use. He thinks it’s enough to pulverize our airplanes.”
He was under no illusions about the coming of the Allied
invasion. Against the opinion of most of the army generals, he
and Hitler agreed that the invasion was likely to hit Normandy
or the Cherbourg Peninsula. On April , his bombers executed
their first attack on the invasion forces assembling at Ports-
mouth and Southampton. The returning planes reported
sighting probable tank-landing craft enough to lift three
divisions and enough shipping for six more divisions dis-
persed along the south coast. The Luftwaffe photographs also
revealed the prefabricated “Mulberry Harbor” caissons, each
meters by meters, identified as “jetties for major landings.”
Coverage of the entire British coastline confirmed to Göring
that this was the only invasion force. He transferred two of his
best divisions, the st Airborne and the th Paratroop, to the
Cherbourg Peninsula.
Another month had passed. Late on April , Saur
phoned. They had now produced , new fighter planes and
repaired . But on May , the Luftwaffe’s terminal nightmare
began. The Americans suddenly opened an offensive against the
Reich’s synthetic-oil refineries. The next day Allied code-
breakers heard Göring ordering flak defenses switched from the
already denuded Russian front and the aircraft factories at
Oschersleben and Wiener Neustadt to the synthetic-oil plants. It
was clear proof that the Germans were giving the defense of
their oil a priority “even above the defense of aircraft manufac-
ture,” and the British code-breakers remarked upon it.
In the weeks before the invasion Göring was confronted with a
moral issue that was to turn up again at his subsequent trial. In-
dividual American fighter planes had begun machine-gunning
trains and even civilians in the fields. The public responded with