speak of the ‘enemy’ now, I am referring only to the enemy in
the west.”
“The most modest requirement,” he shrieked at Messer-
schmitt, “is that your aircraft must take off and land without
their pilots risking every bone in their body.” He glared at
Heinkel: “I was promised a heavy bomber. The Heinkel . Af-
ter calamity upon calamity they tell me, ‘If only the plane didn’t
have to dive, it would be the finest bird in the world it could
go into service at once. At once!’ I declare at once, ‘It doesn’t
have to dive!’ But now that it’s been tried in operations there
have been catastrophic losses, none caused by enemy action. So,
Mr. Heinkel, what do you say today! And how many will go u p
in flames? Half of them!... How amused we all were about the
enemy’s backwardness, their ‘plodding four-engined crates,’
and so on. Gentlemen, I’d be delighted if you’d just copy one of
their four-engined crates, double-quick! Then at least I’d have a
plane to brag about!”
So he raged on. (The transcript covered one hundred
pages.) “That’s what gets under my skin,” he said at one stage.
“They can drop their bombs through cloud cover into a pickle
barrel in a railroad station, but our gentlemen ‘can’t quite find
London.’ ” His admiration of the British electronic equipment
was limitless. “I have long been aware,” he said, “that there is
nothing the British do not have. Whatever equipment we have,
the enemy can jam it without so much as a by-your-leave. We
accept all this as though it were God’s will, and when I get
steamed up about it, the story is we haven’t got the workers....
Gentlemen, it isn’t manpower you’re short of, it’s brainpower.”
The British HS radar set first recovered from the RAF
bomber at Rotterdam was a fine example. It filled half a dozen
steel cabinets. No German bomber was big enough to carry
them. “That’s because they have built those ‘old four-engined