ensive at Kursk.
A surviving handwritten notebook kept by Göring in those
months reveals how extensively his horizon was clouded by the
war in the air by the thundering squadrons of B-s, Lan-
casters, and Mosquitoes. The breaching of the Ruhr dams had
shaken him badly, and he cast around for revenge. “Bigger bar-
rage balloons,” he wrote. Later he added, “Very hard for me to
know of all our important objectives. Führer must decide new
defense priorities,” and he made the note: “All Reich agencies
and party districts must report immediately their most vital air-
defense targets.”
He turned his mind to possible ways of hitting back. “Scot-
tish dams. Heavy raids [on] Russia, nuisance raids on the Urals.”
A later entry shows that he felt that General Robert Ritter von
Greim’s Luftflotte was only “bespattering” the Russian targets
with its haphazard attacks; he decided to place two or three
Geschwader (wings) of near-obsolete He s under one air-
corps command on the eastern front to execute heavy night
raids on Kuibyshev, Moscow, and the more distant Soviet arse-
nals. “Handfuls of planes won’t even dent these gigantic plants,”
he observed. “But if one or two hundred bombers batter them,
time after time, then we’ll get somewhere!”
In the same notebook he wrote reminders to commission
Professor Kurt Tank to design a wooden bomber like the Mos-
quito, and to ask for volunteers for anti-Mosquito operations,
and “a particularly dashing officer” to command them he
jotted down shortly the names of two suitable candidates: “Graf
and Ihlefeld job, tackling the Mosquitoes.” He also crowded
the pages with notes about missile attacks on warships, flak for
the Ruhr and U-boat yards, and setting up a long-range strate-
gic bombing force equipped with the new Heinkel and
Junkers four-engine bombers, adopting the Ameri-