Provoked by the August raids on Berlin, Hitler and Göring
had thus trashed the meticulous staff planning in Schmid’s tar-
get-dossier .Blue. They had done so at the very instant when the
Luftwaffe had almost gained supremacy by gouging out the ra-
dar stations on which Britain’s fighter defenses depended. As
the Battle of Britain underwent this fateful metamorphosis from
a chivalrous dueling in the skies to a brutal exchanging of
bombing raids, Göring again lost interest. Once, seated in Asia’s
dining car, he asked General Jeschonnek, one of the foremost
advocates of this terror bombing, “Do you think that Germany
would cave in if Berlin was wiped out?”
“Of course not!” retorted Jeschonnek stoutly, then smiled
thinly as he realized what he had said. “British morale,” he then
suggested, “is more brittle than our own.”
“That’s where you are wrong,” said Göring.
By the end of September his bombers had killed seven
thousand Londoners, but he saw no sign of a political collapse.
As the glamour of command-train life faded, he moved to Paris,
took over a floor at the Ritz, had an especially large bath in-
stalled, wolfed down caviar, and began to live in a fantasy world
of his own. Once his signals officer had to put him through on
the phone, using “command flash” priority, to Emmy and Edda
at Carinhall. “Can you hear, Emmy?” he shouted, seated on his
hotel bed in a green silk kimono. “I’m standing on Cap Gris Nez
at this very moment, while my magnificent airplanes are thun-
dering overhead to England!”
Clanking with brand-new medals, his commanders
watched his antics with more amusement than anger. Burdened
on September with the Golden Flying Badge with Diamonds,
Richthofen mused sardonically in his diary, “One gets to look
more and more like an ox in the Whit [Sunday] Parade.”