counted the brand-new Me fighter planes lined up on
Döberitz Airfield twenty-seven a four-engine Focke-Wulf
Condor touched down. At Oranienburg, where only cows had
grazed twelve months earlier, an Ernst Heinkel factory was now
producing seventy He bombers a month more than the
entire French aircraft industry in a year. In a remarkable new
hedgehopping Fieseler Storch, Ernst Udet flew the French
Commander in Chief at a lazy eighty miles an hour over the lo-
cal concentration camp (Vuillemin noted that it was visibly “well
attended” “très habité.”) As the Storch fluttered down onto
an airfield, it rocked in the slipstream of the new record-
breaking He zooming a few feet overhead at full throttle. It
was purely a laboratory-test vehicle, but Milch blandly asked
about “production plans,” and Udet grinned and said, “The
second mass-production line is just starting and the third in
three weeks’ time.”
And so the amiable bullying went on. At Messerschmitt’s
Augsburg works airfield a twin-engined Me heavy fighter
prototype, jacked up in the butts, blasted away with a twenty-
millimeter cannon, and another was looped and stunted with
one engine shut down. At Junkers’ Magdeburg plant officials
bragged that the ,-horsepower Jumo would replace the
standard from November (it would still not be in squadron
service five years later).
In his final report General Vuillemin warned Paris that the
German Air Force was one of “truly devastating power,” and
this undoubtedly helped the vacillating French to make up their
minds when the time came.
Whatever his own misgivings, Göring cooperated with the
OKW on the tactical planning of Green and heaped criticism on
the army generals and their plans. He insisted that the all-
important “provocation” be timed to ensure the right flying