"We shall have crushed the life out of them by the time nightfall arrives," boasted Goring.
Himmler thought the fuhrer seemed less sanguine, having been here before with his Luftwaffe chief, but the reports were good.
In war, it was always advisable to discount the best and the worst of everything one heard. But the news coming out of the firestorm they'd unleashed over England was encouraging. Three experienced pilots had radioed back reports of a catastrophe engulfing the RAF station called Biggin Hill, a name they had all come to loathe back in late 1940.
Two others reported identical results over Croydon and Hornchurch.
It was frustrating that they couldn't duplicate the surveillance the British enjoyed thanks to the Trident. They would all have been much happier, seeing the results of the missile attack for themselves. But as the fuhrer rightly pointed out, what did it matter if the British had a perfect view of their doom as it came rushing at them? It was still their doom.
The Reichsfuhrer-SS had flown straight back to the Wolfschanze, having watched Skorzeny depart, and he had been quietly amazed to see how far and how rapidly the situation had developed.
Defeatists and cowards within the High Command had balked at Operation Sea Dragon, even questioning the fuhrer's judgment. But their craven attitude was no longer a consideration. There was a phrase from the future that Himmler quite liked, and which described them perfectly. Oxygen thieves. Well, they weren't stealing any of the fuhrer's oxygen now. The only pity was that they weren't alive to see how wrong they'd been.
The Operations Room was crowded with personnel. The large central table, inlaid with a huge map of western Europe, was covered with hundreds of small wooden markers. These were constantly being pushed toward their objective by junior staff members carrying long, thin poles.
A young female Oberleutnant moved several little wooden blocks, signifying the Tirpitz's battle group, a few miles farther down the Norwegian coastline. A Luftwaffe Hauptmann needed two long pointers to reposition all the airborne forces that were now winging their way toward the east coast of England. Dozens of markers showed Wehrmacht and Waffen-SS divisions converging on the embarkation ports, while dozens more denoted the thousands of Luftwaffe planes that engaged the Royal Air Force over the Channel, or bombed airfields in the southern counties. These measures protected the invasion fleet as it set out from France, and harassed the Royal Navy's squadrons as they moved to intervene.
"Savor this moment, gentlemen," the fuhrer declared as he slowly circled the Ops Room, followed by his entourage. "There has never been a greater force assembled in the history of human conflict. And there has never been a heavier blow landed on that little island. We are not just remaking history today. We are smashing it into a thousand pieces."