Jacket text to
the original US (Little Brown & Co) edition of David
Irving: The Rise and Fall of the Luftwaffe
Jacket
of new edition (click to enlarge)
"Here was a man like me, who just did not know
the word 'impossible."'-- Hitler, speaking of Erhard
Milch
ERHARD Milch: airman, airline tycoon, senior field
marshal after Göring of the Luftwaffe, and finally
prisoner of war. The Rise and Fall of the
Luftwaffe traces the career of the brilliant,
aggressive creator of Germany's air force in World War
II.
A fighter-squadron commander during World War I, Milch
became at age thirty-three one of the directors of
Germany's newly formed state airline, Lufthansa. "If you
like to think of me as having once been energetic," he
advised friends and enemies alike, "I suggest you now add
the word 'ruthless' -- or multiply by it, whatever is
easier by your slide-rule." Milch's dynamism and superb
organizational skills, characterized by Time magazine as
being similar to those of "an able and energetic U.S.
businessman," rescued the faltering Lufthansa and
attracted the attention of Göring and Hitler.
In 1933 Milch was named Göring's State Secretary
for Air and from that post, he engineered the emergence
in 1939 of Hitler's Germany -- forbidden any military
aircraft whatever by the Treaty of Versailles -- as the
strongest air power in the world. But talent of Milch's
caliber proved to be rare; Göring's poor leadership
and the weakness of the Minister in Charge of Armaments,
Ernst Udet, had crippled the technical arm of the
Luftwaffe by corruption and incompetence. German air
strength dwindled, and like so much of Hitler's
Wehrmacht, the air force became a bureaucratic nightmare.
Even Milch's remarkable wartime achievements -- he more
than tripled aircraft production despite limited
resources and crushing Allied air attacks -- could not
forestall the Luftwaffe's ignominious collapse.
Using the extensive notebooks and diaries that Milch
kept throughout his career, David Irving describes the
field marshal's rise and his later uneasy relationships
with Speer, Göring and Hitler as jealousies and
brazen grabs for power (to which Milch eventually fell
victim) erupted openly. Yet even in disgrace, even after
his sentence to life imprisonment at the Nuremberg
trials, Milch, who never read past page twenty of Mein
Kampf, remained as intensely loyal as the day he had
declared of Hitler: "Even if he commanded me to walk
across the waves to him, I would unhesitatingly
obey."
Printed in the USA by Little Brown &
Co
