lampshade, and Göring evidently this robe.
By night the fighter squadrons turned the war in the air
Göring’s way, and decisively.
On February –, the RAF dispatched bombers to
Leipzig. Schmid’s experts plotted the bomber stream’s radar
emissions perfectly. Although the defense radar was again
jammed and voice communications swamped by the familiar bell
sounds and Hitler speeches, the weather was fine enough to de-
tect the enemy route changes, and German fighters made
contact, bringing down seventy-eight of the RAF planes. No
bomber force could sustain this loss rate for long.
By day it was a different story. On the morning of Febru-
ary , one thousand American bombers opened “Big Week”
the attempt to throttle Göring’s air force once and for all. Over
the next five days they set down ten thousand tons of bombs
accurately on every important target of Göring’s aircraft indus-
try.
For an instant it appeared that the Luftwaffe was defeated.
The week-long offensive left thousands of Göring’s skilled air-
craft workers in mass graves and the gutted, useless skeletons of
hundreds of half-built planes on wrecked production lines. But
Göring gave Field Marshal Milch permission to set up an inter-
ministerial, troubleshooting Fighter Staff (Jägerstab), and even
agreed to allow it to be placed under the control of Karl-Otto
Saur, Speer’s loud-mouthed, dynamic right-hand man. That
way, Albert Speer could no longer evade final responsibility for
the Reich’s air defenses. The Speer ministry rose to the challenge
and released the vitally needed raw materials and machine tools;
aircraft production began to pick up again.
On February , Göring packed his suitcase aboard Asia
and told his staff he was taking three weeks’ leave at Veldenstein