Reich, he would rush nineteen fighter squadrons (the entire
Air Corps) to France along with a number of bomber squadrons
and reconnaissance flights; eight of the fighter squadrons would
be converted there to fighter-bombers and placed under Air
Corps (General Buelowius) as a ground-attack command. That
was the plan, and Göring hammered it in with a number of or-
ders that spring. “Invasion, invasion, invasion,” one captured Ju
pilot was heard whispering to another in April. “You’d bet-
ter believe it. That is going to be the clincher!” He recited two
orders issued by Göring to be read out on the invasion front
one assigning specific altitudes to bomber squadrons for daylight
formation attacks on the Allied invasion fleet, and the other
saying verbatim: “This invasion must be defeated even if there’s
no German Air Force left at the end of it.... What Eisenhower
asks of his troops I expect from my Luftwaffe, but more so.”
Even before this exhortation, the fanatical Nazi woman
aviator Hanna Reitsch had begun dreaming of a suicide force to
attack the Allied invasion fleet “piloted,” as she put it under
interrogation, “by healthy young men who believe that through
their deaths thousands of soldiers and civilians can be saved.”
She was thinking in terms of one thousand volunteers. She took
the project to Hitler on February , , at the Berghof. Hitler
scoffed at the idea of a kamikaze force. “It is not in keeping with
the German character,” he told her, but authorized her to de-
velop the plan. Himmler welcomed it as a useful employment
for condemned criminals. A suitable explosive chariot was se-
lected initially Reitsch picked the still-experimental Me
flying bomb: The pilot would guide it into the sea just short of
the target; its two-thousand-pound warhead would explode be-
neath the hull. An aviation doctor at Rechlin was asked to inves-
tigate how close to suicide man could go and still function logi-
cally.