At that moment, Milch stood up. He didn’t need to consult any papers. His head, pink and smooth and as harmless and genial-looking as that of a suckling pig, contained the production figures and capacities of the aircraft manufacturing industry of the whole of Europe. He could rattle off long calculations and statistics by heart. The list of all the official positions and titles he held, which was as long as the string of titles of a medieval prince – among other posts, he was Secretary of State for German Aviation, Head of the Air Ministry Planning Department, Chairman of the Board of Lufthansa, Inspector-General of the Air Force and Head of the Air Force Administration Office – underlined the breadth of his technical and commercial know-how. The bare minimum for the encircled army – in other words, what they needed in order to keep ticking over with no possibility of resupply or replacement of men and materiel – was, Milch explained, two hundred and eighty tons daily, of which one hundred and twenty tons would be ammunition, one hundred tons food and sixty tons fuel. On the basis that each Junkers Ju 52 could carry two tons, this would require an average of a hundred and fifty flights per day. His soft, sensuous mouth struggled to make these stark facts sound clipped and to the point. As he spoke, his pudgy hands described curiously jagged motions through the air. Only his little round eyes kept moving restlessly and ceaselessly around in circles. Milch played at being a military man. And did so very badly; he simply wasn’t cut out for the role. His uniform made him look like a character from light opera. He was less a general than a director-general. And the military honours that had been bestowed upon him (Knight’s Cross and the rank of Field Marshal) reeked of inauthenticity. In the Luftwaffe, people still laughed about Milch’s one and only spell of ‘front-line service’ during the Norway campaign. As commander of the Fifth Air Fleet, he had bombed the French expeditionary force out of Åndalsnes. With great success, apparently; for after the bombardment, not a single Frenchman could be found in the little town, which had taken a terrible pounding. But that, it turned out, was because the French had never been in Åndalsnes in the first place; instead, they had landed in a nearby fjord. In one respect, then, Milch most decidedly was a soldier – though in this instance it would have been better had this not been so – namely, even as a specialist, he obeyed orders from above unquestioningly.
‘Taking all these factors into consideration, therefore,’ Milch concluded, ‘we need a transport fleet of some two hundred and fifty to three hundred aircraft. If the air supply operation were to last longer than anticipated – earlier, there’d been talk of the spring of 1943 – the fleet would have to be resupplied with new planes on a running basis to make up for the losses. And so, for the reasons already mentioned, it is currently not possible to prepare and muster such a large number of transport aircraft.’
‘Thank God for that!’ thought General Wagner. But the next utterance from around the table caused him visibly to wince.
‘It must be possible!’ said a harsh, guttural voice. All faces turned to the figure at the head of the table. These were the first words that Hitler had spoken in this meeting. The officers present who had not seen the Führer for some time noted with alarm that he was no longer the great magician he had once been. His face was grey, while his permanently slightly stooped back looked positively deformed today. White hairs had begun to appear in his Charlie Chaplin moustache, and his temples were greying noticeably too. Never before had this deity seemed so pathetically human to them. Only the eyes, which bespoke a dangerous fixation, gleamed as brightly as ever from beneath his bushy brows. Even Field Marshal Milch, whose frequent contact with the godlike figure had made him immune to any sensation of mystical awe, flinched at the sound of this voice and fell silent. For several months, aircraft production in the Reich had been unable to keep pace with the losses, and it was he who’d had to shoulder the blame. He was desperate to make amends. Had he taken his eye off the ball? Had he said too much? He cowered like a frightened rabbit beneath the gaze of a snake. Others in the room took up the baton. Manstein spoke briefly and to the point, while the old-fashioned Baron von Weichs beat about the bush with any number of ifs and buts. But to a man they all, some in carefully guarded terms, others plainly and soberly, concurred that it would be an impossible undertaking.
‘I managed to supply six divisions in the Demyansk Pocket,’ rasped the feared voice once more, this time more ominously. ‘That was in the face of opposition from my so-called experts, too. Yet we pulled it off all the same. There’s no such thing as “impossible” for us!’
General Wagner was not a religious man; he was an everyday kind of person who believed in reason. But at this point even he clasped his hands together in prayer under the table and repeated the words under his breath: ‘Dear Lord, deliver us from evil!’ The Sixth Army was lost, and with it the war. They were running with eyes wide open headlong to destruction. ‘Retreat!’ he wanted to scream. ‘Pull the army out and withdraw to Donetsk! It’s our only hope! It’s still not too late!’ But he didn’t open his mouth and shout it. Why not? Instead, he looked across the table at the wan, inscrutable face of Jeschonnek, as if some salvation might still come from that quarter. General Jeschonnek sat there motionless, with his thin line of a mouth drawn together even tighter than before. He was tapping a pencil gently on the table. He was remembering the pocket at Demyansk. Six divisions had been encircled there, not twenty-two like now. To get enough transport capacity to supply even that force, they’d had to close the flying schools. In addition, the Luftwaffe was now hamstrung by a shortage of newly qualified pilots. Sure, they’d succeeded in freeing the bottled-up forces then – but at the cost of more troops killed than the number of those trapped.
‘How about you, Jeschonnek?’
The colonel general raised his eyes slowly. His gaze passed over Göring, who was glaring at him like a furious sergeant major, and came to rest, earnestly and calmly, on the glowering face of Hitler. The Führer’s anger knew no bounds if anyone ever dared to contradict him. He tore down curtains and dashed inkwells to the ground. Jeschonnek was all too familiar with these outbursts, and was perhaps the only person who did not go in fear of them.
‘The best will in the world can’t help if the material wherewithal is lacking,’ he said, barely moving his lips. ‘Weighing up all the various factors, it’s clear that dropping enough supplies to the Sixth Army by air just isn’t feasible. I for one am not in a position where I could take responsibility for that.’
You could have heard a pin drop. Only General Wagner, normally a model of composure, shifted uneasily in his chair. Now was the time for him to speak up, surely! He still hadn’t uttered a word, nor had anyone asked his opinion. Why didn’t he just say something? Hitler’s grey face, to which everyone’s eyes were glued once more, flushed momentarily, and an evil gleam appeared in his watery blue eyes.