At the top Luftwaffe level Hanna Reitsch found little en-
thusiasm, however. Korten was lukewarm, and instructed Colo-
nel Heigl of KG, the special weapons Geschwader, to take the
project up. Göring showed no enthusiasm at all for the scheme.
“We needed strong leadership,” Reitsch later said, criticizing the
spirit with which the Reichsmarschall had imbued the Luftwaffe.
“Leadership, tempered with an idealism to match our own.”
Such thinking was not German exclusively. There was also
fanaticism among the stoical British bomber crews, who kept
doggedly coming back for more despite punishing losses. A
Junkers attacked an RAF heavy bomber over Stuttgart on
March , raking it from underneath with a long burst from its
“sloping music” (schräge Musik), a cannon set at an angle in the
Junkers’ roof. “We pulled up and opened fire,” the sergeant-
navigator Kugler said ruefully later. “We raked them from stem
to stem.... They were dropping and on fire, but their rear
gunner still opened fire on us! He was going down in flames, but
he killed my radio operator and ‘coachman’; missed me, but my
plane was on fire and I had to bail out.”
Two weeks later, on the night of March –, Göring
scored his biggest defense victory of the war. The RAF bombers’
night target was Nuremberg. Despite deafening jamming and
clever feint operations, the fighters had no difficulty in sighting
their prey as the eight hundred bombers scraped condensation
trails across the clear moonlit sky, betraying their general posi-
tion once more by their radar emissions. Schmid fed a total of
fighters of the st, nd, rd, and th Fighter Divisions into
the bomber stream. “From south of Bonn onward,” his war di-
ary grimly records, “the bomber stream’s route was marked by
crashes.” The fighters claimed to have destroyed heavy
bombers that night; the RAF’s own records concede the loss of
over Germany, and a dozen more that crashed after limping