suming that you still have bombers able to fly that far!” Luft-
waffe liaison officer Karl Bodenschatz, no more eager than
Göring to sweat it out round the clock at the Wolf’s Lair, rented
overnight rooms at the Park Hotel at Königsberg, and took to
fleeing there by Storch each night until Göring found him out.
“Your job is to be with the Führer,” he snapped.
The Korten era began at : .. on August , , when
Göring introduced him to Hitler as Jeschonnek’s successor as
chief of air staff. Over the eleven months until his untimely
death in July , General Günther Korten would give the air
force a new sense of strategic purpose. Backed by his new dep-
uty, the ponderous, Bavarian-born Lieutenant General Karl
Koller, Korten pulled fighter squadrons out of Russia and Italy
and transferred them to the defense of the Reich. General
Rudolf Meister was given command of the new Air Corps,
which would bomb the seven main power stations along the
Upper Volga, in Moscow, and in Leningrad, on which Soviet
tank and aircraft-engine production depended.
The nights were soon long enough for the British to reach
Berlin again. The first RAF raid on August killed people.
Hitler wanted to strike back, but he knew that reprisals were
going to have to wait. Meanwhile British code-breakers heard
Korten ordering Luftflotte on August to transfer elements
of KG bomber wing to Illesheim for conversion to the new Me
with the death-dealing -cm Nebelwerfer rocket. Fighter
planes were now equipped with the excellent SN-Lichtenstein
cockpit radar, the infrared detector Spanner, and Naxos-Z, a
device that homed onto the enemy bombers’ HS on-board ra-
dar. Beppo Schmid, now commanding the Fighter Corps,
had set up a countrywide network to track these radar emis-
sions. To confuse the bombers’ radar operators, Göring’s engi-