handle in sight, while the field marshal screamed, red-faced,
“Has the fellow gone stark-raving mad?”
He soon forgave Görnnert as the victory reports poured
in. With the Nazi breakthrough at Sedan on May , France was
already doomed. Three days later Göring sent for the Swedish
consul general in Paris and suggested that he invite the French
to sue for peace. “We are ready,” he assured the Swede, “to
grant reasonable conditions.” He basked in Hitler’s praise. Once
he ordered his chief of air staff to bomb the airfields around
Paris. “Jeschonnek,” he boomed grandly, “let my air force
darken the skies!” On May , he handed out the first eight
Knight’s Crosses to his airborne troops. On that day the British
expeditionary force began its humiliating retreat to the English
Channel ports, abandoning their Belgian and French allies.
Göring picked up the phone and bragged to Hitler that his
bombers would set those ports ablaze, then wipe out the enemy
troops trapped in northern France. Air Corps commander
Richthofen noted Göring’s orders in his diary: “Destroy the
British in the pocket.”
Hitler indulged his air-force commander, ordering his
tank forces on May to hold back. “The air force,” wrote Gen-
eral Franz Halder, chief of the general staff, in his diary that
evening, “is to finish off the encircled army!” “Our air force,”
Göring announced, beaming, to his deputy, “is to mop up the
British. I’ve persuaded the Führer to hold the army back.” The
halt order was controversial, but it made sense to the generals at
the time: There was a belief that the campaign was all but over;
there was no question of “going easy” on the British. “The
Führer wants us to give them a lesson they’ll never forget,”
Göring told Milch.
As his squadrons geared up for this task, Göring shifted his
train Asia forward once more, to Polch, then flew off in a