lost, and the front line retreated so far that the Heinkels could
no longer make the return flight.
Hitler ordered Milch to fly the highly esteemed Panzer
general Hans Hube out of the fortress. “Why not kill an air-
force general or two!” Hube told him, pointing out that there
was not one Luftwaffe general now left inside Stalingrad. Hitler
passed the scathing remark on to Göring. “Isn’t it remarkable,”
sneered Göring to Milch, “how anybody who goes to the front
immediately loses his clear view of the front!” Richthofen, lis-
tening on the other earpiece, looked around for “a wall to run
up,” as he admitted in his diary. When Göring, calming down,
phoned again on the twentieth, Milch said that both he and
Manstein regarded the Sixth Army’s plight as hopeless.
Impotent to help the Sixth Army, Göring now haunted
Hitler’s headquarters. Milch wrote in his diary on January ,
“Telephoned Führer’s headquarters until : or : ..
Göring sends endless telegrams.” Displaying a frenzy born of
belated guilt, Göring spent five hours with Hitler that day,
phoned him twice on the twenty-fifth (about a new crisis devel-
oping at Voronezh), and personally attended Hitler’s main
conferences on the twenty-sixth and twenty-seventh.
Milch now had trainloads of transport gliders, ground
crew, preheating equipment, and mass-produced airlift contain-
ers bearing down on the Stalingrad front; a squadron of the new
Me G fighter planes was also on its way. But the Army De-
partment rang with vicious criticism of the Luftwaffe. The army
spokesman, General Kurt Dittmar, described in his diary the
sense of bitterness at what they saw as Göring’s “unfulfilled
promises” of an airlift, and Hitler made no secret of his disgust
at the fiasco of the vaunted He long-range bomber in the
airlift.