Eagle Day The Battle of Britain (2021).pdf

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To the unknown pilot
Chapter One
“My God, Life Wouldn’t Seem Right…”
August 6–7
At sunrise the house named Karinhall was silent. It sprawled, as still as a
slumbering animal, a vast unwieldy pile of hewn stone, forty miles north-
east of Berlin, amid the sandy plain called the Schorfheide. Yet the silence
was deceptive: on this hazy August morning of 1940, eyes were watching
everywhere at Karinhall. Through the dark forests beyond the terrace
wound fences inset with photo-electric cells, set to sound instant alarm in
guardrooms along the boundary. In these razor-edged days, the house’s 120-
strong security force, under General Karl Bodenschatz, could take no
chances.
But this morning, there were few overt signs of trouble; the overlord of
this feudal complex, forty-seven-year-old Reichsmarschall Hermann
Goring, Commander-in-Chief of the Luftwaffe, was in benevolent mood.
As Goring towelled after an icy shower, before donning an ornate silk robe,
his valet, Robert Kropp, knew just the gramophone music to choose for his
master’s serenade this morning – lively excerpts from Auber’s
Fra Diavolo
or even
Arabella.
For today, Tuesday, August 6,1940, all the omens were
good.
It was just nine weeks since Dunkirk, six since the Fall of France – yet
still there was no indication that Great Britain would realise the true
hopelessness of her position and sue for peace. Three weeks back, even
before Winston Churchill’s outright rejections of a peace offer, made
through the King of Sweden, Hitler, angered by the stalemate, had issued
his famous Directive No. 16: since England seemed unwilling to
compromise, he would prepare for, if need be carry out, a full-scale
thirteen-division invasion of the island on a 225-mile front – from
Ramsgate on the Kentish coast to west of the Isle of Wight. The code-name
for what Hitler styled “this exceptionally daring undertaking” was “Sea-
Lion”.
But, the directive stressed, prior to any such landing, “The British Air
Force must be eliminated to such an extent that it will be incapable of
putting up any substantial opposition to the invading troops.”
To Goring, sipping breakfast coffee, this seemed no insuperable task. The
French collapse had given his Luftwaffe fully fifty bases in northern France
and Holland; even the short-range planes that accounted for half of the
2,550 machines immediately available – Messerschmitt 109 fighters,
Junkers 87 (Stuka) dive-bombers – were now within twenty-five minutes
striking distance of the English Channel coast. Since July’s end, no British
convoy had dared to run this formidable gauntlet – and as Goring had
warned the world through a July 28 interview with a U.S. journalist, Karl
von Weygand, to date the Luftwaffe’s strikes had been child’s play, “armed
reconnaissance only”.
And to the top commanders whom he’d this day summoned to mull over
final details, men such as Generalfeldmarschall Erhard Milch, the
Luftwaffe’s Inspector-General, and Generaloberst Hans-Jurgen Stumpff,
commanding Air Fleet Five in Norway, it seemed that Goring hadn’t a care
in the world. Both Air Fleet Two’s Generalfeldmarschall Albert Kesselring,
and Generalfeldmarschall Hugo Sperrle, chief of Air Fleet Three, whose
300-pound bulk earned him the nickname “The Monocled Elephant”, found
him benign, even cocky. To Goring, following the whirlwind Polish and
French campaigns, to step up aircraft production beyond the 1939 level of
460 planes a month now seemed pointless – and bombers, the proven
spearhead of these campaigns, still had priority above fighters.
So this morning, as some present later recalled, it was as much a social
occasion as a rehearsal for battle. Resplendent in his sky-blue uniform,
Goring seemed more eager to show off the Renoirs in his art-gallery than to
discuss tactics – and as aides in smartly cut uniforms hovered with brandy
and cigars, Kesselring and Sperrle exchanged meaningful glances. Now,
with each week that passed, Goring, like any new-rich millionaire, grew
more steadfast in fantasy – and today his whole strange world, lying at the
end of a two-mile avenue flanked by marble lions, would surely be
displayed to them anew… the silk and silver hangings and the crystal
chandeliers… the gold-plated baths… the private cinema and the bowling
alley… the model beer-cellar… even canary cages shaped like dive-
bombers.

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