ON a bleak October evening in 1940, Generaloberst Ernst Udet, then chief of the Reichsluftfahrtministerium Technical Department, returned to his secluded villa on the outskirts of Berlin. Pouring himself a stiff brandy at the little cocktail bar in the lounge, Udet carried his glass into the gun-room and selected a revolver from the long rack of gleaming weapons there. Slowly he raised his arm, aiming carefully at the target on the opposite wall, and a moment later the room shook to the thunder of the revolver as shot after shot crashed home. Blue smoke drifted gently around Udet in the angry silence; he stood quite still for a long moment, gazing sadly at the widely scattered bullet holes that told him his old skill, even in this, was no longer there. Then, wearily, he dropped the gun and sank heavily into a chair, staring moodily into space. Again and again, his thoughts returned to the fateful news Goering had confided to him less than an hour before; that Adolf Hitler intended to attack Russia within a year. To Udet, the quiet night outside his home seemed suddenly filled with grim shadows, the accusing figures of Milch, Jeschonnek and the rest, all closing inexorably in to surround him.
Udet was ill and disillusioned, a man broken in spirit by the failure of his Stukas in the Battle of Britain and the unceasing struggle to avoid the intrigue woven around him by his opponents. Always, he longed desperately for those carefree pre-war days when he was free to do and say what he liked: the man who had demonstrated the prototype Messerschmitt Bf 109 and later broken the world speed record in a Heinkel He 100 at a speed of 397 m.p.h., the great ace of 1918 who loved to talk over old times with his former enemies; and above all, never needed to worry about tomorrow, because every new day was an adventure. But Udet knew that he was his own executioner. He had destroyed his freedom for an idea that was now tumbling like a pack of cards around his ears, and he was slowly being strangled by red tape and stupidity, becoming the scapegoat that Goering needed to appease Hitler.
Yet Udet had tried hard to shoulder the responsibilities of his office during the first year of war. More than once, he protested that there was a serious shortage in the aircraft industry of skilled workers and vital materials, such as aluminium, but Goering cheerfully waved all his arguments aside. Germany would soon need fighters and still more fighters to defend the homeland, warned Udet, after the first British bombing raids on Berlin; what did fighters matter when the war would soon be over? smiled Goering, unmoved. Finally, Udet gave up the hopeless battle against such overwhelming complacency and ignorance and simply made his own decisions, unfortunately all too often plunging out of his depth into matters quite beyond him. Meanwhile, he eased his conscience by too much hard drinking and excused his inadequacy by saying, in effect, “I’m doing the best I can in this job, but don’t expect too much from me.”
The dive-bomber fiasco was the real beginning of the end for Udet; if he had never returned from America so filled with enthusiasm for such a daring venture his life would have remained as careless and untroubled as that of any other cosmopolitan playboy in the ’thirties. But he infected the Luftwaffe with “Stuka madness” and for that he alone was to blame. Now, he faced the results of his own, and Jeschonnek’s, thoughtless implementation of the dive-bomber policy; the Ju 87 condemned as a complete failure; the twin-engined Ju 88—the so-called Wonder Bomber—just coming into quantity production as dive-bombing was revealed to be a costly and useless procedure; the new Do 217 being fitted with a complicated, troublesome and totally unnecessary dive brake; and the four-engined He 177 still under development three years after acceptance because it was proving impossible to tum such a huge machine into a dive-bomber.
More than any other single type of German aircraft, the Heinkel He 177 typified the short-sighted policy of the Luftwaffe leaders in refusing to prepare for anything except a localised war. It could have been a decisive answer to the American B-17 Flying Fortress and the mainstay of German air power, for the specification that gave birth to this aircraft called for a four-engined long-range heavy bomber, and resulted directly from the theories propounded by General Wever. Unfortunately, on Wever’s death the development of the Dornier Do 19 and Junkers Ju 89 heavy bombers was abandoned, and the He 177 only allowed to continue in development because it was considered a suitable maritime reconnaissance and anti-shipping bomber. At this time, the He 177 was still on the drawing-board, and had a rival in its new role, the Focke-Wulf Fw 200 Condor, but the Heinkel team, headed by Walter Gunther, nevertheless persisted with the design, which was finalised by 1938, the prototype He 177 flying for the first time in November, 1939.
The He 177 was unusual in employing twin “double-motors” or coupled units, each comprising a pair of inverted vee liquid-cooled engines mounted side by side and geared together, an arrangement successfully tested on the record-breaking Heinkel He 119 prototype fast bomber. The first He 177 was powered by two Daimler-Benz DB 606 units, which each comprised two DB 601 engines and provided 2,700 h.p. for take-off, but many teething troubles were soon experienced with these coupled motors, including frequent engine fires. While these problems, and also certain structural failures, had still to be overcome, Udet reminded Ernst Heinkel that the four-engmed bomber, as such, was dead, and the He 177 must be able to dive before it could enter Luftwaffe service.
“A giant plane like that can’t be a dive-bomber!” objected Heinkel, according to his autobiography, but Udet disagreed. “In practice the machine is twin-engined,” he said, “and if the twin-engined Ju 88 can be a dive-bomber, why not the He 177?”
“Because it’s nearly twice as heavy,” replied Heinkel. Nevertheless, Udet had his way, and the five prototype He 177s were fitted with dive brakes above and below the outer wings, a modification causing further delays in development. Time passed, and the design dragged wearily through 1939 and on into 1940, mainly because the diving characteristics not unnaturally proved to be extremely dangerous in an aircraft weighing over twenty tons. Also, the innumerable troubles with the coupled engines led Emst Heinkel to request authority for the construction of two prototypes as normal four-engined bombers, with four single Junkers Jumo 211 motors. This proposal was rejected at once, on the grounds that the efficiency of the He 177 depended upon it being used with two power units, as the normal four-engined aircraft could not be used as a dive-bomber! This was the kind of curious reasoning that came to be taken for granted by many German aircraft designers—although Heinkel for one tried to argue against it—and eventually led to the disintegration of the industry as a whole.
When the Battle of Britain came to an end, the He 177 was the only new bomber Udet could consider almost ready for squadron service—and this at a time when the He 111, Do 17 and even the Ju 88 had revealed so many operational shortcomings that they needed extensive modifications as to armour and defensive armament. The fighter situation had at first sight a rather brighter outlook, the Messerschmitt Bf 109E comparing favourably with the Spitfire, and the first production batch of an excellent new radial-engined fighter, the Focke-Wulf Fw 190, almost ready to leave the Hamburg and Bremen assembly lines. Also just coming into production was the ill-fated Messerschmitt Me 210, envisaged as a more powerful successor to the inadequate Bf 110. Unfortunately, literally dozens of new fighter and bomber designs were scattered through the German aircraft industry, varying from the conventional to the downright ridiculous, and facing Udet with the unenviable prospect of a bottleneck in the future caused by the arrival of too many different designs at the same time. This was the problem that neither Udet or Milch succeeded in solving; a serious shortage of new types when they were badly needed, and the promise of all kinds of wonderful aircraft just out of reach over the horizon.
Not for the first time, Udet endeavoured to bring about a simplification of types to be produced and thus increase the flow of aircraft into the Luftwaffe; he introduced a plan known as Elk, which was intended to discard all aircraft that had failed under operational conditions and concentrate the industry on the manufacture of a few carefully selected models. Elk could have been a first-class scheme, but, regrettably, Udet chose two types of aircraft destined to remain dogged by ill fortune—the He 177 and the Me 210—as the mainstay of the Luftwaffe bomber arm, with production of the Ju 87 and He 111 to be abandoned. In the event, Plan Elk had in many ways to be turned completely upside down, the He 177 and the Me 210 never fulfilling Udet’s hopes, and output of the He 111K having to be stepped-up despite its obsolescence, for the simple reason that no suitable replacement existed.
In that winter of 1940, Udet had good cause to ponder gloomily on the future of the Luftwaffe; and before Christmas his worst fears had been realised. On 13th December, Hitler issued his Directive No. 20 for the invasion of Greece, code-named Marita, supposedly “… to foil British attempts to create air bases under the protection of a Balkan front… for this would be dangerous above all to Italy as well as to the Rumanian oil fields….” Five days later Directive No 21 confirmed the Fuehrer’s intention to undertake Barbarossa, the invasion of Russia, for it stated: “The German Armed Forces must be prepared to crush Soviet Russia in a quick campaign even before the end of the war against England…. Preparations are to be begun now—if this has not yet been done—and are to be completed by 15th May, 1941….” A further Directive ordered the establishment of a Luftwaffe striking force in Sicily and the transfer of German troops—the nucleus of Rommel’s Afrika Korps—to Tripolitania.
Already weakened by the Battle of Britain, and constantly beset by many internal problems, the Luftwaffe was thus being committed to one full-scale offensive after another in the year ahead; and the R.A.F. bombers continued to roam night after night over an anxious Germany, small in numbers, but always leaving behind them the unspoken question: “When is Hitler going to do something about England?” But the slight, insignificant man roaming restlessly from room to room in his Obersalzburg mountain retreat had for the moment lost interest in Great Britain. He hoped to earn undying fame for himself in the vast wastes of Russia, and it was true he was destined to become a second Napoleon; but in a way that he had never dreamed.
At dawn on 6th April, 1941, as the armoured columns of the Wehrmacht thundered into the Balkans, bomber squadrons of Luftflotte 4 took off from their Rumanian airfields on yet another of those operations that Hugo von Sperrle liked to consider “an act of force”—the systematic destruction of Belgrade by aerial bombardment. For three days the bombs rained down on the stricken city, the unopposed German aircraft skimming the rooftops to make absolutely certain that the centre of Belgrade was destroyed, and when the martyrdom came to an end more than 17,000 people had been killed. “Yugoslavia, despite her protestations of loyalty, must be considered as an enemy and crushed as swiftly as possible,” Hitler had declared, when the pro-German government of that country was overthrown, and Belgrade died as a result of his decision. On 17th April, Yugoslavia capitulated.
Meanwhile, masses of German infantry and armour were flooding into Carinthia and Hungary, Sofia had been occupied, and the Greek Army, which had successfully resisted the Italians for six months, was on the brink of capitulation. Again, this was Hitler’s tried and tested Blitzkrieg technique, carried out so efficiently that on 24th April—a week after hostilities came to an end in Yugoslavia—the Greek government surrendered. For Great Britain, Greece had proved to be another Norway; a punitive expeditionary force of some 60,000 men hopelessly overwhelmed, stunned by sheer weight of metal, and finally evacuated after suffering heavy losses in men and material. The eight R.A.F. squadrons of Blenheims, Hurricanes and Gladiators available were inadequate in numbers if not in courage against the might of Luftflotte 4, and were nearly all destroyed in the air or on the ground, the handful of aircraft that remained being flown to Crete as the campaign in Greece disintegrated into an Allied nightmare.
The island of Crete, a bulwark for the Balkans and Asia Minor, and of vital strategic importance as a Mediterranean base, remained in British hands, the garrison of 8,600 men now reinforced by some 20,000 battle-worn troops evacuated from Greece. Although Crete had four excellent harbours on the north coast—Canea, Rethimnon, Iraklion and also Suda Bay, used as a naval refuelling base—and airfields at Maleme, Irak-lion and Rethimnon, Hitler had not, in fact, planned to launch an operation against the island when he attacked Greece. However, Generaloberst Lohr, the commander of Luftflotte 4, considered that Crete could be captured solely by airborne and parachute troops, and suggested as much to Goering. The Reichsmarschall was only too anxious to throw himself and the Luftwaffe back into the Iimelight of conquest after so many setbacks over England, while Hitler, whose agile brain was teeming with the preparations for Barbarossa, needed very little persuasion before giving his official agreement. Accordingly, on 25th April, 1941, the Fuehrer issued his Directive No. 28, which stated: “An operation to occupy the island of Crete, Operation Merkur, is to be prepared, with the object of using Crete as an air base against Britain in the eastern Mediterranean.” All responsibility for the success of the attack on Crete was slyly delegated to Hermann Goering, who took the burden quite happily on his broad shoulders, secure in the knowledge that the island was defended from air attack by only fifty antiaircraft guns and some thirty obsolescent fighters.
The initial assault on Crete was to be carried out by the airborne and parachute troops of Fliegerkorps XI, under the command of General Kurt Student, supported by the ground attack aircraft of Fliegerkorps VIII, commanded by Baron Wolfram von Richthofen. Using over 500 three-engined Junkers Ju 52 transport aircraft and D.F.S. 230 gliders, it was estimated that Fliegerkorps XI would be able to drop or land from the air about 16,000 men, and it was hoped to land a further 7,000 from the sea. Assembled in the ground support squadrons of Fliegerkorps VIII was a striking force of more then 400 medium bombers and dive-bombers and 250 fighters and reconnaissance aircraft; many of these were in action from 1st May, attacking British naval units, dive-bombing harbour installations in Suda Bay, and finally striking at the unprotected airfields of Maleme and Iraklion. Within a fortnight, twenty-three German aircraft had been shot down, but the R.A.F. suffered such heavy losses during the same period that by 19th May only three Hurricanes and three Gladiators remained undamaged, and the same day they were withdrawn from the island.
On the early morning of 20th May, 1941, the dawn of a warm, fine day, hundreds of Messerschmitt Bf 109 and no fighters rocketed in from the sea in wave after wave of blazing guns and indescribable noise to attack the defences on Crete, followed almost at once by formations of Ju 87 and He 111 bombers, which saturated the airfields at Maleme and Iraklion with a deluge of high explosive comparable only to the bombardment that preceded the Battle of the Somme in 1916. Oddly enough, the infantry cowering in their slit trenches sustained only a scattering of casualties, although the more exposed artillery positions were largely knocked out or rendered ineffective by the smoke and confusion. At last, there came a brief lull in the onslaught; then the alarm whistles were sounding again, and the huge, ponderous Ju 52s were swaying overhead.
Line after line, the lumbering troop carriers throbbed slowly in over Crete at a height of only 300 ft., many of them releasing their towed gliders which drifted gently down to the beach and disgorged armed men, or, with less good fortune, fell into the sea or crashed into olive groves in tangled wreckage. Simultaneously, the sky became filled with hundreds of multi-coloured parachutes, men dropping apparently everywhere, but actually in three main concentrations, over Maleme aerodrome, in Prison Valley near Canea, and on the Akrotiri peninsula. They fell through a hail of rifle fire, and many tumbled through the trees to hang there, riddled with bullets, while others, hurling stick grenades and spraying bursts from their Schmeisser machine pistols, were nevertheless killed before they struck the ground. Time passed, and as the defensive fire slackened more and more of the paratroopers were landing unscathed; although General Meindl, commanding in the Maleme area, was seriously wounded in the initial fighting, and General Sussmann, who had been ordered to take command in the Canea area, was killed when his glider crashed on the island of Aegina. Confusion reigned everywhere, with the airborne troops pinned down by a surprisingly heavy British fire and the parachute troops fighting for their lives as they sought to link up and form their widely scattered groups into a disciplined force.
By nightfall on 20th May General Student had a critical situation on his hands. The airborne troops had to a great extent captured their objectives, but only at the cost of many gliders and an appalling wastage in men. On the other hand, the parachute troops had been handled so fiercely on landing that all timing arrangements had been ruined, and their only success of the day was a precarious hold on Maleme airfield, which immediately came under heavy British artillery fire. Also, during the night a German convoy of assorted small vessels attempting to land troops on Crete was totally destroyed by British warships off Suda Bay, with the loss of some 1,500 men; not a very promising beginning for an operation supposedly depending entirely on close co-operation between the air and sea borne forces.
On 22nd May, Maleme airfield was still in German hands, but under such intense artillery fire that it was still considered impossible to disembark troops from the air, although a few Ju 52s had managed to crash-land on the beaches east and west of Maleme. Hundreds of the big three-engined aircraft continued to drone in monotonously over the sea from Greece, dropping their parachutists with an utter disregard for casualties. Many of the transports were shot down in flames and plunged to earth, tumbling men and equipment into space all the way down; paratroopers fell like stones, trailing long streamers of fire; British machine-gun fire riddled the corrugated fuselages of the slow Ju 52s as they passed overhead; and still the armada would not be repulsed. However, despite their undiminished efforts, the Germans failed to achieve complete success, and the vital airfields remained almost within their grasp but uncaptured.
Many miles away in Berlin, Hans Jeschonnek, with Goermg’s approval, decided to save the situation in Crete, a feat he accomplished very simply by ordering the airborne landing of a mountain infantry division on Maleme airfield—ignoring the artillery fire!—or, if the airfield was no longer in German hands, on the open ground to the west of Maleme. Wolfram von Richthofen’s already overworked Fliegerkorps VIII was required to protect the landings at Maleme, and also support further paratroop attacks on Canea and Suda Bay. It was an admission from Luftwaffe headquarters that the whole operation was in jeopardy, and nothing mattered any longer except success; everyone and everything on Crete was committed and expendable.
On the morning of 22nd May, the troop-carrying Ju 52s again arrived over Maleme, this time to circle slowly and purposefully over the airfield. As they swung in to land, the British artillery fire increased in intensity, but one by one the transports touched down, hurriedly unloaded forty infantrymen into the inferno of shellfire, and then took off again. Rifle and machine-gun bullets swept the airfield, mowing the exposed German troops down like com before the scythe, but reinforcements continued to arrive in an apparently endless stream. Many aircraft were hit, and crashed heavily, engines and bits of wings and tailplanes flying into the air; within a few hours Maleme airfield became a shambles of tangled debris and burning wreckage. All the time, more and more Ju 52s brought in men and equipment and then rumbled away through the smoke and confusion to fly back to Greece and load up once more, returning with a machine-like determination and disregard for human life that appalled the New Zealand defenders.
While the battle at Maleme raged on into the hot afternoon, General Student learned that the parachute landings to the west had met with little success, and his troops were fighting their way forward only very slowly, against strong resistance. However, by nightfall the New Zealand forces were running desperately short of ammunition, and without air support they could not hope to survive much longer. In fact, General Frey-berg, the officer responsible for the defence of Crete, had planned a counter-attack the same night, but with the arrival of such heavy German reinforcements during the day the move was first delayed for some hours and finally abandoned.
What happened to air support for the defenders in the Battle of Crete? On 23rd May, after four days without a British aircraft on or anywhere near the besieged island, six Hurricanes and a few obsolete Blenheims were sent from North Africa, with the remarkable orders to use Iraklion as a base and attempt to disorganise the German airborne landings at Maleme. They survived the unceasing attentions of Fliegerkorps VIII for exactly twenty-four hours; in that time they found Iraklion airfield so pitted with craters that even to land or take off safely amounted to a miracle, the sky overhead was filled with enemy aircraft and the strip itself surrounded by paratroopers who raked everything that moved with automatic fire. Indeed, the only purpose served by this futile gesture from Cairo was a completely negative one, for the unexpected arrival of British fighters immediately brought German reinforcements to the Iraklion area and increased the pressure there.
By 26th May, all the defending forces on Crete were on the point of exhaustion. In the Suda Bay area, the Imperial troops were being pushed relentlessly into the sea, and the men at Rethimnon and Iraklion had been almost completely surrounded during the last two days. Some 20,000 German air-borne and parachute troops now swarmed all over the island, and in the face of such overwhelming opposition General Frey-berg faced a hopeless situation. The following day, his weary forces were ordered to withdraw, while Freyberg urgently requested permission for an immediate evacuation. The living conditions under which the New Zealand and British defenders were existing at this time was beyond description; but without sleep, food or water, they continued to resist the élite and well-equipped German parachute and mountain troops to the bitter end, retreating in good order, carrying their wounded, and even dragging their remaining ammunition along in hand carts. Human endurance could do no more; and two days later the Mediterranean Fleet was despatched to Crete to save those who still survived.
During the night of 29th May the British warships embarked some 6,000 men, on 31st May another 1,500 were lifted from the Sphakia beaches, and the following day a further 4,000 were evacuated. The three cruisers and six destroyers that embarked the Iraklion garrison at first light were attacked repeatedly by German bombers during the return journey to Alexandria, the cruisers Ajax and Orion being heavily damaged and the destroyer Hereward so crippled that it sank during the afternoon. The Battle of Crete thus ended on a note of complete tragedy, for a fifth of the men lifted that morning had been either killed or wounded in the stricken ships, but a total of some 16,500 had been evacuated by the Mediterranean Fleet and brought safely to Egypt; an everlasting tribute to the naval forces based at Alexandria, in view of the severe losses already incurred by the Royal Navy in operations off Crete and Greece.
From the German point of view, a costly and indecisive victory had been achieved, that even to Goering must have seemed scarcely worth the expenditure in men and material. Over 3,600 highly trained airborne troops had been killed, not including 320 men of the Luftwaffe who had also been lost, and some 200 transport aircraft—nearly half the attacking force—lay scattered in wreckage on Crete, together with an untold number of gliders and assorted light aeroplanes. It was all very well for the German High Command to beat the big drum over Crete and emphasise that the invasion had been a dress rehearsal for other operations of a similar nature, with vague references to England, but that in itself did not justify the wholesale destruction of Fliegerkorps XI, Goering’s crack parachute division. Crete was a strategic pearl beyond price; it guarded the whole Balkan peninsula, brought Cyprus, Alexandria, Cairo and Suez within German medium bomber range and threatened Turkey and the Dardanelles. After his success in Greece, Hitler should have realised the importance of Crete; it only remained to be seen if he had the sense to exploit such outstanding possibilities.
In the event, Hitler showed his approval of the victory by boasting that “there are no more unconquerable islands”, and promptly withdrew most of his troops and aircraft from Crete to take part in the forthcoming campaign in Russia. Within a few weeks, only a handful of German and Italian air squadrons were left on the island, and without the bombers which could have struck at the heart of the Middle East, Crete became just another little piece of territory in German hands, a conquest that had served no purpose. So, the wastage of Fliegerkorps XI did not increase Goering’s prestige after all; and yet never before had there been a greater need for him to prove his value to the Fuehrer.
The friendship between Hitler and Goering, already weakened after the failure of the Luftwaffe in the Battle of Britain, had cooled visibly when the Fuehrer declared his intention to attack Russia. For once, Goering decided to speak his mind, and reminded Hitler that Germany would be taking a fearful risk in attempting to wage a war on two fronts. The dictum of Mein Kampf had stressed that very danger, he said; why was the Fuehrer prepared to abandon his own logic now? “There will be no war on two fronts,” replied Hitler, calmly. “The Atlantic Wall will protect us in the west while we quickly overcome Russia.” A lengthy argument ensued, but when it came to an end Hitler was as convinced as ever that Russia should be attacked in the near future, and Goering had gained nothing except the Fuehrer’s unmistakable displeasure.
Then, on 10th May, 1941, occurred the strange incident that severed another link in the relationship between Hitler and the Commander-in-Chief of his Air Force, a thunderbolt out of the blue for both leaders that surprised the Allies and rocked the so-called invincible Third Reich to its very foundations.
That memorable Sunday evening, Hitler was sitting in his spacious study at the Berghof when the arrival of a courier bearing an important letter for the personal attention of the Fuehrer was announced. Hitler glanced at the contents of the letter, there was a moment of awful silence, then the storm burst over the unsuspecting heads of those around him. “Hess has flown to England!” he shouted. “He must be crazy… he has gone to England… call Ribbentrop. I must talk to Goering right away!” He slumped into a chair, mumbling that Hess was crazy, and from time to time shouting that he wanted to see Goering at once. “The Luftwaffe, the damned Luftwaffe again!” he roared at Karl Bodenschatz, Goering’s only representative in the Berghof that night, who was already urgently telephoning his Berlin headquarters.
It was incredible, almost unbelievable. Rudolf Hess was the deputy leader of the party, Hitler’s closest friend for over twenty years, the man who had helped him to write Mein Kampf while they languished together in Landsberg prison after the 1923 Putsch, and ever since accepted as a fanatically loyal member of the Third Reich. What Hitler did not know was that the dark, beetle-browed Hess had for some time been frustrated by the growing power within the Nazi hierarchy of that mysterious, shadowy figure, Martin Bormann, and his muddled reasoning finally convinced him that only by some sensational act of devotion could his former position be regained. Slowly, he became certain that he was the only man in the Third Reich who could bring the war to an end by negotiating a peace between Germany and England. On 10th May, 1941, Hess became Hitler’s unofficial envoy, to gain the notoriety he craved, and surprise the world.
When Goering arrived at the Berghof after a reckless four-hour drive from Veldenstein, Bodenschatz quickly placed the known facts about the Hess affair before him. A first-class pilot, the deputy Fuehrer had taken off alone from the Messerschmitt factory aerodrome at Augsburg in a twin-engined Bf 110 fighter which had later been sighted passing over Oldenburg, flying in the direction of the North Sea. Goering immediately telephoned a surprised Adolf Galland and ordered his whole Geschwader into the air. “The deputy Fuehrer has gone mad and is flying to England in a Bf 110,” he shouted. “He must be brought down!” Then he slammed the receiver into place, leaving Galland to wonder how one particular Bf 110 could be successfully intercepted at an hour when many aircraft of the same type were flying, and within ten minutes of darkness.
The Berghof was in pandemonium, with everyone talking at once and Goering wilting under the barrage of questions Hitler directed at him. “Can he make it? You are an airman, tell me, can he get there alone?” he snapped, but Goering was at a loss for an answer. Finally, Galland called to report that his fighters had failed to sight the missing aircraft, and another argument exploded in the Berghof when Goering suggested that Hess had at least “a fifty-fifty chance” of reaching England, and a statement declaring his insanity should therefore be issued at once. “What if he has fallen into the sea, and nobody knows anything about it?” demanded Hitler, and decided to await British confirmation that Hess had arrived. Meanwhile, he contented himself by ordering the arrest of those nearest and dearest to the deputy Fuehrer, including his wife, his personal staff, and even Willy Messerschmitt, who had so regrettably supplied the new aircraft he would never see again.
Some hours before the agitated men at the Berghof dispersed in the grey light of dawn, Rudolf Hess had reached Scotland, where shortage of fuel brought his flight to an abrupt end. Nevertheless, he baled out within twelve miles of his destination, the home of the Duke of Hamilton, and was arrested by a farmer, identifying himself as a Luftwaffe pilot, Alfred Horn. Later, Hess revealed his correct name, stating that he was “on a special mission of humanity” and requesting an interview with the Duke of Hamilton, to whom he had been introduced during the Berlin Olympic Games in 1936.
After an inconclusive meeting with the Duke of Hamilton, subsequent conversations between Hess and Ivone Kirkpatrick, the former First Secretary of the British Embassy in Berlin, soon proved that the muddled deputy Fuehrer was almost certainly sincere, but also the victim of his own confused delusions. His “peace proposals” included such curious conditions as a free hand for Germany in Europe, the satisfying of certain German demands in Russia, and a reminder that negotiations could not under any circumstances be entered into with the existing British government, which contained Mr. Churchill and his colleagues: “… who had lent themselves to his war policy…” Hess insisted that he had flown to Britain because he felt that England could come to an understanding with Germany without loss of prestige on either side, and warned that a rejection of his proposals would entitle the Fuehrer to destroy Britain utterly without further delay
On 12th May, after Hess’s arrival on British soil had been confirmed, the Goebbels propaganda machine surpassed itself with an official communique which stated: “The party member Rudolf Hess recently managed to obtain an aircraft against the Fuehrer’s strict orders forbidding him to fly on account of an illness which has been growing worse for some time. On 10th May, at about 6.0 p.m., Hess took off from Augsburg on a flight from which so far he has not returned…. It seems that party member Hess lived in a state of hallucination, as a result of which he felt he could bring about an understanding between England and Germany…. This, however, will have no effect on the continuance of the war….”
So ended the political career of Rudolf Hess. The shock of his remarkable flight soon subsided, and he became a forgotten man, remaining a prisoner of war until October, 1945, when he was released to stand trial at Nuremberg. Hitler was only too pleased to find the affair had come to such a quiet conclusion, and after giving orders to have Hess shot at once if he should return to Germany the Fuehrer decided to forget the whole embarrassing business. However, his wrath was still kindled resentfully against Goering, whose position was not unproved by the Hess episode and its aftermath—the appointment as deputy Fuehrer of his old enemy, Martin Bormann. Udet, Milch and Messerschmitt had also been affected by the latest upheaval in the Nazi hierarchy; they could not be accused either of conspiring to assist Hess or professing faith in his convictions, but all three were forced to endure the Fuehrer’s ravings at their ineptitude and returned from Berchtesgaden shaken by the unpleasant experience.
Fortunately for Goering, so many military preparations for the conquest of Russia absorbed Hitler during the spring of 1941 that he found little time to worry about the shortcomings of his air leaders. The Wehrmacht generals had again proved troublesome, displaying their opposition to the Barbarossa plan by quietly raising doubts about the German Intelligence assessment of Soviet strength; they had finally been won over by Hitler’s argument that nothing could be accomplished against England or in the Middle East until Russia was eliminated. “When Barbarossa commences,” he told them, “the world will hold its breath and make no comment!” Yet he had already lost four valuable weeks in conquering Yugoslavia and Greece—a delay the German generals would later assert made the difference between victory and defeat when they were faced with the bitter Russian winter—and the launching of Barbarossa, originally planned for 15th May, was postponed until 22nd June.
Conference followed conference with Hitler reassuring his leaders by telling them that the campaign would be over and done with before the autumn; a few sharp Russian defeats in the early days would lead to the overthrow of the Stalin régime. The most inveterate gambler in history thus committed his greatest blunder of the war in refusing, against all advice to the contrary, to make any preparations for an extended, winter campaign in Russia. Aware that the Soviet forces were numerically superior in men and material, but confident that the weaknesses of the Bolshevik political system were on his side, he assured General Jodl: “We have only to kick in the door and the whole rotten structure will come crashing down.”
In National Socialist Germany the Fuehrer was always right. But Ernst Udet, pondering gloomily amid his gleaming collection of rifles and revolvers, had never been a dedicated party member; and he was beginning to doubt if Hitler and Goering would ever be right again.