large clearing surrounded by pine trees; the dining
car is at its center.
At : .. the French appear... Their airman
displays a studied nonchalance. After the Preamble
has been read, the Führer departs. It was an uplifting
hour.Hitler’s commanders followed him in a carefully prescribed or-
der, with Göring immediately behind, then Ribbentrop, Hess,
and Raeder. Squeezing his bulk behind the long dining table in
Asia afterward, Göring declared happily, “You know, even as a
boy I always knew that one day I should become a Feldherr
[warlord]!”
Through a man whom Beppo Schmid would identify in his pa-
pers simply as a “third party,” Göring learned that Hitler was
proposing only to simulate invasion preparations against Britain
under the code name Sea Lion, a “gigantic bluff” to bring the
British into line. This suited the field marshal down to the
ground. He did not want to invade Britain; talking in private
with Milch, he dismissed the notion of an invasion as superfl-
uous. Schmid was not surprised when the air staff made no call
for the targeting preparations that a real invasion operation
would have required. On June , Waldau recorded that re-
grouping had begun, but after attending a command confer-
ence called by Göring on the following day he recorded,
“Nothing of military significance [is planned] before [Hitler’s]
Reichstag speech” which would not be for two or three weeks.
On June , Jeschonnek frankly told the major liaising be-
tween the air staff and the high command (OKW), Baron Sigis-
mund von Falkenstein, “There isn’t going to be any Sea Lion.
And I haven’t got time to bother about it.” Expanding this re-
mark in a postscript that day to Waldau about the air force’s