“Right,” said Göring, and did the calculation for him.
“That means you can make three sorties to engage the enemy
during each four-hour raid if you really wade into them!”
Galland hesitated to commit himself.
“Three times,” said Göring flatly. “I insist!”
Thus he became the architect of the Luftwaffe’s biggest
victory over the American bombers one week later.
For three days, meanwhile, on October , , and , , he
held a technical inquisition. His tongue had lost none of its edge.
“Our Luftwaffe,” he would brood to his generals on the eighth,
“is at the bottom of an abyss. It has lost the confidence of the
public and the armed forces.... The people are saying that our
fighters chicken out and trail along behind while the big enemy
squadrons fly unmolested over our cities for hours on end in
‘Nuremberg party rally’ style. Yes, that’s the catchphrase now.”
Milch defended the fighter pilots. To Göring, however,
these youngsters were just “pussyfoots.” “They just have to close
the enemy to four hundred yards instead of a thousand; they
just have to bring down eighty instead of twenty. Then their low
spirits will be gone, and I will doff my hat to them. But as for
taking potshots at two thousand yards, my attitude is, this: Götz
von Berlichingen [Lick my ass]!”
As he was speaking the next day, October , a message was
handed in to him. Despite a colossal air battle over northern
Germany involving German fighters from all over Central
Europe, the American bombers had wrecked percent of the
Focke-Wulf assembly plant at Marienburg in East Prussia.
“Things can’t go on like this much longer,” announced Göring.
“Orders must go to Minister Speer at once to build six under-
ground factories for fighter planes.”
The Americans had lost twenty-eight bombers that day.
They took revenge by attacking Münster on October , and lost