During the meal [Backe wrote in a letter] I sat on the
Reichsmarschall’s right, with an Oak Leaves holder,
the dive-bomber pilot Lieutenant Kupfer on his left.
Kupfer spoke with welcome bluntness to him. He said
we still don’t know how to build defenses in depth,
and that we are too gentlemanly to force the civilian
population to do it like the enemy does every day.
Hence the so-called “breakthroughs” that aren’t
anything of the sort because there was nothing in
front of them and the Soviets were just groping for-
ward into empty space. He had harsh words for the
feeble army commanders up front, and compared
them with the SS units: Where an army division fled
in panic, a single company of the SS Totenkopf had
held the whole line. In fact, only the SS is still worth
much in air-force eyes.That night the British hurled a second major attack at Berlin.
This time they lost forty-seven heavy bombers, most of them to
Major Herrmann’s non-radar-controlled “free lancers.” The
British were now in serious difficulties. Trying again to wipe out
Berlin, they killed people on September , but lost twenty-
two more bombers. In the three raids only twenty-seven planes
had come within three miles of the aiming point. The miles of
craters tailing back across the countryside were vivid evidence of
lowering bomber morale. The British called off the attack on
Berlin.
Marshal Badoglio announced on September , , that he had
signed a secret armistice with Eisenhower. Göring was not sur-
prised at all. At the same time the Allies landed at Salerno in
southern Italy. Hotly contested by the Luftwaffe, the beachhead
became an Allied bloodbath as Air Corps’ rocket-firing