Goering (35 page)

After considerable vacillation, Hitler finally decided that Operation Yellow, the code name for the invasion of the West through Holland and Belgium, should begin on May 10. In less than six weeks the Germans, to their own surprise, became the masters of Holland, Belgium and France.

By the time this devastating campaign was launched, the Luftwaffe had become the world's largest air force. Goering had some 3,500 operational aircraft for the invasion, organized in two air fleets commanded by Kesselring and Sperrle. Kesselring's command included naval air operations and mine laying, and the all-important paratroop division commanded by General Student. This division and the dive bombers were prominent in the strategy, as they had been in Scandinavia; it was the main landing of Goering's airborne troops that took the Dutch by surprise. The invasion involved the merciless bombing of Rotterdam by Stukas in which over eight hundred persons were killed and many thousands injured at the very time the surrender of the city was being negotiated.

The ruthless bombing of Rotterdam was a further sign of Hitler's aggressive cruelty. Though it was a defended city and its capitulation had not taken place at the time of the attack, both Goering and Kesselring should have been aware that the negotiations for surrender were in progress; Student, who had initially asked for the attack, had sent a radio message at noon to that effect and saying that the proposed raid should be postponed. It has been assumed that Goering and Kesselring deliberately launched the attack to hasten the negotiations, and that there was confusion over the flares put up to cancel it. Kesselring refers to “hours of heated conversation with Goering” about the raid and whether it should take place at all. The effects of the raid were seriously aggravated by the fire department's being put out of action, and by flaming oil from a margarine factory. But whether Goering was deliberately careless of the lives of the Dutch or not, ruthlessness is revealed by his public announcement on May 28 that all captured French airmen would be put in chains because the French were reported to be ill-treating German airmen whom they had taken prisoner; he declared that he would shoot five French prisoners for every German airman shot, and that he would increase this to fifty if a German flyer were shot while parachuting to earth.

It was at this time that the King of Italy consented at last to award Goering his Collar of the Annunziata. Ambassador Alfieri hurried at Ciano's orders to the battlefront and there met Goering in his armored train, which was covered with camouflage netting, surrounded by antiaircraft guns and stationed near a tunnel in case of emergency. Goering's voice quivered with emotion as he thanked the ambassador for the decoration he had coveted so long; after the little ceremony of presentation, he told him about the successes of the Luftwaffe and the invincible strategy of the blitzkrieg. The war, he claimed, would soon be over. Then he squeezed himself sideways through the door to the dining saloon, and returned almost immediately wearing his Collar. He called for the photographers and carefully posed for them displaying his new order. It had taken far longer for him to overcome the resistance of the King of Italy than to conquer the armies of the West.

The attack on Belgium proceeded at such a dramatic pace that Hitler had a nervous crisis. He was “frightened by his own success,” as Halder noted at the time. He halted the advance of his armored divisions twice at the very time they most needed to press on. The second of these halts was on May 24 twenty miles outside Dunkirk, where he appeared to have the northern Allied armies completely cut off and at his mercy. On May 28 the King of the Belgians capitulated without consulting his allies.

The reason for Hitler's decision to halt has been debated ever since it happened. The evidence collated by Shirer, and based to a considerable extent on a letter from Halder, makes Goering ultimately responsible. The German armored columns were halted by Hitler and General von Rundstedt, who were in conference at the latter's Army Group A headquarters at Charleville. Halder noted bitterly in his diary, “Finishing off the encircled enemy army is to be left to the Air Force!” Goering had intervened and offered to bomb the enemy into submission; he was overheard saying to Hitler, “My Luftwaffe will complete the encirclement and will close the pocket at the coast from the air.” Halder wrote later to Shirer:

During the following days it became known that Hitler's decision was mainly influenced by Goering. To the dictator the rapid movement of the Army . . . became almost sinister. He was constantly oppressed by a feeling of anxiety that a reversal loomed . . .

Goering, who knew his Führer well, took advantage of this anxiety. He offered to fight the rest of the great battle of encirclement alone with his Luftwaffe, thus eliminating the risk of having to use the valuable panzer formations. He made this proposal . . . for a reason which was characteristic of the unscrupulously ambitious Goering. He wanted to secure for
his
Air Force, after the surprisingly smooth operations of the Army up to then, the decisive final act in the great battle and thus gain the glory of success before the whole world.
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Guderian, the panzer leader, also said, “I believe it was Goering's vanity that caused Hitler to make his momentous decision.” The only Army intervention Goering wanted was a simple mopping-up operation which should follow the major action that he would initiate. Meanwhile the paralyzed panzers would stand by at a safe distance to keep the human target hemmed in.

The order to halt was withdrawn two days later, on May 26, but by that time the British evacuation plan was under way and the German tanks found themselves faced by three British divisions supported by heavy artillery. The Luftwaffe failed to vindicate Goering's boasts, for two reasons. The first was that bad weather frequently grounded the planes (which in any case did not at this stage fly at night, when the evacuation was continued), and the second was that the Luftwaffe met its first strong opposition by an air force that was to prove its match. The Messerschmitts met the Spitfires, which, although outnumbered, outclassed the German fighters in performance.

The Luftwaffe bombed Dunkirk harbor on May 27, but did not completely destroy it; it was still usable on May 28, when the bad weather combined with smoke from the stores and fuel that had been set alight to obscure the action below. By May 29 the Germans realized the extent of the evacuation that was going on, and the Luftwaffe began to attack the boats. The R.A.F. retaliated, often above the clouds, which led to the unfortunate belief among the beleaguered soldiers that they had been deserted by their Air Force. On May 30 the Luftwaffe was grounded by the weather, but it renewed its attacks on the ships on May 31. “We are now paying for our failure to cut off the West, due to interference from above,” wrote Halder in his diary. On June 1 came the greatest battle in the air, and each side lost some thirty planes. After this the evacuation continued only at night until the weather once more turned in its favor and the Luftwaffe was again grounded. The evacuation ended only on June 4, when the German ground forces, not the Luftwaffe, overcame the Allied resistance (Raeder, his Navy either sunk or confined to Norway, could do little to oppose the British at sea); but by that time 338,000 Allied troops, including some 60,000 French, had been rescued. Goering turned this failure into the semblance of a triumph by going with his staff into Dunkirk and gloating over the vast piles of undestroyed booty left by the retreating enemy.

On June 5, the day after Dunkirk had fallen, Milch joined Goering in his train, which was drawn up in a tunnel near the Channel coast, and proposed that a carefully co-ordinated series of mass parachute landings should be made on the R.A.F. fighter stations in England. Goering agreed to put this to Hitler.
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Further meetings to discuss it were held on June 18 and 27, by which time France had capitulated.

Hitler, however, still hoped for peace, and he gave another, and this time a political, reason, which Halder duly noted, why he did not want the decisive battle against the Allies to take place on Flemish soil; he regarded the Flemish as cousins to the Germans, and he wanted to keep their land intact. Also he was beginning to think he could persuade the British to accept peace now that Germany was dominant in Western Europe. He seems to have accepted Goering's failure in good part, perhaps for this reason. He invited Mussolini to join in the final defeat of France once the French Air Force had been liquidated. Mussolini entered the war on June 10, but his forces made no headway in the south, while the French high command refrained from any offensive action against Italy. The victory was Hitler's, and the armistice terms that he dictated to France were entirely of his making. On June 18 Hitler said to Goering, “The war is finished. I'll come to an understanding with England.” Goering, greatly moved, beamed and said, “Now at last there will be peace.”

The old railway coach in which the 1918 armistice was signed was torn from its museum and set up in a sunlit clearing in the forest of Compiègne, a forlorn relic isolated beneath the trees. There Hitler, accompanied among others by Goering, Ribbentrop, Keitel and Hess, arrived in a car at three-fifteen on the afternoon of June 21. Goering carried his field marshal's baton. Together they looked at the granite block on which were inscribed the words, “Here on the eleventh of November, 1918, succumbed the criminal pride of the German Empire—vanquished by the free peoples which it tried to enslave.” The film cameras recorded every moment of the scene as Hitler's face took on its pathological expression in which contempt and triumph were horribly matched. Then they entered the coach and there received the group of Frenchmen sent to negotiate the terms of armistice. Hitler left Keitel in charge of the discussions, which continued for two days. The railway coach at Compiègne was then taken to Berlin, and the granite plaque that had offended Hitler and Goering in the moment of their glory was blown to pieces. Hitler went for a sight-seeing tour of Paris, while Goering took advantage of the moment to make the first of his many visits to the city which was to become one of the principal centers where he could forget war and indulge his pursuit of works of art for the great collection he was now assembling.
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Halder noted in his diary on July 4 that Goering was demanding that an economic commission should be set up parallel to the armistice commission to settle all aspects of French economic life, including confiscation of raw materials for Germany.

On July 19 in the Kroll Opera House Hitler proclaimed the victories of his genius to an assembly of the Reichstag; then he offered Britain peace. After this, he made the principal agents of his power into field marshals and generals. Goering was proclaimed the “Reichsmarschall des Grossdeutschen Reiches.” Shirer, who was present at the ceremony, describes Goering sitting on his president's dais scribbling out his own speech while Hitler spoke, chewing his pencil and frowning “like a schoolboy over a composition,” clapping his hands “with Gargantuan gestures” and waving his arms “like a boxer in the ring” when Hitler announced that Milch, Kesselring and Sperrle were to become field marshals, and even “sneaking a glance under the cover of the lid” when Hitler handed him the box containing his special baton.
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In July Goering entrusted Walther Funk, Reich Minister of Economics, with the task of forming the plan for the German New Order in Europe. This New Order was created gradually by a succession of statements and decrees and never existed in the form of a charter or published plan. The integration of industry throughout the whole territory under German control formed a major part of the scheme, with specialization of production in different countries, and with an increase of agriculture (a less profitable occupation than industry) in the countries outside the Reich. The whole idea was based on the Golden Age—but golden for Germany, not her tributaries.

When Churchill rejected Hitler's propagandist peace offer, the problem was thrown back to Hitler and his commanders whether or not to proceed with the invasion of Britain. Both Kesselring and Student, like Milch, were said to have been in favor of invasion after Dunkirk, but Goering rejected this immediately. If Britain was to be beaten, bombing must come first. So Air Fleets 2 and 3 were concentrated along the newly captured Channel coast during June and July, when Hitler was turning over in his mind the various ways in which Britain could be brought to the point of negotiation or capitulation.

Hitler hated the sea. As Halder noted, he thought crossing the Channel would be very hazardous, and the German high command had had no experience in naval operations, except for the none-too-encouraging action in Norway which had seriously depleted Germany's small Navy. All the preliminary, theoretical planning in 1939 for Operation Sea Lion, the projected invasion of Britain, had led to doubts from one source or another, and now when the time had come to take advantage of Britain's weakness (in July Britain could have armed only some six divisions on her own soil, whereas arms were available for twenty by September), controversy and indecision dominated Hitler's headquarters. Goering had a habit of trying to curry favor with Hitler by showing up the deficiencies of the other commanders. The feud between Raeder and Goering, which had started over the Scandinavian invasion, intensified.
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Goering had sent Raeder a grossly insulting telegram telling him to mind his own business, in reply to the Admiral's request that a strong air force be kept to protect the German naval base at Trondheim. Because of the uselessness of the Navy during the western campaign, Raeder came to Hitler's headquarters bursting with plans for transporting German troops to the shores of England. Rundstedt's counterproposals were unacceptable to the Navy. Milch mulled over the idea of dropping paratroopers on the English airfields, and Kesselring, convinced that landings would be possible on the beaches he could see with the naked eye from Cap Gris-Nez, chafed at the inaction forced upon him. With Hitler's and Goering's approval, “deception drops” of fake paratroop materiel, maps and instructions were made by the Luftwaffe to unnerve the British and give them rumors to publish in the press. When, in late June, the R.A.F. sporadically bombed Germany, Goering wanted to strike back, but Hitler still restrained him, though very minor operations over England were outlined in a directive issued by Goering on June 30. By mid-July, Hitler had approved the final invasion plan, and at a conference convened by Goering on July 21 he told his staff that they now had a new task ahead of them: inflicting damage on the British Navy in the United Kingdom. By the end of July Hitler was persuaded by Raeder to consider giving up the idea of invasion during 1940, but meanwhile to unleash the Luftwaffe against Britain. The order was issued on August 1. Sea Lion, over which the Army and the Navy continued to wrangle, would depend on the results.