enough for Hitler. Perhaps at Martin Bormann’s suggestion
because the latter entered it in his diary Hitler called in all the
aircraft designers four days later and, telling them not to
breathe a word of this to Göring, grilled them about the chaos in
the industry.
Göring had more immediate preoccupations. Operating one
thousand bombers most nights now, the RAF was executing
ruthless saturation raids on every Ruhr city, dumping two
thousand tons of bombs on Krefeld, , tons on Mülheim and
Oberhausen, , tons on Gelsenkirchen. When the American
bombers now joined in by day, wrecking the vital Nazi oil
refinery at Hüls on June , Milch reminded Göring in an
alarmed letter that half of their entire synthetic-fuel capacity
was concentrated in the Ruhr, within easy bombing range.
Milch urged that the Führer be prevailed on to divert June’s
entire fighter production to the air defense of the Reich. As if
this were not enough, Göring’s experts now sent a two-page re-
port advising that the British could at any time poison the radar
defenses with showers of aluminum foil; there was, warned the
unfortunate signals chief Martini, as yet no antidote. Frightened
of giving the enemy even a hint about this awful device, Göring
halted all German research into the “antidote” that Martini
mentioned.
Instead, he continued to search for unorthodox solutions
to the problems of air defense. On the day that Hitler secretly
hosted his meeting with the aircraft designers, Göring was
holding a discussion with his top bomber experts, the bucca-
neering majors Werner Baumbach and Hajo Herrmann.
Herrmann had recently taken a single-seater plane up to ob-
serve RAF night-bombing techniques for himself the dazzling
spectacle of cascading pyrotechnic flares. He had not needed