Göring’s own diary opened in to reveal him still at Carin-
hall, seeing the New Year in. He made only occasional forays into
Berlin. He proudly watched little Edda at ballet school, listened
to Rosita Serrano sing, went for drives in the snow, hunted wild
boar; he canceled a conference with Galland and Dietrich Pelz,
his bomber commander, and in general refused to see what was
bearing down on Germany’s skies. On January , Milch and his
technical chief Colonel Wolfgang Vorwald brought out to
Carinhall the red top-secret volume of enemy production sta-
tistics: Britain, the United States, and Canada, this showed, had
been producing , bombers and , fighters per month
during , while German industry had averaged only and
respectively. “Milch,” thundered the Reichsmarschall, com-
fortably seated behind his great desk, “have you joined the
dreamers too? Do you really believe all this?”
The next day Milch confessed to his staff, “The
Reichsmarschall doesn’t quite see eye to eye with me on these
figures.”
“Even if they are making these numbers,” he quoted
Göring as saying, “they’re no use whatever to their forces in Af-
rica if they can’t back them up with the necessary shipping
space.”
In a few days’ time Göring would complete his half-
century. Late on January , , he left for East Prussia, spent
seven hours the next day with Hitler, jotted into his diary a
jumble of notes on discussions with Speer, Rosenberg, Bormann,
and Milch; then waddled back to Carinhall. The preparations
for his fiftieth birthday helped to deaden the ever-fainter cries
coming from Stalingrad, and the hollering from North Africa.
He had one talk with Kesselring about “the case of Rommel,” but
his birthday overshadowed all else. Pandering to his eager mood,
the Italians awarded him the first Gold Star of the Roman Eagle