Bournemouth. On one night, May –, the British effortlessly
dropped over two thousand tons of bombs on Dortmund in the
Ruhr.
The Reichsmarschall lay low, humiliated and angry.
“My people tell me, ‘We’re not sure we can find London at
night,’ ” he mimicked, months later. “But their guys fly over to
a dam that’s socked in with fog, and whack right into it.”
Just at this lowest ebb in his fortunes, Göring had a visitor
who brought hope. Colonel Adolf Galland, the young, cigar-
chomping general of fighters, came on the twenty-fifth to talk
about that Messerschmitt jet fighter the first operational
jet fighter in the world. He had test-flown it three days before.
“The bird flies,” he said. “It flies like there’s an angel pushing.”
The Me was a clear miles per hour faster than the
Me G, the fastest German conventional fighter. “If the en-
emy sticks to the piston engine,” wrote Galland in the report he
handed to Göring, “the Me is going to give us an unimagin-
able lead.”
Even as Göring took in these words, Milch came on the
phone from Berlin. It would, he said, be quite feasible to slot the
jet straight into the mass-production program. “I want your
permission,” asked Milch, “to drop the Me and turn out
every we can, as a matter of urgency.”
Göring panicked. He hated decisions. He threw a glance at
Colonel Galland, listening on the second earpiece. “Well?”
Galland nodded.
“Agreed!” said Göring.
“Dump the Me , replace with Me ,” recorded Milch
in his pocket diary.