with their famous B- Flying Fortress squadrons. The bomber
flew fast and high. It was heavily armored and equipped with
eleven heavy machine guns. A gloomy overcast settled on
Göring’s fighter commanders.
Göring concealed the bad news from the German public.
“If Mr. Churchill brags,” he thundered to a Berlin audience on
October , “that he is going to have thousand-bomber jaunts
over Germany every night, let me just reply this: He won’t be
making any at all.” He dismissed the American bomber threat
equally cheerily. “In the American language,” he scoffed, “one
word is spelled in capital letters: Bluff!”
But one of the formidable B-s had now been shot down
it had drifted out of formation and when Milch came out
to see Göring at Kalinovka a week after the speech, he brought
the dossier on it. The field marshal solemnly warned against un-
derestimating this plane.
“How come they tell me one thing,” Göring challenged,
uneasily alluding to the air staff, “and you another? Whom do I
believe?”
His experts had now spotted what looked like turbocharg-
ers on photographs of an American B- Liberator bomber.
That meant that they might soon be flying into German airspace
at thirty thousand feet. Göring shrugged it off. “The
Reichsmarschall,” Milch reported to his staff in Berlin a few days
later, “told me that there is no cause for anxiety about the
American planes and that, four-engined though they be, we can
contemplate the future with equanimity. I told him that I do
not agree I think the Flying Fortress and B- are remarkable
planes.”
Facing allegations of the hoarding of labor in his bloated
Luftwaffe, in September Göring was ordered by Hitler to
release two hundred thousand of his troops to the depleted