emblem, the walking stick made for Germany’s most famous flyer by a craftsman called Holzapfel, who had so pleased Richthofen by his gesture that he had kept the stick with him to the day he died. Reinhardt had possessed it for only four weeks.
On July 17 Goering dispatched his first official report, in which he wrote:
The British single-seaters are giving as good an account of themselves as ever, but the French fighters rarely penetrate beyond the front line; they usually avoid serious encounters. On the other hand, the French two-seaters usually appear in close formation, pushing home their bombing attacks ruthlessly and from low level. For this they usually employ twin-engined Coudrons whose armor is proof against our ammunition. I myself, attacking a Coudron at close distance on 15.7.18, wasted almost my entire ammunition; the Coudron simply flew on, completely ignoring me. Those well-armed and well-armored machines should be attacked by antiaircraft guns. Flying in close formation they offer good targets for our flak . . . Many [of our] pilots have to take to the air up to five times a day. In the long run, neither the men nor the engines can stand up to such strain. . . . Lack of direct telephone communication between squadron and fighter groups adds to our difficulties. Imperative to have new telephone lines completed.
On the following day Goering himself secured his twenty-second Allied aircraft, a Spad which he shot down early in the morning. He reported briefly:
At 8:15 A.M. I attacked several Spads. One of them I forced down and, after some spiraling, shot down. It fell into the woods of Bandy.
This was Goering’s final personal victory. In spite of the urgency of the times he went on leave (“well-deserved,” says Bodenschatz) on July 26, leaving Lieutenant Lothar von Richthofen, Manfred’s brother, in charge of the squadron. He did not return until August 22.
The Geschwader, claims Bodenschatz, shot down some five hundred Allied planes during the nine months of its existence, but by the end of September the numbers of officers and men were much reduced: fifty-three officers, including medical and administrative staff, and 473 N.C.O.s and men. The weather was bad. “The features of Lieutenant Goering are getting harder,” noted Bodenschatz. But the end of the war was in sight. On the ground the German armies were in retreat, and as summer turned to autumn the British Air Force shot down many of Goering’s pilots.
In November, during the last days of the war, the weather was bad and the news grew worse. Rumors circulated that the Kaiser was abdicating, that there was unrest in Berlin, that the Navy was in a state of mutiny; it was said even that soldiers were firing at their officers. On November 9 Goering called his officers together and urged them to be as loyal to each other during these difficult days as they had been in action, and to fight to the last.
The period November to 9 was one of growing disorder. Goering’s reports as recorded by Bodenschatz show this clearly. On November there was heavy fighting east of the Meuse, and the Allied advance forced Goering to withdraw his men and equipment to an airdrome west of Tellancourt, where the ground conditions were bad for take-off and landing. The rainy weather prevented flying, and Goering’s reports are brief and formal.
November 8. Settling down at Tellancourt airdrome. Drizzle; deep cloud.
November 9. Weather unfavorable. Nothing much happened. Preparing for retreat.
During the three days November 9, 10 and 11 Goering received many contradictory instructions from an irresolute high command. The whole atmosphere of capitulation was hateful to a man of his temperament who had so recently won the supreme award and whose squadron, in spite of bitter losses and half-trained replacements, had been responsible for great acts of courage and considerable successes in the air until they were grounded so unaccountably (as indeed it seemed to this young commander of twenty-five, whose photograph was by now on sale to the German public as a war hero). Varying instructions came in: he was to surrender his planes to the Americans, he was to take his machines and armament to Darmstadt.
On November 10 the weather still made flying impossible, and the agony of waiting dragged on.
November 10. By order of the commander, Fifth Army Air Force, aircraft flying to Darmstadt, the more valuable equipment to be sent on by road transport . . . two columns of eight trucks each. Tents and some useless machines and equipment left at Tellancourt. Men moved partly by truck and partly on foot to be entrained. Food supplies were adequate.
Then, on November 11, the official news of the armistice arrived, and the evacuation was halted. Bodenschatz writes of the strange silence that closed on the countryside. Goering called his men together and told them he would never surrender to the Allies; he would continue with the evacuation to Darmstadt. Bodenschatz was put in charge of the trucks, and the pilots took to the air in spite of the arrival of a staff officer with orders that the squadron should put their planes at the disposal of the French in Strasbourg. Goering at first refused bluntly; if this had to be done, he said, then someone else could do it. In the end, a few machines were flown to Strasbourg, but their pilots crash-landed them as a final act of defiance against the enemy.
In the confusion, some of Goering’s pilots mistook their route to Darmstadt and landed at Mannheim, which was one of the places where soldiers’ and workers’ councils, in active revolt against what authority remained, had taken charge of the airport. On landing, the pilots were disarmed and sent on to Darmstadt by road. When they arrived with the report of what had happened, Goering was furious. He put the entire squadron into the air again and flew the short distance to Mannheim, where, while the officers deprived of their arms landed, Goering and the rest of his pilots circled over the airdrome. The officers on the ground presented the soldiers’ and workers’ council with an ultimatum that unless the stolen arms were returned to them at once and they were allowed to take off with them unmolested, their commandant, Lieutenant Goering, would machine-gun the airdrome. The pilots were hastily given back their arms, and they rejoined the squadron in the air. Goering then led the flight back to Darmstadt and ordered those who could to crash-land their planes.
Goering’s final record on the day of armistice is a formal tribute to his squadron.
November 11. Armistice. Squadron flight in bad weather to Darmstadt. Mist. Since its establishment the Geschwader has shot down 644 enemy planes. Death by enemy action reached 56 officers and noncommissioned pilots, 6 men. Wounded 52 officers and noncommissioned pilots, 7 men.
HERMANN GOERING,
Lieutenant O.C. Geschwader.
Goering was demobilized, with the honorary rank of captain, in the old Bavarian town of Aschaffenburg, some thirty miles from Frankfurt. There, it seems, he stayed, at the villa of the managing director of the Buntpapier A.G., a firm of paper manufacturers, and the actual disbanding of the Geschwader took place in the courtyard of the firm’s premises where the officers’ luggage was stowed before being sent on to their homes. Goering and his officers spent most of their time in the Stiftskeller, the best restaurant and drinking place in the town. They were determined to keep together as long as they could. On November 19 Goering finally said goodbye, and he discovered his gifts as a speaker in a speech he made at the Stiftskeller. He spoke of the history and the achievements of the famous Richthofen squadron, of the bitter times that Germany must now endure, and of the disgraceful behavior of the German people in their attitude to those who had, as officers, sacrificed themselves fo
r their country. He was outraged by the revolt of soldiers against authority, and by the support the soldiers’ councils were receiving in many parts of Germany. “The new fight for freedom, principles, morals and the Fatherland has begun,” he said. “We have a long and difficult way to go, but the truth will be our light. We must be proud of this truth and of what we have done.
We must think of this. Our time will come again.” He gave the toast to the Richthofen Geschwader; solemnly they drank, then smashed their glasses.
Outside, crowds of civilians and ex-soldiers gathered in the streets to insult the officers, who, they were now led to think, had betrayed Germany and sacrificed the lives of their men in order to win for themselves decorations of the kind the Emperor had bestowed on Goering. The story goes that Goering was set on in the street and that with difficulty he prevented the mob from stripping the medals from his breast. He stayed in Aschaffenburg until early December, and then, without gratuity or pension, he went to Munich, where his mother was living. It was plain to him that he must make his own way in the world.
In Munich he was at first very fortunate. During the war he had given generous treatment to a prisoner of war, Captain Frank Beaumont, a pilot in the Royal Flying Corps, who had made a forced landing in a damaged plane after destroying two German fighters in the air. It was part of Goering’s creed to admire a good enemy, and he did his best to keep Captain Beaumont from being taken over by the Army; he had talked to him at length about the profession of flying, about which they were both enthusiasts. Goering now discovered that Captain Beaumont, who spoke German fluently, was stationed in Munich with the responsibility of preparing the way for the breaking up of the German Air Force. Together with Ernst Udet, Goering presented himself and was made welcome. Indeed, for some weeks, until Munich became politically too warm for Goering to stay, Captain Beaumont acted as host to Goering and Udet and repaid past kindness with a generosity that enabled the two young men to live with ease whilst deciding what it was best for them to do.5 Meanwhile, his unofficial engagement to Fräulein Mauser was forgotten. Herr Mauser wrote to Goering, “What have you got now to offer my daughter?” Goering telegraphed back, “Nothing.”
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