The Rise of the Luftwaffe, 1918-1940 by Mason Herbert Molloy

Author:Mason, Herbert Molloy [Mason, Herbert Molloy]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Endeavour Media
Published: 2016-10-24T16:00:00+00:00

11 — OPERATION MAGIC FIRE

We bombed it, and bombed it and bombed it, and buena why not?

— Nationalist staff officer

Wever was replaced by Major General Albert Kesselring, forty-eight, a stocky, balding, open-faced professional army officer known for boundless energy and expansive humor. Kesselring served throughout the war, and remained in Seeckt’s Reichswehr afterward. He transferred into the Luftwaffe in the fall of 1933, following on Wever’s heels, and although the two men got along well together, Kesselring was surprised at being named Wever’s successor; Wever had his eye on Major Hans Jeschonnek, only thirty-seven, a pilot, ardent National Socialist, clearly a comer in grasping the intricacies of air staff work. It was Jeschonnek, as chief of the Luftwaffe Operations Staff, who had prepared the plans for the deployment of the Luftwaffe during the Rhineland adventure. Kesselring had no quarrel with the Luftwaffe’s rearmament program as set in motion by Milch and Wever, and only six weeks after taking command of the Air General Staff, Kesselring was presented with the unexpected opportunity of putting selected Luftwaffe units through trial by combat. He was delighted; all the tactical theories and the new weapons could be proven in a foreign cauldron, using somebody else’s country as a battleground, and with negligible risk of becoming prematurely embroiled in a war with any major power. The proving ground lay across the Pyrenees.

*

On the evening of July 26,1936, Adolf Hitler and the greater part of his entourage were in Bayreuth, attending the annual music festival. That afternoon Hitler had been treated to the full orchestral treatment of Wagner’s Ride of the Valkyries , and was in a soaring mood when he received three emissaries from the Spanish mainland, then in its ninth day of a bloody uprising against the Republican government. The visitors, Adolf Langenheim and Johannes Bernhardt, both Nazi party officials resident in Spain, were accompanied by a Nationalist air force officer, Captain Francisco Arranz, bearing a letter from his commander in chief, General Francisco Franco. The Falangist leader’s request was modest enough: purchase of “ten transport aircraft with maximum seating capacity” so as to airlift his troops in Morocco across the Strait of Gibraltar to join in the revolt. Republican sailors had seized thirty-nine of Spain’s fifty warships, slaughtering the officers in the process, and the straits and the Alboran Sea were effectively closed to Nationalist maritime traffic.

Hitler agreed immediately to supply the needed transport planes, and added that he was willing to do a great deal more. He gave numerous reasons for springing to Franco’s aid, any one of which would have sufficed: it was an opportunity to thwart the “danger of the Red Peril overwhelming Europe”; Germany needed Spanish iron ore — which would not be supplied by a left-wing regime; and a Fascist victory would be a strategic defeat for Britain and France, who would face a power friendly to Germany across their sea communications in the Mediterranean. Admiral Wilhelm Canaris (code name “Guillermo”), head of Germany’s counterintelligence branch, the Abwehr

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