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 

The Blind Leading the Blind

Göring would admit to the gauleiters in November  that the
Luftwaffe could never regain superiority in numbers. The en-
emy’s thousand-bomber raids were now commonplace. “Just a
year ago,” wrote Herbert Backe sarcastically afterward, “he was
talking of [the Americans] as a race of razor-blade and button
manufacturers. It’s hair-raising. But,” added the Staatssekretär,
“he has declared that he will publicly pronounce retribution the
moment we can attack the [British] Isles with one hundred
planes.”
Understandably Göring vested his hopes in the new jet. “I
don’t want to come up with the  half a year too late,” he had
remarked nervously in mid-October. A modest pre-production
series was now planned  one Me  in January , eight in
February, forty in March, and sixty a month after that. Real
mass production would not begin until November .
Displaying the kind of energy that only occasionally