shouted, still fuming, at his staff two days later, “only when it’s
their cities that are being wrecked. I won’t have a monkey made
out of me, and that’s what I tell the Reichsmarschall. I don’t
mince my language with him.”
Shaken by this downturn in their personal relations,
Göring hurried to Rechlin in Asia on the twenty-fourth, and
watched with Milch as the fourth prototype of the Me
streaked majestically past. The howl of the twin Jumo jet en-
gines a sound that not many people in the world had heard
until then gave the two Luftwaffe chiefs newfound con-
fidence.
That night the RAF began Operation Gomorrah, a maca-
brely named attempt at literally wiping out an entire city with its
population. Cascading tons of aluminum foil to blind the Ger-
man radar defenses precisely the electronic trick that Göring
had feared and forbidden his own forces the RAF smashed
Hamburg hard, killing fifteen hundred civilians for the loss of
only twelve bombers.
“One single suburb,” gasped Hitler at midday on July ,
“has lost eight hundred dead!” Turning to an air-staff officer he
again declared, “The British will stop only when their own cities
are being wrecked.” Forthwith he signed a decree to Speer to
mass-produce the army’s A- long-range rocket to bombard
London.
Although this change of priorities looked like yet another ero-
sion of Göring’s role, Hitler still needed Göring the “Iron
Man,” as he liked to be called badly. That evening he phoned
Göring. There were reports that Marshal Pietro Badoglio, “our
deadliest enemy,” had seized power in Italy. The stenographers
recorded only Hitler’s end of the phone dialogue, but even the
Reichsmarschall was evidently incredulous.