Hell Above Earth: The Incredible True Story of an American WWII Bomber Commander and the Co-pilot Ordered to Kill Him
by Stephen Frater, St. Martins Press, New York, 2012, $25.99
In Salt Lake City’s German-American community during the 1930s, handyman Karl Goering loved to tell neighbors that his younger brother was Hermann Göring, the World War I ace who was then commander in chief of the Luftwaffe. Karl and Hermann even exchanged letters. Pride morphed into shame as the true character of the Nazi regime revealed itself, and Karl’s son Werner reacted as so many others did after Pearl Harbor: He joined up, becoming a B-17 Flying Fortress pilot.
When FBI director J. Edgar Hoover heard about it, he dispatched agents to make certain Captain Werner Goering flew with a copilot who had orders to shoot and kill him, if necessary, to keep him from falling into enemy hands. Even if Goering was loyal to his native United States, officials apparently believed it would be too much of a propaganda coup to have Göring’s nephew captured by the Nazis. The FBI tapped copilot 1st Lt. Jack Rencher, an expert pistol shot, to fly with Werner.
This is a gripping tale, at times perhaps too graphic for young readers. As Stephen Frater, a former staff writer for the Sarasota Herald-Tribune, points out, flying a B-17 over Europe was one of the most dangerous jobs of the war.
Although we follow Goering and Rencher through their entire lives (they become buddies, sort of), this is essentially an aviation story. Readers learn just about everything that can happen aboard a B-17—and also a lot about other aircraft in the battles high above the Reich. It’s all in strong narrative form, with plenty of convincing dialogue.
As for the obvious question—if Werner Goering was in fact related to the Luftwaffe chief, why didn’t the Army Air Forces assign the American to different duties?—Frater provides an answer and a couple of surprising twists best not revealed here. Let’s just say that everyone on the American side believed in the relationship until near the end of Werner’s life. I started Frater’s book believing that it relied too much on a gimmick. I finished it still trying to decide.
Originally published in the November 2012 issue of Aviation History. To subscribe, click here.
