Reichsmarschall also wanted “another talk with the Führer”
about it. Incongruously, the supposedly life-weary glider pilots
were unenthusiastic about converting to the dangerous, death-
laden FW . When Lieutenant Colonel Werner Baumbach
shortly replaced Heigl at KG, the FW plan was quietly
shelved. Writing to Hitler on July , Speer would oppose
wasting the brave men on the invasion ships far more profi-
table, he would argue, to use them against the Soviet power sta-
tions instead. The suicide squadron became a hot potato. It was
handed back to Hanna Reitsch, then to the scar-faced SS Colo-
nel Otto Skorzeny. They forwarded it to Galland; he passed it to
Göring, during a train journey from Rominten to Berlin; and
the Reichsmarschall passed the buck to his lethargic crony, the
chief of personnel Bruno Loerzer. This was his own sure way of
ensuring that nothing got done.
There was an inherent fallacy, but only Galland seems to
have spotted it. “I told my men,” he recalled a year later, “that if
you’re going close enough to ram [a bomber] anyway, you can
shoot them down and have a fifty-fifty chance of coming down
alive.”
On the first day of the Allied invasion Hitler had ordered
Göring to launch the flying-bomb reprisal attack on London.
After six days of rushed preparations and a humiliating pre-
mature effort ending in fiasco, the pilotless missile attack on
London was resumed in earnest on the fifteenth: flying
bombs were catapulted and an Me pilot reported huge fires
sweeping the British capital. Suddenly Göring was persona grata
at the Berghof again.
Within a few weeks these missiles were destroying thirty
thousand homes a day in South London. More important, they
were diverting a colossal bombing effort away from German cit-