time. Meanwhile Göring said that he welcomed the signs that
the Finns had been shrewd enough to abandon their former
policies and move closer to the German line.
Göring allowed little to disturb his East Prussian vacation.
Once, he languidly directed Jeschonnek to phone orders
through to Milch to bomb Liverpool and Manchester at once,
whatever the moon, and to deliver “a heavy blow at London” in
between.
On December , Milch and Waldau brought out to
Rominten the plans that they had drafted on Hitler’s instruc-
tions for a Luftwaffe Air Corps to be moved to southern Italy to
help extricate Mussolini from his own military quagmires in
North Africa and Greece. Göring still loathed the Italians in
general and Mussolini in particular. “If I were a Frenchman,” he
had sneered when Mussolini belatedly entered the war in June,
“I should spit on the ground every time I saw an Italian.” But
every Italian setback now just boosted British morale, so Göring
had to approve the rescue plan.
“Wet autumn day,” wrote General von Waldau in his di-
ary. “A very nice heart-to-heart with the Reichsmarschall, most
of it in the shooting brake that conveyed us to the feeding place
of the world-record stag, Matador.”
For a while the raids on Britain continued against Lon-
don, Birmingham, Liverpool, and Sheffield. Over Christmas,
however, Hitler, of all people, ordered a festive lull in the mu-
tual killing match. The British, not to be outdone, did the same.
From his East Prussian retreat, Göring was inspired by the
Christmas spirit to send bank books to the children of airmen
killed in action, each with a deposit of one thousand marks from
his own bulging account. By the end of that year Hitler had is-
sued the formal directive for Barbarossa, a possible attack on the
Soviet Union. Göring’s task would be to force a “brisk conclu-