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 

Renaissance Man

Göring had appeared at the great Aviators’ Club Ball in Febru-
ary  in white tie and tails and, close to tears, had repeated to
his fellow Great War aviators the solemn pledge that he had
made on disbanding the Richthofen Squadron in   that
the German Air Force’s time would come again. He pledged too
that the first fighter squadron of the reborn air force would bear
the name Richthofen. He kept his word in both respects. On
May , , his generals would inform him that Germany now
had an air force that was the most powerful in the world.
Creating it in the face of all the international prohibitions
placed on any kind of German military aviation had been quite a
problem, but the Weimar Republic had already laid some foun-
dations, establishing in the Soviet Union, far from prying eyes,
bases and proving grounds for airplanes, artillery, gas warfare,
and even submarines. The young army officer Kurt Student had
selected a primitive airfield at Lipetsk, in southern Russia, as a