Eagles of the Third Reich: Men of the Luftwaffe in WWII (Stackpole Military History Series) (54 page)

For Erhard Milch, the day of reckoning for his silence came at the Berghof on the afternoon of May 23, 1944. Col. Edgar Peterson, the director of Luftwaffe Research Establishments, was briefing Hitler on the Me-262 program. Goering, Speer, Saur, Milch, and Galland were also present. Peterson referred to the jet as a fighter. Hitler interrupted, saying he thought the Me-262 was coming out as a high-speed bomber. How many, the Fuehrer wanted to know, had been manufactured as bombers? All eyes turned to Milch, who was finally forced to admit that none had been. Hitler was stunned. After an awkward silence, Milch explained to the Fuehrer that the Me-262 could not carry bombs without extensive design modifications, and even then bombs weighing over about 1,000 pounds could not be used.

Hitler exploded. He wanted a fighter-bomber. He had expected a fighter-bomber. He had been led to believe that he would receive a fighter-bomber. He had been deceived. He subjected Milch, Goering, and Galland to a torrent of verbal abuse. He upbraided them as unreliable, insubordinate, and even treasonable. Milch tried to speak again, but Hitler shouted him down. He then turned away from Milch and refused to speak to him during the rest of the conference. When Milch left for Berlin that evening, his career was wrecked. Shortly afterwards, Hitler withdrew his directive earmarking Milch as Goering’s successor.
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The Allied invasion was now only two weeks away.

As a result of this conference, Hitler transferred the entire jet program away from the Fighter Branch and gave it to the general of bomber forces. “The fighter arm and the defense of the Reich, which had seen in the jet fighter the savior from an untenable situation, now had to bury all hopes,” Galland commented.
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Hitler did not authorize the creation of the first jet fighter wing until Reichsfuehrer-SS Heinrich Himmler (who was meddling in Luftwaffe affairs) recommended it. This wing, JG 7, was formed under the command of Col. Johannes Steinhoff in November, 1944—too late to have any influence on the air war, or on Erhard Milch’s career.
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Now that Milch no longer had the support of the Fuehrer, Goering wasted no time in stripping him of his power. On May 27 he agreed to transfer the entire air armaments program from Milch to Saur. On June 20, in Hitler’s presence, Goering ordered Milch to resign as director of air armaments. He would also have to resign as secretary of state for aviation, although he would retain his post as inspector general of the Luftwaffe, to keep the news of their intragovernmental dispute from becoming public. Milch resigned the next day. On June 30, 1944, Milch made a bitter farewell speech to his staff, in which he blamed the reorganization on the intrigues and obstructionism of Speer and Saur and on the Allied bombing campaign—not because of any failure on the part of the Luftwaffe or the Office of Air Armaments. Milch now went into semiretirement in his lakeside hunting lodge.
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Speer named Milch his deputy for armaments and war production and plenipotentiary for armaments in the Four Year Plan. Hitler agreed to this move, and Goering did not object, but the appointment was tokenism, without any real power. Milch took it as an indication of Speer’s guilty conscience for his role in Milch’s downfall.
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It was not like Erhard Milch to blame himself for anything.

After the July 20, 1944, attempt on Hitler’s life failed, Milch sent him a message of congratulations. He even called the conspirators “vermin” on the witness stand at Nuremberg.

Milch continued to make inspection trips until October 1, 1944, when his car skidded at high speed on the road near Arnhem, ran into the woods and hit a tree. Milch woke up in the hospital, with broken ribs and lung damage. He lay immobilized in his hunting lodge until early 1945, but showed up unexpectedly at Karinhall on January 12, to congratulate Goering on his fifty-second birthday. The Reichsmarschall was surprised and very unpleasant. Three days later Milch found out why: he received a week-old letter from Goering, dismissing him from his last office, inspector general of the Luftwaffe.
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He was placed in Fuehrer Reserve and remained there for the rest of the war.

Erhard Milch was not the only high-ranking member of the Luftwaffe to fall from power in 1944. Field Marshal Hugo Sperrle, the commander-in-chief of the 3rd Air Fleet, was sacked as well—and with considerably more justification.

Sperrle became more and more disillusioned over Hitler’s and Goering’s conduct of the war, and this may have accelerated his own lack of interest in the war. Lt. Gen. Hans Speidel, the chief of staff of Erwin Rommel’s Army Group B in France in 1944, remembered: “Sperrle was a man of unusual vitality; but the more clearly he saw the unholy disorder in Hitler’s leadership, the more he expended his energies in bitter sarcasm. He tried to work with us in a comradely manner whenever he could, especially since he shared the political views of Rommel.”
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Sperrle seems to have become more and more vain and indolent the longer he stayed in France. Considering himself a great gourmet and with a stomach to prove it, he became more interested in fine foods and wines and gambling than in the operations of his air units. His prejudice against women in the service also grew to almost insane proportions. It should have been obvious to anyone that Germany had a worker shortage by 1943. Obviously, if more women could be employed in rear-area duties, more men could be released for duties in the combat zone. Sperrle did not see things that way, however. When a female military operator answered his calls, he would throw the telephone to the floor and scream. Once, as he was out walking with Lt. Gen. Hermann Plocher, Sperrle saw a female dressed in fatigues enter a mess hall.

“Do I see right?” Sperrle asked, incredulously. “Is that a woman going into the mess hall where our heroes eat?”

Yes, Plocher replied. In fact, he knew the woman. She was a German agent who had just returned from a very dangerous mission behind enemy lines.

The field marshal, realizing that he had made a fool out of himself, was at a loss for words. He sputtered for a few moments and then said: “I know. That’s what I mean. She should be eating in the General’s mess.”
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At least Hugo Sperrle was flexible.

The 3rd Air Fleet had no chance of defeating the U.S. and British air forces, who began paving the way for the Allied invasion in April 1944. As of May 31, Sperrle had only 891 aircraft, of which 497 were serviceable.
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Table
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shows his exact organization and strength. His few, understrength units faced a vast aerial armada of some fourteen thousand combat aircraft. The enemy’s primary objective prior to D-Day was to seal off the battlefield and isolate Seventh Army in Normandy from its supplies and reinforcements. To accomplish this task, the French railroad network had to be smashed. Before the Allied air offensive began, the German transportation staff was running more than one hundred supply trains a day to the armies in France. By the end of April, it was only running forty-eight; and by the end of May, only twenty trains per day were operating throughout France. Rail traffic was at a standstill as all bridges over the Seine, Oise, and Meuse rivers had been destroyed or seriously damaged. By April 30 some 600 supply trains were backlogged in Germany, unable to proceed; in France, the Allied air forces were destroying up to 113 locomotives per day.
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General Esposito wrote: “Allied air attacks had weakened the railroad transportation system in France to the point of collapse.”
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The French highway system was in similar straits. On June 3, 1944, the Luftwaffe Operations Staff reported:

In the area of northern France and Belgium—the zone of the invasion in the narrower sense of the word—the systematic destruction that has been carried out since March of all important junctions of the entire network—not only the main lines—has most seriously crippled the whole transport system (railway installations, including rolling stock). Similarly, Paris has been systematically cut off from long distance traffic, and the most important bridges over the lower Seine have been destroyed one after another . . . In the “intermediate zone” between the German and French-Belgian railway system “all the important through stations . . . have been put out of action for longer or shorter periods . . . In May the first bridge over the Rhine—at Duisburg—was destroyed ‘according to plan’ in a large scale attack.”
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TABLE 16: ORGANIZATION AND STRENGTH, 3D AIR FLEET, MAY 31, 1944
Unit	Aircraft Types	Strength	Operational
Air Fleet Units:
5th Group	Night Fighters	33	17
123rd Group	Long-range recon	59	30 *
13th Group	Short-range recon	30	16
Trans units	Transports	64	31
II Fighter Corps:
4th Fighter Div	Day fighters	104	71
Night fighters	57	29
5th Fighter Div	Day fighters	69	48
II Air Corps	Close-spt aircraft	73	55
IX Air Corps	Long-range bombs	326	150
X Air Corps	Antishipping a/c	23	20
2nd Air Div	Torpedo bombers	53	30
Totals	Fighters (all)	425	266
Bombers (inc. antiship and torpedo)	402	200
Transport aircraft	64	31
Total:	891	497

*
Includes long-range aircraft of 5th Group

Source: Ellis I, p. 567