keep their entire navy operational for a year! The swine tucked
it away, barrel upon barrel, and then came whining to me for
more. ‘We would dearly love to fly, but we haven’t the fuel!’ I
gave them another thousand tons. And now we find they have
sixty-five thousand tons tucked away!”*
Vengeful and angry, Hitler ordered Göring to bomb an
Italian city like Brindisi or Taranto before the Allies had time to
organize air defenses. “We’ve got to show the Italian public,”
rasped Göring, passing on Hitler’s logic to his generals, “and
some of the neutrals and our other indolent allies, that even if
you chuck in the sponge you’re not out of the war!” Told that
Italian Air Force officers, before turning their equipment over to
the Germans, had riddled the aircraft engines with machine-
gun fire and ripped up the parachutes, Göring ordered the
culprits hunted down. “I would have them hanged on the air-
field,” he said, “and leave the bodies dangling for three days.”
Yes, Hermann Göring had loathed the Italians ever since
.
“You have no idea,” he would tell U.S. General Carl F.
Spaatz on May , , “what a bad time we had in Italy. If they
had only been our enemies instead of our allies, we might have
won the war.”
“As commander in chief of the air force,” said Göring that
October, , “people hold me responsible, and rightly so.” For
a few days that month the war in the air seemed to have taken
an uglier turn. Spaatz’s bombers attacking the German coastal
port of Emden on the second were clearly monitored carrying
radar, so they too could bomb through ten-tenths cloud. The
Luftwaffe seemed increasingly impotent. By day, Galland’s
fighter squadrons seemed paralyzed by fear. “Göring’s fighters
- Rommel had discovered , barrels in the tunnels at La Spezia; the Ger-
mans also seized million liters of gasoline.