soured even as it passed his lips. The BBC scoffed that the Ger-
mans had been caught with their pants down. Göring himself
used a different sartorial metaphor. “The Reichsmarschall,” his
humorless office signaled all echelons on June , , “has es-
tablished that, during enemy operations and the state of emer-
gency, men of the Luftwaffe have been sleeping with their
clothes off.” This signal too, was intercepted and deciphered by
the British. This cipher weakness would prove crucial to the
thwarting of Göring’s anti-invasion operations in Normandy.
On the seventh, for example, the British deciphered his orders
to three fighter-bomber squadrons thus:
. Concentrate attack on tank assemblies at
Periers-sur-le-Dam...
. Time of attack : hrs.
. Fighter cover by simultaneous operation
of elements of Fighter Corps.As things went awry in France, Göring recalled Hanna Reitsch
and her suicide squadron. He found it had made little real pro-
gress. Production of the special Me glider-chariot at Gotha
was only fitful, so the unit was converting to the Fi flying
bomb, modified to include a pilot’s cockpit. Since several test
pilots had been killed, Colonel Heigl of KG proposed using
souped-up FW fighter bombers instead: each could carry as
much as a ,- or ,-kilo armor-piercing bomb (since it
would not, of course, need any fuel for a return flight). Koller’s
record for June confirms that Heigl’s squadron had thirty-
nine volunteers standing by to carry out what was coyly referred
to as this “total operation” (Totaleinsatz) in fourteen days’ time.
Himmler, however, intervened to ask Hitler to forbid the pre-
mature mission and, on June , Koller noted that the