crates,’ ” he mimicked. “Aircraft so big you could lay out a dance
floor in them!”
He rounded on General Wolfgang Martini, the shy and
academic chief of Luftwaffe signals. “I refuse to be led a song and
dance like this,” he declared. “The enemy can actually see
whether he is over a city or not, right through the clouds. We
cannot jam him. You tell me that we also have something, and in
the same breath you add, ‘But it can all be jammed by the en-
emy!’ ”
Later that month Göring retreated to Berchtesgaden and
tried to clear his mind. The catastrophic air raids on Berlin and
the Ruhr were increasing in violence, and now the American
bombers were joining in. The Reich had lost fifteen thousand
dead in air raids. On April , American daylight raids killed
Frenchmen in Paris and Italians in Naples; on the fifth, the
U.S. bomber squadrons killed , Belgian civilians in Antwerp.
Telephoning Goebbels in Berlin on the sixth fully aware that
the Forschungsamt would courier reports of his scathing lan-
guage to Göring Milch heaped obloquy on the Reichsmar-
schall’s name.
Intervening in Luftwaffe operations, Hitler ordered fighter
squadrons switched to the Russian front. “It’s out of the ques-
tion,” Göring ranted over the phone to Jeschonnek. “It’s about
time you learned to stand up to the Führer.” Swamped in the
east, run out of Africa, almost nonexistent in the west, his air
force struggled to survive. Troubled by the Reich’s growing
food shortage and threats of cuts in the meat ration, Göring
took refuge in bed. His diary shows April ending with visits
from Hitler’s surgeon, Karl Brandt, and his own doctor On-
darza, who helpfully prescribed still more bed rest.
Göring still found time for less martial pursuits: he in-
quired of Fräulein Limberger “whether the amethysts were