Hermann Göring was a complicated mixture of good and bad qualities. He was clever and decisive, and before he sank into stuporous luxury, he had the brutality to enforce the hardest decisions. All this was to the good. But his vanity shut his mind to reason, and his obstinacy and greed crippled aircraft design and production. Until Speer came into the picture, the Luftwaffe was worse hit by bad management and supply on the ground than by any enemy in the air, including the Royal Air Force in 1940. Göring vetoed excellent designs for heavy bombers, and built a short-range air force as a ground
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