strategic deception plan prior to Barbarossa. On June , Göring
phoned Milch to order him to tour Field Marshal Hugo Sper-
rle’s dwindling Luftflotte in the west; this was part of the same
grand deception, designed to conceal the fact that Kesselring’s
Luftflotte , with twenty-five hundred warplanes, had already
been transferred to the eastern front.
During May Göring had committed the air force to
one other minor theater of war. After an Arab rebellion against
the British forces in oil-rich Iraq, he had despatched a small
force of Messerschmitt planes under General Felmy to aid the
rebels. But it was too little and too late, as Göring explained to
Hitler and Foreign Minister Ribbentrop on the last day of May.
“They don’t know anything about aviation out there, and air-
lifting fuel would have been pointless and costly.”
Thus he glossed over his own inadequacies while empha-
sizing those of his colleagues. Unfeeling and scheming to main-
tain position, Göring used the sinking of Germany’s newest bat-
tleship, Bismarck, four days before, with the loss of twenty-three
hundred sailors, to generate bad feeling against Admiral Raeder.
His own prestige was high. On May , he was able to deliver a
victory report on Crete to Hitler (although the Luftwaffe had
lost Junkers transport planes in the assault).
Air force is overextended [wrote Hewel after Göring’s
visit to the Berghof]. Had no respite since this war be-
gan. Based on Crete, a determined struggle will now
begin against the British Fleet and Tobruk [the main
obstacle to Rommel’s advance across Libya]...
Göring and F. use harsh language about Bismarck and
the navy.By now they had received secret reports of a speech that Stalin
had delivered at a Kremlin banquet one month before, an-