its work cut out to find any enemy troops at all, in wide-open
terrain.”
Hitler was in no mood to listen to the army’s defense
against Göring’s allegations. The sweltering, mosquito-laden
climate of Vinnitsa contributed to the ill temper. Oppressed by
fear that the British bomber squadrons would soon start to dev-
astate Munich, Vienna, Linz, and Nuremberg, he instructed
Göring to start building flak towers in those cities at once.
Göring told his staff of Hitler’s gloomy prognosis on September
, and added a prediction of his own: “We’ll probably get these
[raids] once our troops are standing south of the Caucasus.” But
that triumphant moment suddenly seemed more distant than
ever; Field Marshal List arrived at Hitler’s headquarters with
maps showing that he could make no further progress through
the tortuous, narrow mountain passes. Feeling cheated and be-
trayed, Hitler flew into a tantrum, refused to shake hands with
one general and erupted like a volcano over another. Göring
fled from the headquarters before the glowing lava engulfed
him too. Milch, who arrived at midday, noted afterward: “Row
over List, Göring already left.” The Reichsmarschall sent off for
twenty more books on the Caucasus.
But the real fulcrum of the fighting now became Stalin-
grad, not the Caucasus. The city was a grimy, sprawling sea of
houses and factories straddling the Volga River. Each side real-
ized that Stalingrad was the key to the Russian campaign. On
September , Richthofen wrote, exasperated, “The throttling of
Stalingrad gets slower and slower.” From his base headquarters
at a fighter airfield only ten miles from the city, he phoned
Göring on the thirteenth to demand that one single army com-
mander take over that sector and he did not mean Paulus,
whom he regarded as “worthy but uninspiring.”
The Americans had now begun raiding German targets