Italian raw-material demands being phoned through by Ciano
from Rome. The list, Italy’s price for joining White, included
millions of tons of coal and steel, impossible quantities of molyb-
denum, tungsten, zirconium, and titanium, and flak batter-
ies as well. By the time that Ambassador Bernardo Attolico, a
balding, small-headed Italian blinking through pebble-glass
lenses, had brought the message over to Hitler, some embassy
wag had added the words “... to be delivered before hostilities”
to the text.
Göring goggled, but Hitler remained unmoved.
“Two can play that game,” he said, and dictated a reply
promising the Italians everything, including entire flak battal-
ions too.
“That’s out of the question!” remonstrated Göring.
“I’m not bothered about actually making the deliveries,”
Hitler soothed him. “Just depriving Italy of any excuse to wrig-
gle out.”
Göring joined his special train near Carinhall, and an ad-
jutant shortly brought Birger Dahlerus aboard. The Swede had
just flown back from London. “We’re heading for my head-
quarters,” explained Göring, and they puffed off in the darkness
toward “Kurfürst,” a bunker site among the beech groves that
had once been a royal hunting ground near Potsdam.
Dahlerus launched into a self-important two-hour narra-
tive of his day’s confabulations in Whitehall, and eventually re-
vealed that he had brought a personal letter from Lord Halifax,
the foreign secretary, to Göring.
The field marshal gasped and snatched it rudely out of his
hand. (“Did he think I’d plonk my ass on it first and leave it till
next day?” Göring later said.) The British statesman’s courtly,
platitudinous epistle was not much compared with the bloody
parchment that Ribbentrop had brought back from the Krem-