Fighter: The True Story of the Battle of Britain

Three of Göring’s Luftwaffe Generals became Field Marshals at the Kroll Opera House ceremony. One was the dapper little Erhard Milch, senior man at the Air Ministry, as well as Inspector General of the Luftwaffe. The other two were Albert Kesselring, commander of Air Fleet 2, and Hugo Sperrle of Air Fleet 3. Both men were double-jumped in promotion from General der Flieger to Field Marshal. Was this an idea of Göring’s, to lessen Milch’s power? Until this day he had been the Luftwaffe’s only Generaloberst. If so, this divide-and-conquer policy was something Göring had learned from Hitler. To be an arbitrator between rival subordinates is a well-established device of the tyrant. It consolidates power. But in July, as the first skirmishes of the Battle of Britain were taking place, Göring and his three Field Marshals were about to learn that it was no way to win a battle.

Hermann Göring

Hermann Göring grew up in the gothic shadows of a castle at Veldenstein near Nuremberg. His father was a retired government official, once senior officer in German South-West Africa and Consul-General in Haiti. Göring’s godfather – a wealthy bachelor named Epenstein – was a friend of his family. He owned the castle, lived in stylish quarters on the top floor, and shared his bed with Göring’s mother. Her husband tolerated this arrangement.

While still a small child, Hermann went to boarding school. He grew up to be an ill-disciplined boy, so bold that he seemed incapable of recognising physical danger. This seemed exactly the right qualification for military college, and so it proved. By the time war began, in the summer of 1914, Göring was a promising young infantry officer, although not promising enough to be accepted for flying training. So, without him, his closest friend, Bruno Loerzer, went off to get his wings.

As Loerzer finished pilot training, Hermann Göring was nearby, hospitalised by arthritis, after considerable front-line service. Göring could hardly walk, and there was no question of his returning to the trenches. Defying all military regulations, Loerzer put his friend into the back seat of his aeroplane, and they reported for duty, with Field Aviation Unit No. 25, as pilot and observer.

It says much for Göring’s famous charm that the crippled young officer escaped a court-martial, and was allowed to become an aviator. For the Air Service it proved a wise decision. This lame subaltern became one of Germany’s most famous fighter pilots. He won the coveted Orden Pour le Mérite – the Blue Max – and succeeded von Richthofen to command Jagdgeschwader 1, the legendary ‘flying circus’.

For Loerzer it was also a wise decision. Göring never forgot his friend’s loyalty, and on 19 July 1940 at the Kroll Opera House he became a full Luftwaffe General.

In the final hours of the First World War, as communists fought to seize power throughout Germany, Göring came into conflict with a ‘soldiers’ soviet’ in Darmstadt. Göring came off best, as he did later when faced with a mob intent on roughing up any officer in uniform, on the grounds that such men were responsible for the war which Germany had lost. But doubtless these events played a part in Göring’s acceptance of the Nazi creed. And the Nazis’ pathological hatred and fear of Jews went unchallenged by a man who had seen his father humiliated by his mother’s Jewish lover.

In 1922 Hermann Göring joined the Nazi Party. The presence of this ex-officer war hero was very reassuring to the middle classes whose support the Nazis badly needed.

Göring was always the Nazi candidate for political office. He was used to show the voter how responsible the party could be when in power and how willing it was to conform to parliamentary democracy. And so it was Göring who became the President of the Reichstag and the Prime Minister of Prussia.

Hitler appreciated the importance of Göring. When the Nazis got power, Hitler gave him an authority second only to his own. Göring organised storm troopers, took over the Prussian Ministry of the Interior, formed the Gestapo, set up the first concentration camps, and took charge of the economy for the Nazi ‘Four Year Plan’.

A fine horseman and a crack shot, Göring was able to combine his enthusiasm for hunting with a sincere concern for wildlife, and opposition to vivisection. In his youth he had been something of a womaniser but two contented marriages provided him with a stability that many of the other top Nazis did not have. He met his first wife, a countess, after flying through a snowstorm and landing on a frozen-over lake in Sweden. His passenger – a wellknown explorer who’d engaged Göring to fly him home – offered him hospitality in his castle. It was there that Göring met his future wife.

For pleasure Göring read detective stories, his favourite authors being Agatha Christie and Dashiell Hammett, but he could talk with some authority on subjects as varied as mountaineering and the Italian Renaissance. And he could do so in Italian if need be.

Göring’s rise to power gave him a life-style rarely equalled in the twentieth century. He had castles, several hunting estates with grand lodges, and town houses too. The most remarkable of all was Karinhall – named in memory of Göring’s first wife – built between two lakes, with formal gardens, fountains and bronze statues, as well as a large section of private countryside. His servants were dressed in comic-opera outfits: knee-length coats with rich facings, high white gaiters, and silver-buckled shoes. There was a swimming pool, a vast library, gymnasium, art gallery, and one of the world’s most elaborate model-railway layouts. His study was larger than most houses, and in its ante-room there was a wall covered with photographs inscribed with varying degrees of enthusiasm: Boris, King of Bulgaria, ‘to the great marshal’, Prince Paul, Regent of Yugoslavia, ‘with thanks’, Hindenburg, ‘to Göring’.

The pink, girlish complexion, overweight body and many childish indulgences masked a personality capable of superhuman self-control. Göring, wounded during the 1923 putsch, became a morphine addict as a result of his treatment. He eventually cured himself of this addiction by willpower alone.

Five feet nine inches tall, Göring was dynamic – a fluent and persuasive enthusiast with a powerful handshake and clear blue eyes – and many of his antagonists fell prey to his charm.

Göring’s civil power as Air Minister, his military rank as Commander in Chief of the Luftwaffe, and his political status made him incomparably more powerful than any other military leader in Germany. To retain his advantage, Göring was quick to point out to Hitler any failing of his rivals: the army Generals. The power and prestige of pre-war Germany had been largely due to the show of air-power that Göring’s Luftwaffe had staged. Hitler responded by treating the Luftwaffe as a privileged ‘Nazi’ service, while describing his army and navy as ‘Imperial’ legacies of the old regime.

As a confidant of Hitler, and by 1940 named as Hitler’s successor, Göring had personal access to the supreme command. As a ‘General’ who gave the army the closest possible co-operation, Göring was important to the men of the General Staff. As the air ace who inherited von Richthofen’s command, Göring had an unassailable authority among his own flyers.

In 1940 the victories in the west gave the 47-year-old Göring new power, and new tastes of luxury. He went shopping for diamonds in Amsterdam, and took a suite at the Ritz Hotel in Paris. Göring liked Paris so much that he decided to move into a fine house on the Rue du Faubourg St Honoré. That this was the British Embassy – now unoccupied except for one caretaker – made it no less attractive.

Göring took the German ambassador with him to inspect the property but when they explained the purpose of their visit, the custodian said, ‘Over my dead body, your Excellency’, and closed the door in their faces.

As far back as 1933, Hitler had authorised Göring to start a national art collection which would remain in Göring’s hands for his lifetime but then become a public collection. The conquests of 1940, and the way in which the European currencies were all pegged artificially lower than the German mark, gave new impetus to this collection. Many art treasures were simply seized: ‘ownerless’ Jewish collections and ‘enemy possessions’ were taken into new custody. To obtain paintings from unconquered countries, Göring simply swapped his surplus. A dealer in Lucerne, Switzerland, received 25 French Impressionist paintings in exchange for 5 Cranachs and 2 German Primitives.

The regal splendour of Göring’s life-style was completed by his train. Code-named ‘Asia’, its vanguard was a pilot train which accommodated the staff – civilian and military – in comfort that extended to bathing facilities. There were also low-loaders for cars, and freight wagons for Göring’s shopping.

The train in which Göring travelled, and sometimes lived, was specially weighted to provide a smooth ride. This luxury meant two of Germany’s heaviest locomotives were needed to move it. One coach was designed as bedrooms for himself and his wife, and a study. Another coach was a modern cinema. A third was a command post with a map room. A fourth was a dining car.

There were also carriages for his senior commanders and for guests, some of whom (Milch, for example) had a whole carriage to themselves. At front and back, there were special wagons with anti-aircraft guns and crews, although whenever possible the train was halted near tunnels as protection against air attack.

In the spring of 1940 Göring, who liked to be called ‘the Iron Man’, ordered his train west to Beauvais in France, a suitable place to command his Luftwaffe for the attack upon England. Few doubted that Der Eiserner was about to lead his Luftwaffe to a unique military victory. To do it would be nothing less than a personal triumph.

The Rise of the New German Air Force

In November 1918, a defeated Germany was forbidden the use of military aviation. Since there was at that time virtually no other sort of aviation, about a hundred large companies were without work.

AEG (manufacturer of the G.IV twin-engined bomber) had already planned for such a contingency. As early as 1917, they had formed Deutsche Luftreederei, an airline which would use the aircraft they built. So within three months of the war’s end, the world’s first civil aeroplane airline* (#ulink_76b759bc-d4dc-5186-9831-833994099178) connected Berlin with Leipzig, Weimar and Hamburg.

Professor Hugo Junkers, another German aircraft manufacturer, was just as quick to adapt to the changing times. On the very morning that the Armistice was signed, he had held a senior staff conference to discuss the changeover to manufacturing civil aircraft. By 25 June 1919 – three days before the signing of the Versailles Treaty – the outstanding Junkers F-13 was test flown. And while the other transports in use were cumbersome old wood-and-fabric biplanes, Junkers’s new machine was an all-metal cantilever monoplane, and such a breakthrough in design that sales were made in spite of the thousands of war surplus aircraft that were available at give-away prices. It was a period when many wartime flyers formed one-man airlines. But the manufacturers were in the most advantageous position to prosper, and Junkers had shares in several airlines.

Professor Hugo Junkers came from an old Rhineland family. He was a scientist, a democrat and a pacifist. He was also a genius. While working on gas-stove design he became interested in the efficiency of layered metal plates for heat transfer. He built himself a wind tunnel to study the effect of heated gases on various shapes, and ended up as the most important pioneer of metal aircraft construction.

By 1918, as the First World War ended, Hugo Junkers was already 60 years old. He was a white-haired old man with a large forehead and clear blue eyes. He had a large family but was ready to ‘adopt’ brilliant newcomers.

The most successful of Junkers’s protégés was a small, rather pop-eyed man named Erhard Milch. No account of the Luftwaffe, its victories or its failures, would be complete without devoting some words to this strange personality.

Erhard Milch did not create the Luftwaffe (that was the role of General Hans von Seeckt and dated from his memo of 1923), but Milch wet-nursed the infant air force, and dominated it right up to the end.

Milch was born in March 1892 in Wilhelmshaven, where Milch senior was an apothecary of the Imperial German Navy. ‘Loyalty to the Kaiser and loyalty to my country were the only political doctrines I received either as an officer or earlier in my parents’ home,’ he told the judge at Nuremberg at his war-crimes trial.

But the dominant influence upon Milch’s life was a secret that troubled him throughout it. So much so that when, near the end of his life, a biographer discovered the truth, Milch suppressed it still. The facts are simple, but, even in this permissive age, bizarre.

Klara, who was to become Milch’s mother, fell in love with her uncle. Such a marriage was forbidden not only by her parents but by Church law too. Eventually she did her parents’ bidding and married another man – Anton Milch – but did so on the strict understanding that he would not father her children. It was a decision endorsed by the discovery that his mother was in an asylum, and incurably insane. And so she agreed to the arranged marriage on condition that her uncle – the man she truly loved – would be the father of her future children. Erhard Milch grew up to know the wealthy man who visited them as ‘uncle’, not realising that the visitor was his father.

So carefully did his parents guard their secret that it was not until 1933 that the by then middle-aged Milch discovered the truth behind the mysteries that had haunted his youth. And this was the result of an investigation started by an informer who said that Milch’s father was Jewish. It was an accusation calculated to get him removed from the key job he had in the Nazi regime.

The rumours said that because Anton Milch was Jewish, his mother had invented a story about Erhard’s illegitimate birth in order to get Erhard classified as ‘Aryan’. The rumours continued throughout the war and after it. They were fomented by Milch’s evasive replies at the post-war Nuremberg trials. Milch allowed these stories to circulate all his life, for the only way that he could refute them was by revealing a secret that he was determined to take to his grave.

‘I’ll decide who is Jewish and who is not Jewish,’ Göring told several men who came to him with stories of Milch’s birth. But such replies only convinced the accusers that Göring was a part of the cover-up.

But Göring knew all the facts of Milch’s birth. He had in fact been behind the Gestapo’s investigation of the mystery. It is difficult not to wonder what Göring himself made of the curious fact that his right-hand man had a secret about his mother that was even darker than Göring’s own.

Milch was an observer with the German Army Air Service in the First World War. His organisational abilities gave him command of a fighter squadron in spite of the fact that he could not fly an aeroplane! So it was no surprise that Milch proved to be such an able employee in the Junkers organisation. And yet his next change of job took him to the very top levels of commerce. When the German government bullied and cajoled thirty-eight separate airlines into becoming just one subsidised state monopoly, Milch was selected to be one of its bosses. This choice remained ‘inexplicable’ even to Milch: he still couldn’t pilot a plane, had very little business experience and no technical knowledge of aviation or manufacturing.

But Milch learned very quickly. Soon he was paying Hermann Göring – by now an influential Nazi Reichstag deputy – a regular ‘consultancy fee’, and his private papers later revealed the extent to which he was already compiling files of damaging material about his rivals and superiors.

By 1929 Milch was the chief executive of Lufthansa and a secret member of the Nazi Party. His enemies said that his membership was kept secret so that when he falsified Lufthansa accounts (so that the Nazi Party never paid for the aircraft chartered from Lufthansa) no suspicion would attach to him. In 1932 alone, Hitler and other Nazi leaders flew 23,000 miles. Aircraft played a vital part in the Nazi political campaigning. If Milch provided this facility for nothing he certainly earned the rewards he subsequently collected.

Milch became a figure of growing political importance as Lufthansa built airport facilities, organised signal and meteorology networks, and radio beacons for air-corridors. Its personnel were trained in administration, supply and engineering as well as all the mysteries of blind-flying and long-range navigation. Even in its first year, Lufthansa had a night passenger service Berlin–Königsberg to connect with Moscow, and was sending experimental flights far afield. Its G-24s went to Peking and its Dornier Wal flying boats to Brazil. As early as 1930, civil aviation in Germany (measured by passengers or by mileage) was as big as all the British and French civil aviation services combined! All gliding records were, at this time, held by Germany and Austria.

By 1932 (and this was a year before the Nazis came to power) Germany had a claim to be the leader of world aviation. The Graf Zeppelin airship – carrying about sixty people and freight – had circumnavigated the world, been on long cruises to Egypt, Iceland and the Arctic, and in March 1932, begun a scheduled service between Friedrichshafen and Rio de Janeiro. This was to be the only transatlantic air service for another seven years! The experimental twelve-engined Dornier Do X had crossed both the South and North Atlantic and a German pilot in a German plane had made the first east–west crossing of the North Atlantic.

Professor Junkers’s series of all-metal monoplanes had culminated in the classic Junkers Ju 52/3m. By 1932 it was in service on the Berlin–Rome and Berlin–London routes. Lufthansa now connected Berlin with Barcelona, Moscow and Athens, flying a daily average of 30,000 miles.

No country in the world had training facilities to compare with the Deutsche Verkehrsflieger Schule (German Air Transport School), where so many of the Luftwaffe’s pilots learned to fly bombers. To supply candidates for Lufthansa’s training, there were about 50,000 active members of gliding clubs of the Deutsche Luftsportverband. In 1932, the 20-year-old Adolf Galland, already a skilled glider pilot, applied for training as a Lufthansa pilot: of 4,000 applicants, only 18 were accepted. The examinations lasted ten days.

This intense interest in aviation was shared by the general public. The 14-year-old apprentices, working at any aircraft factory, would find glider construction a mandatory part of their apprenticeship, and would not become qualified tradesmen unless they possessed the glider pilot’s licence.

When the Nazis gained power, Erhard Milch was the obvious choice to build in secrecy a new air force. Professor Hugo Junkers had by now become an outspoken critic of the Nazis. He was one of the most powerful individuals in German aviation, and by far the most brilliant. Milch decided that he could gain control of the aviation manufacturing industries by making an example of his one-time benefactor and employer.

Milch sent the police to arrest Junkers. He was accused of many offences, including even treason. Armed with the terrible power of the totalitarian state, Milch broke Junkers. The end of the interrogations came only when Junkers assigned 51 per cent of his various companies to the State. This was not good enough for Milch. He then demanded, and got, chairmanship of the companies for his own nominees. Still not satisfied, Milch put the ailing old man under house arrest, until he gave the State the remainder of his shares. Less than six months afterwards, Hugo Junkers died. Milch sent a delegation of mourners from the Air Ministry, with a suitably inscribed wreath. This so angered Junkers’s family that the men from the ministry returned to Berlin without attending the ceremony, rather than face their wrath.