tank offensive at Kursk, Göring lingered on at his nearby
mountain villa, sitting in his white uniform in the sunshine or
strolling with Emmy. The news from the Ruhr did not encour-
age him to attend Hitler’s daily conferences at the Berghof.
One afternoon, however, June , Ulrich Diesing came
Göring’s bright new young technical officer. Diesing brought
tidings of a revolutionary new Luftwaffe missile that promised to
be a means of hitting back at the British after all a small, steel-
skinned robot plane that would carry a one-ton warhead over
two hundred or three hundred miles. A Luftwaffe unit at
Peenemünde, on the Baltic, had tested fifty already, and thirty-
five of these prototypes had functioned perfectly. Field Marshal
Milch was planning, said Ulrich, to mass produce five thousand
a month. Greedy for revenge, Göring added a zero to the figure
on the document fifty thousand and ordered construction
work to begin immediately on the first one hundred catapult-
launching sites along the French coast. “The enemy air force will
be obliged to attack these launching sites,” predicted Milch in a
letter to Göring a few days later, “and our fighter planes and
flak will have wonderful opportunities to inflict annihilating
damage on them.” Göring began to savor the moment when he
could not only launch these flying bombs against London but
against General Dwight D. Eisenhower’s supply ports in North
Africa and from the decks of U-boats cruising off the Ameri-
can coast even against the skyscrapers of New York too.
All this lay some time in the future. Meanwhile a number of ur-
gent personnel problems had to be faced. Smoldering over
Göring’s insensitive recourse to his own “little air staff” of Brau-
chitsch, Diesing, and Ondarza, the chief of air staff, Hans
Jeschonnek, reported “sick” or so his deputy General Rudolf
Meister told Göring on June , . Probably the illness was