When Roedel came to say his good-byes, he told Franz and his comrades that he was not going home with them. Instead, he was heading to Greece to oversee the formation of JG-27 with its new IV Group. Roedel must have thrown Goering’s angry memo in the trash, because he never issued it to his men. Roedel knew Goering, the leader who wore a red toga at his home in the Alps and smoked from a huge porcelain pipe that touched the ground. Goering, the violent morphine addict who painted his fingernails. Goering, who recorded his rants against his pilots on records that he shipped to his men on the
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