Goering (4 page)

At the age of sixteen, Goering went to the military training college at Lichterfelde, close to Berlin. The social life at this academy was in keeping with his tastes; he enjoyed himself at night in what he was later to insist was the most exclusive of the
Kadettenkorps,
to which he naturally belonged, and in the daytime he responded to the clique discipline and the uniform-wearing, which had excited his childhood imaginings. He did well and left the academy with the highest distinction, and in March 1912 he was commissioned in the Prinz Wilhelm Regiment, the 112th Infantry, the headquarters of which were at Mulhouse. His age was nineteen. Goering assumed his status as a commissioned officer with conventional pride. “If war breaks out, you can be sure I'll give a good account of myself and live up to the name of Goering,” he told his family and friends when they assembled to admire him in his new uniform.

It was in the following year, 1913, that the Goerings finally broke with Epenstein and had to leave Veldenstein. The relationship between Epenstein and Franziska had worn itself out, and tedious quarrels had been developing with the old man. The situation grew impossible, and Heinrich Goering was forced to move his family to Munich. Almost immediately afterward he died, and there was an imposing funeral in Munich at the Waldfriedhof. Goering fought hard to control himself, but suddenly burst into tears and wept openly as he stood in his officer's uniform beside his father's grave.

At Mulhouse he had settled down to the routine of an Army life still embedded in the traditions of Frederick the Great, but he spent in mountaineering every moment he could free himself from his duties. His best friend was a fellow officer, Lieutenant Bruno Loerzer, with whom he was to keep in contact all his life. Both he and Loerzer were still based at Mulhouse when war was declared in August 1914. Mulhouse was a border garrison town in German Alsace barely a mile or so from the frontier with France, and Goering's regiment was immediately withdrawn and restationed behind the Rhine. His first chance for adventure came when the platoon of which he had charge was sent to reconnoiter the enemy positions. French advance parties were already penetrating into German territory and had occupied Mulhouse. Lieutenant Goering and his men crossed the Rhine toward Mulhouse in an armored train. Goering soon forgot the limitations of his orders when he heard from the excited civilians that the French were in occupation of the town hall. He went straight there and, finding the French no longer in possession of the building, tore down the posters they had put up declaring that the city was under French martial law, and then continued his pursuit of the invaders. Eventually, having exchanged fire with the French, Goering returned to base with four French dragoon horses as a token of his initiative in action.

The following day the possession of Mulhouse was more seriously contested. Once more, Lieutenant Goering enjoyed his own individual skirmishing. He equipped his platoon with bicycles, and at dawn this seven-man patrol pedaled along the familiar road to the town that had once been their base. Their first encounters with the French outposts were a little too successful, and with courage bursting in their hearts they rushed on through the suburbs until they had passed under the railway bridges, which were in fact held by French, and cycled into the heart of the city, where the enemy was in full occupation. Once there, Goering was quick to commandeer a horse. He intended capturing the French General Paul Pau by charging suddenly into the midst of the men surrounding him, catching him up across his saddle and then galloping back to the German lines. But the plan misfired—one of his men lost his nerve and let off his rifle. Goering and his platoon swung their bicycles round and, feet whirling on the pedals, fled furiously back to headquarters, where they arrived breathless but unharmed. Goering never got over that lost chance to make a spectacular start to his war. But another task was immediately assigned him, and he found himself that afternoon high up in the church tower of Illzach, with the French entering the village streets below. The platoon escaped with some French prisoners.

Goering became an experienced junior officer, and in the campaigns that followed all he finally suffered was an attack of rheumatism resulting from the damp of trench warfare. He was sent to hospital in Freiburg. Meanwhile, his friend Lieutenant Bruno Loerzer had been seconded to an air training school in the same town, and his stories filled the invalid with envy. Goering soon felt well enough to visit the flying school, though certainly not sufficiently recovered to go back to the damp trenches. He applied for an official transfer, which was immediately turned down. But Goering was not discouraged. When Loerzer finished his training, he was accompanied in the sky by a new observer. Goering had arranged for his own transfer and risked the consequences. He was, in effect, pardoned when a military court sentenced him to three weeks' confinement to barracks. The sentence was never carried out, however, because, through the nebulous organization of the Air Force, by the time it was imposed Loerzer and Goering had become attached as a team to the 25th Field Air Detachment of Crown Prince Friedrich Wilhelm's Fifth Army—though it seems that they had to steal a plane in order to qualify.

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.
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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.