{"id":8947,"date":"2026-10-15T09:24:52","date_gmt":"2026-10-15T16:24:52","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/novus2.com\/righteouscause\/?p=8947"},"modified":"2026-10-15T09:33:13","modified_gmt":"2026-10-15T16:33:13","slug":"this-day-in-history-the-author-is-only-two-handshakes-from-the-reichsmarschall-hermann-goring","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/novus2.com\/righteouscause\/2026\/10\/15\/this-day-in-history-the-author-is-only-two-handshakes-from-the-reichsmarschall-hermann-goring\/","title":{"rendered":"This Day in History: The Author is Only Two Handshakes from the Reichsmarschall Hermann G\u00f6ring"},"content":{"rendered":"

PHOTO:<\/strong><\/span> Royal Air Force pilot Robert Stanford-Tuck (left) and General Adolf Galland (right), Commander of the German Air Force during World War Two, together to mark the memorial of the Battle of Britain, Zurich, August 21st 1969. (Photo by Keystone\/Hulton Archive\/Getty Images). Image has been colorized by Google Gemini.<\/em><\/span><\/p>\n

Shortly before eleven o’clock on the night of 15 October 1946, Private Harold Johnson stood at the door of a cell in the Nuremberg prison and watched the most powerful prisoner in Europe lying on his cot. Every guard in that corridor had orders never to take his eyes off the condemned men. Hermann G\u00f6ring, once Reichsmarschall of the Greater German Reich, heir apparent to Adolf Hitler, and commander of the largest air force on earth, had his hands folded on the blanket. Then his body went rigid. A rasping sound came from his throat. By the time the prison chaplain, Henry Gerecke, reached his side, G\u00f6ring was dead. In his mouth were the shards of a glass cyanide capsule. Within two hours he was to have climbed the steps of the gallows. He had asked the tribunal for a soldier’s death by firing squad and been refused. In the end he denied the hangman, as he had so often denied responsibility, with one last act of theatre.<\/p>\n

That was eighty years ago tonight.<\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n

The death was a fitting final scene for a man who had spent the war in steady retreat from the obligations of command. The Luftwaffe he built in the 1930s was a dazzling instrument of propaganda. But G\u00f6ring governed it the way he governed everything, through flattery, intrigue, and appetite, and when reality failed to match his boasts, he looked for someone else to blame. Those someones were very often his own fighter pilots.<\/p>\n

The Channel Coast, 1940<\/strong><\/span><\/h2>\n

The pattern was set in the late summer of 1940, as the Battle of Britain reached its crisis. The Luftwaffe had promised Hitler mastery of the skies over southern England as the prelude to invasion. That mastery had not come. The RAF’s Hurricanes and Spitfires were still rising, squadron after squadron, to tear into the German bomber formations, and the Messerschmitt 109s escorting them, short on fuel and tethered to the slow bombers, were bleeding pilots they could not replace.<\/p>\n

G\u00f6ring came to the French coast to confront his fighter commanders. Among them were the two brightest stars of the fighter arm: Werner M\u00f6lders, the cerebral tactician, and Adolf Galland, the cigar-chomping commander of Jagdgeschwader 26. The Reichsmarschall did not come to listen. He berated them, charging that the fighter arm lacked fighting spirit and that its timidity was costing Germany the battle.<\/p>\n

When G\u00f6ring finally asked what his pilots needed, Galland gave an answer that has passed into aviation legend. He wanted a squadron of Spitfires.<\/p>\n

It was insolence, but it was also the truth. Galland was telling his commander-in-chief that the men were being sent into an impossible fight, under impossible orders, by a leadership that would not face the facts. G\u00f6ring stormed off. Galland kept his post, and for the rest of the war he defied the Reichsmarschall on behalf of his pilots, struggling through the strange, Byzantine bureaucracy of the Luftwaffe High Command against demands that grew more detached from reality every year. In 1945, Galland’s protests finally cost him his command. G\u00f6ring, meanwhile, had withdrawn into his hunting lodge, his art plunder, and his morphine.<\/p>\n

The Enemy at the Dinner Table<\/strong><\/span><\/h2>\n

On the other side of the Channel stood men like Robert Stanford Tuck, among the most highly decorated aces of the RAF. Tuck fought through Dunkirk and the Battle of Britain and became a squadron leader and then a wing leader. In January 1942, during a low-level sweep over France, German flak brought down his Spitfire. He was captured near Boulogne, almost in the backyard of JG 26.<\/p>\n

What followed belongs to the strange chivalry that survived in the air war long after it had died almost everywhere else. Galland invited his captured adversary to dine with the officers of his wing. The two men talked shop as professionals, comparing aircraft and tactics, before Tuck was sent off to a prisoner-of-war camp. He spent three years behind the wire, and in early 1945, as the Reich collapsed, he escaped. He made his way east to the Soviet lines and fought for a time alongside Red Army infantry before working his way home to Britain in time for VE Day.<\/p>\n

Atlanta, 1978<\/strong><\/span><\/h2>\n

Decades later, the two old adversaries had become friends. Both served as technical advisors on the 1969 film Battle of Britain<\/i>, and they stayed close after. In November 1978, they toured the United States together, promoting prints of a painting by the British aviation artist Frank Wootton that depicted their duel at 14,000 feet above the French coast. Proceeds went to the Battle of Britain Museum and the RAF Benevolent Fund. In Arlington, Virginia, the Washington Post<\/i> covered their visit under the headline “Best of Enemies,” describing two old men bantering about the war that had once required them to try to kill each other.<\/p>\n

The tour also went to Atlanta. There, at a small gathering of history enthusiasts, I met them both.<\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n

The Arithmetic of History<\/strong><\/span><\/h2>\n

Someone reminded me recently of “Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon,” the game invented by three Albright College students in Pennsylvania who, watching Footloose<\/i>, hit on the idea that any actor can be linked to Kevin Bacon in six steps or fewer. It is a parlor game built on a serious observation: the world is smaller than it looks.<\/p>\n

I did the arithmetic. I shook hands with Adolf Galland. Galland stood face to face with Hermann G\u00f6ring and asked him for Spitfires. That is two degrees of separation between a boy from my generation and the Reichsmarschall of the Third Reich.<\/p>\n

The distance between us and the darkest chapter of the twentieth century is not measured in centuries. It is measured in handshakes.<\/p>\n

Coda<\/strong><\/span><\/h2>\n

The three men’s endings say a great deal. G\u00f6ring died alone in a guarded cell, cheating the rope with poison he had kept hidden, a man who never once accepted the weight of what he had done. Galland, held by the Americans after May 1945 and questioned about German jet development until 1947, lived to be eighty-three and died on 9 February 1996 near Remagen. Tuck died on 5 May 1987 at seventy, still the friend of the man who had once been his enemy.<\/p>\n

Of those three men, only the two who had faced death honestly in the air found something like peace on the ground.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

PHOTO: Royal Air Force pilot Robert Stanford-Tuck (left) and General Adolf Galland (right), Commander of the German Air Force during World War Two, together to mark the memorial of the Battle of Britain, Zurich, August 21st 1969. (Photo by Keystone\/Hulton Archive\/Getty Images). Image has been colorized by Google Gemini. Shortly before eleven o’clock on the…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":8948,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[183,181,174],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-8947","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-did-you-know","category-history","category-world-war-ii"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/novus2.com\/righteouscause\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/10\/Tuck-and-Galland.png","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/novus2.com\/righteouscause\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8947","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/novus2.com\/righteouscause\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/novus2.com\/righteouscause\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/novus2.com\/righteouscause\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/novus2.com\/righteouscause\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=8947"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/novus2.com\/righteouscause\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8947\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":8952,"href":"https:\/\/novus2.com\/righteouscause\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8947\/revisions\/8952"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/novus2.com\/righteouscause\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/8948"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/novus2.com\/righteouscause\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=8947"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/novus2.com\/righteouscause\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=8947"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/novus2.com\/righteouscause\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=8947"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}