

 

Zero Hour for Hermann

Reichsmarschall Göring now again commanded a fighter force
to be reckoned with. Occasionally the fighters had gone aloft 
on November , General Galland had sent up  planes, de-
stroying twenty-five American bombers over Hanover  but
then Hitler ordered a halt. “Suddenly,” recalled Göring a few
months later, “the order came from the Führer that I was to use
this air force for the offensive, rotating its front to north-south.”
The “offensive” was to be Hitler’s supreme, final gamble in
the Ardennes. The thunderous launch of what became known as
the Rundstedt Offensive at dawn on December  took the Allies
by surprise, while the bad weather gave Göring local air suprem-
acy over the battlefield for the first time. He had committed
twenty-four hundred planes to this historic battle, and strutted
proudly back into Hitler’s forward headquarters, the Eagle’s
Nest, able to look the other commanders in the eye for the first
time in months. For a week he had no reason to dodge the war