bluster: “If you don’t shoot down five hundred B-s the next
time,” he said, “you’re all transferring to the infantry!” At one
stage he dramatically ripped his medals off and slammed them
down, declaring that he would put them on again only when his
pilots starting shooting down planes. “That really nettled Gal-
land,” said one Heinkel pilot. “They all took off their Knight’s
Crosses then.” Much of the sermon was vintage Göring he
forbade any aviator to abort a mission because of defective “wa-
ter thermometers” or “speedometers.” Adding insult to injury,
he also ordered excerpts of his speech broadcast by loudspeaker
at every fighter airfield.
Göring returned to East Prussia after that, fearing Bor-
mann’s vendetta more than Stalin’s military rabble.
Hitler had meanwhile sent yet again for General von
Greim. Torn between sentiment and pragmatism, however, he
once more abandoned the idea of dispossessing the Reichsmar-
schall. “I think that Hitler still felt too close to Göring from the
years of struggle,” his air-force adjutant von Below said after-
ward. Bormann, thwarted once again, poured out his irritation
in a letter on the last day of October. “People refer,” he wrote,
“to the constant failure of the Luftwaffe high command ever
since Stalingrad and North Africa.”
A few days later Kreipe’s tenure of office was over. In a
farewell conversation with him on November , Göring candidly
referred to the general’s somber memorandum, and advised
him never again to commit such dark thoughts to paper. “I am
sure,” he prophesied, “that there is going to be a ‘Nibelungen’
struggle, but we shall fight it out on the Vistula, on the Oder,
and on the Wesel.” Since these latter rivers were in the heart of
Germany, it was not a joyous prospect.
Kreipe pleaded with him to persuade Hitler to revert to
diplomacy.