ingly cobbled together each week for the newsreels.
No wonder, as [Göring] never visits the front!The weather worsened, as Waldau had predicted. On the sev-
enth and eighth, Göring registered thunderstorms and hail. In
lordly style, he continued to haunt the hunting grounds, elicit-
ing from Waldau on the ninth further signs of edginess. “It’s a
real drag working at Rominten a round trip of eighty miles
each day... There’s no comparing our existence with that of
the troops.”
On the ninth the rain began bucketing down along the
whole front. It was the heaviest downpour since . The high-
ways became morasses. “We are heading for a winter campaign,”
wrote General von Waldau. “The real test has begun.”
Throughout that summer of Hermann Göring had ducked
the ugliest problem confronting him. It stared him in the face:
the fact that Ernst Udet, whom he himself had appointed GL
director of air armament two years earlier, had failed to in-
crease aircraft output since war began. Udet, Göring’s once-
handsome comrade from the old Richthofen Squadron pro-
duced apologetic graphs that established apparent crippling
shortages of raw materials and manpower. Göring trusted him.
“If they plonk graphs in front of me,” he would say three years
later, sadder and considerably wiser, “then I know from the start
that I am about to be swindled. And if they are planning a really
big fraud, they draw them in three colors. I’ve been lied to,” he
added, “duped, cheated, and robbed blind by the GL.”
In March and April, as Udet’s surviving agendas show, he
regularly postponed the discussion of items like “supply situa-
tion” and “increased fighter output.” He was no longer normal.
He was flooding his system with alcohol and mind-numbing