rule during the first twenty-four hours whether this Normandy
invasion was real or a feint.
Not until late on the seventh would the high command
authorize Göring to start transferring the eight hundred fighter
planes from the Reich to France.
Thus, for the air force the invasion battle was virtually lost
before it began. Against the , sorties flown by Allied planes
on the sixth, the Luftwaffe could muster only eighty Nor-
mandy-based fighter planes. Some units did make a fitful start
from Germany. At : .. the first and second fighter squad-
rons of Jagdgeschwader signaled that they were on their way
with thirty-one and thirty-two FW s respectively; the third
squadron reported, rather less ardently, that it would take off
“when the thunderstorm now over the airfield has passed.” The
example of another unit, the third squadron of JG, may stand
for all the rest: Of twenty-two FW s setting out that evening
from Cologne, only two arrived at the right destination Villa-
coublay Airfield and only one was serviceable the next day.
The papers of Karl Koller, Korten’s deputy, show that by
late on June , Buelowius had only five ground-attack planes
and ninety-five fighters operational in Normandy. Allied code-
breakers heard the Luftwaffe specify the airfields at which seven
new squadrons were to arrive; within one hour those airfields
were in Allied target dossiers. By the ninth, fifteen fighter
squadrons (though still not the nineteen originally promised)
had arrived with Me s and FW s, of which total
were serviceable; but their airfields were moonscapes of bomb
craters, and their ground organization nonexistent.
Richthofen’s diary, however, reveals that optimism initially
prevailed on the Obersalzberg. Koller’s papers contain the u p -
beat message that Göring sent congratulating his staff on their
brilliant work before the invasion. But the nectar of triumph