every first air raid always gives the impression that the town has
been completely destroyed. Take all necessary steps at once....
All the best.” Göring, sensing disaster, sent Bodenschatz to re-
port. The general returned to Carinhall ashen-faced, with word
that fifty-one thousand dead had already been counted in
Dresden. The death toll of that night’s massacre would rise to
over one hundred thousand.
As troops began to cremate Dresden’s air-raid victims on
makeshift pyres, five hundred at a time, Hitler swore revenge.
His scientists had perfected the nerve gases sarin and tabun,
which would have penetrated any Allied gas mask. Hitherto he
had forbidden their use, as violating the Geneva Convention.
Now he pondered whether it was not time to fight dirty too.
Goebbels cackled approval, but Göring, Ribbentrop, and Dönitz
were united in opposing any such late departure from the con-
ventions and rules of war.
For Göring the setbacks now came thick and fast. One Feb-
ruary morning, French men and women agents were loaded
aboard one of the Luftwaffe’s two remaining captured B-s in
the high-security enclosure of Stuttgart’s Echterdingen Airbase.
Two billion French francs were stowed in the khaki-colored
Flying Fortress with them. Their mission the sabotage of
France’s entire economy. At ten-thirty all other flying opera-
tions were halted “on orders from the Reichsmarschall”
while the plane took off, its obligatory tiny swastika barely visible
on its tailplane. At three hundred feet the plane exploded. “One
of those idiot bitches blew herself up,” said a Heinkel pilot who
witnessed the drama. “Eighteen dead! The next day the place
was crawling with generals.... Hermann was furious. He got
one hell of a cigar from the Führer for that one!”
Bad luck completed the disaster that poor security had be-
gun. On March , the Luftwaffe lost its only other B-. The