WITH PLANNING FOR HIS INVASION of Russia—Operation Barbarossa—well underway, Hitler found Britain’s continued resistance galling. He would require every available soldier, tank, and aircraft for the campaign, after which he would be free to focus his attentions on the British Isles. Until then, however, he needed to negotiate a peace or otherwise neutralize Britain as a viable foe, and it was here, with an invasion of England at least temporarily out of consideration, that the Luftwaffe continued to play the most critical role. Its failure to achieve the victory promised by Hermann Göring was undoubtedly a source of frustration for Hitler, but he remained hopeful that his air force would prevail.
On Thursday, February 6, he issued a new directive, No. 23, in which he ordered the air force and navy to further intensify their attacks against England, ideally to cause Churchill to surrender but, short of that, to at least weaken British forces to the point where they could not disrupt his Russian campaign. With Russia now thought to be speeding production of aircraft, tanks, and munitions, the longer he waited, the harder it would be to achieve his vision of utter annihilation.
The increased intensity of attacks, the directive said, would have the secondary benefit of creating the illusion that a German invasion of England was imminent, and thereby force Churchill to continue allocating forces for home defense.
GÖRING WAS DISMAYED.
“The decision to attack the East made me despair,” he later told an American interrogator.
He tried to dissuade Hitler, he claimed, by quoting Hitler’s own book, Mein Kampf, which warned of the dangers of a two-front war. Göring was confident that Germany could readily defeat the Russian army, but he believed the timing was wrong. He told Hitler that his air force was on the verge of bringing about England’s collapse and surrender. “We’ve got England where we want her and now we have to stop.”
Hitler replied: “Yes, I shall need your bombers for just three or four weeks, after that you can have them all back again.”
Hitler promised that once the Russian campaign ended, all newly freed resources would be poured into the Luftwaffe. As one witness to the conversation reported, Hitler promised Göring that his air force would be “trebled, quadrupled, quintupled.”
Recognizing that he could push Hitler only so far, and always covetous of his favor, Göring resigned himself to the fact that the invasion of Russia would indeed occur, and that he needed to play a key role in its execution. He convened a meeting of military planners at the Gatow Air Academy, outside Berlin, to begin detailed preparations for Barbarossa.
It was “strictly top secret,” wrote Luftwaffe field marshal Kesselring. “Nothing leaked out. Staffs were as much in ignorance of what was in the wind as the troops.”
Or so the German High Command imagined.
IN ACCORD WITH DIRECTIVE No. 23, the Luftwaffe stepped up its attacks against England, hampered only by bouts of bad winter weather. Its pilots encountered little resistance. They could tell from their daily experiences that the British still had not found an effective means of intercepting aircraft at night.