A big hope of making a dent in Allied air superiority rested on the production of the jet-fighter, the Me262, which had been commissioned the previous May. Its speed of up to 800 kilometres per hour meant that it was capable of outflying any enemy aircraft. But when the aircraft designer Professor Willi Messerschmitt had told Hitler of its disproportionately heavy fuel consumption, it had led by September 1943 to its production priority being removed. This was restored only a vital quarter of a year later, on 7 January 1944, when Speer and Milch were summoned to Hitler’s headquarters to be told, on the basis of English press reports, that British testing of jet-planes was almost complete. Hitler now demanded production on the Me262 to be stepped up immediately so that as many jets as possible could be put into service without delay. But valuable time had been lost. It was plain that the first machines would take months to produce. Whether Hitler was as clearly informed of this as Speer later claimed is questionable.47 When Captain Hanna Reitsch, who had risen to become one of his star pilots, visited Hitler at the end of February to receive her Iron Cross, First Class, she proposed setting up a Kamikaze-squad along Japanese lines. Hitler refused, saying he expected great things in the near future from the early deployment of his jets. Reitsch pointed out that it would be months before this could happen. Hitler’s Luftwaffe adjutant Nicolaus von Below reinforced the point later that evening. But Hitler was adamant that the Luftwaffe had informed him differently, and that the dates he had laid down would be met. No one had openly contradicted his demands, he stated.48 Speer himself, according to Goebbels, was confident that the new jets would bring a radical change of fortunes in the air-war.49
Hitler’s instincts, as always, veered towards attack as the best form of defence. He looked, as did — impatiently and more and more disbelievingly — large numbers of ordinary Germans, to the chance to launch devastating weapons of destruction against Great Britain, giving the British a taste of their own medicine and forcing the Allies to rethink their strategy in the air-war. Here, too, his illusions about the speed with which the ‘wonder-weapons’ could be made ready for deployment, and their likely impact on British war strategy, were shored up by the optimistic prognoses of his advisers.
Speer had persuaded Hitler as long ago as October 1942, after witnessing trials at Peenemünde earlier in the year, of the destructive potential of a long-range rocket, the A4 (later better known as the V2) able to enter the stratosphere en route to delivering its bombs — and unstoppable devastation — on England. Hitler had immediately ordered their mass-production on a huge scale. When Wernher von Braun, the genius behind the construction, had explained some months later what the rocket was capable of, and shown him a colour-film of it in trials, Hitler’s enthusiasm was unbounded. It was, he told Speer, ‘the decisive weapon of the war’, which would lift the burden on Germany when unleashed on the British. Production was to be advanced with all speed — if need be at the expense of tank production. By autumn 1943 it had already become plain that any expectation of early deployment was wildly optimistic.50 But in February 1944, Speer was still indicating to Goebbels that the rocket programme could be ready by the end of April.51 In the event, it would be September before the rockets were launched.52
The alternative project of the Luftwaffe, the ‘Kirschkern’ Programme, which produced what came to be known as the V1 flying-bombs, was more advanced. This, too, went back to 1942. And, like the A4 project, hopes of it were high and expectations of its production-rate optimistic. Production began in January 1944. Tests were highly encouraging.53 Speer told Goebbels in early February it would be ready at the beginning of April.54 Milch pictured for Hitler, a month later, total devastation in London in a wave of 1,500 flying-bombs over ten days, beginning on Hitler’s birthday, 20 April, with the remainder to be dispatched the following month. Within three weeks of exposure to such bombing, he imagined, Britain would be on its knees.55 Given the information he was being fed, Hitler’s illusions become rather more explicable. Competition, in this case between the army’s A4 project and the ‘Kirschkern’ Programme of the Luftwaffe, played its part. And ‘working towards the Führer’, striving — as the key to retaining power and position — to accomplish what it was known he would favour, to provide the miracle he wanted, and to accommodate his wishes, however unrealistic, still applied. Reluctance to convey bad or depressing news to him was the opposite side of the same coin. Together, the consequence was inbuilt, systemic, over-optimism — shoring up unrealizable hopes, inevitably leading to sour disillusionment.
<p>IV</p>
