bombers neatly parked at Saint Trond in Belgium, begging to be
attacked. Göring brought in every available pilot, including in-
structors, pupils, and even veteran Geschwader commodores
like Major Michalski, who would personally lead the fifty-five
Me -Gs and FW -As of his Jagdgeschwader , and
Lieutenant Colonel Herbert Ihlefeld of JG.
Again the code-breakers did not realize what Göring was
up to even though at : .. on New Year’s Eve his rd
Fighter Division had been heard forecasting fine weather at zero
hour and at : .. instructing the four Geschwader of
fighter planes, “Zero hour for Hermann hrs.”
At : .. with zero hour delayed an hour by ground
fog Bodenplatte began, with the hundreds of FW s and Me
s suddenly screaming across the Allied lines, firing rockets
and cannon, and bombing every targeted airfield simultane-
ously. It was a more spectacular triumph than Poltava. The dev-
astation caused, particularly to the British-occupied airfields in
Belgium, was colossal though never officially admitted at the
time. Göring claimed to have used twenty-three hundred
planes, which may well have been true. Photographic recon-
naissance planes brought back pictures of nine of the many air-
fields targeted, showing on these alone Allied warplanes
definitely destroyed and damaged. But as the day wore on, it
became clear that his own fighters had taken an unexpected
hammering. “What we did not allow for,” said Göring later, not
without a degree of perverse pride, “was the intense concentra-
tion of [Allied] anti-aircraft guns set up against our V- [flying
bombs].” Probably two-thirds of his own losses of about
planes were caused by his own trigger-happy flak gunners. (The
German naval flak in Holland alone admitted having shot down
twenty German fighter planes.) Both Göring and Koller de-
fended the operation at Hitler’s main conference, commenting