But Milch learned very quickly. Soon he was paying Hermann Göring — by now an influential Nazi Reichstag deputy — a regular 'consultancy fee', and his private papers later revealed the extent to which he was already compiling files of damaging material about his rivals and superiors.

By 1929 Milch was the chief executive of Lufthansa and a secret member of the Nazi Party. His enemies said that his membership was kept secret so that when he falsified Lufthansa accounts (so that the Nazi Party never paid for the aircraft chartered from Lufthansa) no suspicion would attach to him. In 1932 alone, Hitler and other Nazi leaders flew 23,000 miles. Aircraft played a vital part in the Nazi political campaigning. If Milch provided this facility for nothing he certainly earned the rewards he subsequently collected.

Milch became a figure of growing political importance as Lufthansa built airport facilities, organized signal and meteorology networks, and radio beacons for air-corridors. Its personnel were trained in administration, supply, and engineering as well as all the mysteries of blind-flying and long-range navigation. Even in its first year, Lufthansa had a night passenger service Berlin-Konigsberg to connect with Moscow, and was sending experimental flights far afield. Its G-24s went to Peking and its Dornier War flying boats to Brazil. As early as 1930, civil aviation in Germany (measured by passengers or by mileage) was as big as all the British and French civil aviation services combined! All gliding records were, at this time, held by Germany and Austria.

By 1932 (and this was a year before the Nazis came to power) Germany had a claim to be the leader of world aviation. The Graf Zeppelin airship carrying about sixty people and freight had circumnavigated the world, been on long cruises to Egypt, Iceland, and the Arctic, and in March 1932, begun a scheduled service between Friedrichshafen and Rio de Janeiro. This was to be the only transatlantic air service for another seven years! The experimental twelve-engined Dornier Do X had crossed both the South and North Atlantic and a German pilot in a German plane had made the first east-west crossing of the North Atlantic.

Professor Junkers's series of all-metal monoplanes had culminated in the classic Junkers Ju 52/3m. By 1932 it was in service on the Berlin-Rome and Berlin-London routes. Lufthansa now connected Berlin with Barcelona, Moscow, and Athens, flying a daily average of 30,000 miles.

No country in the world had training facilities to compare with the Deutsche Verkehrsflieger Schule (German Air Transport School), where so many of the Luftwaffe's pilots learned to fly bombers. To supply candidates for Lufthansa's training, there were about 50,000 active members of gliding clubs of the Deutsche Luftsport-verband In 1932, the 20-year-old Adolf Galland, already a skilled glider pilot, applied for training as a Lufthansa pilot: of 4,000 applicants, only 18 were accepted. The examinations lasted ten days.

This intense interest in aviation was shared by the general public. The 14-year-old apprentices, working in any aircraft factory, would find glider construction a mandatory part of their apprenticeship and would not become qualified tradesmen unless they possessed the glider pilot's licence.

When the Nazis gained power, Erhard Milch was the obvious choice to build in secrecy a new air force. Professor Hugo Junkers had by now become an outspoken critic of the Nazis. He was one of the most powerful individuals in German aviation, and by far the most brilliant. Milch decided that he could gain control of the aviation manufacturing industries by making an example of his one-time benefactor and employer.

Milch sent the police to arrest Junkers. He was accused of many offences including even treason. Armed with the terrible power of the totalitarian state, Milch broke Junkers. The end of the interrogations came only when Junkers assigned 51 per cent of his various companies to the State. This was not good enough for Milch. He then demanded, and got, chairmanship of the companies for his own nominees. Still not satisfied, Milch put the ailing old man under house arrest, until he gave the State the remainder of his shares. Less than six months afterwards Hugo Junkers died. Milch sent a delegation of mourners from the Air Ministry, with a suitably inscribed wreath

This so angered Junkers's family that the men from the ministry returned to Berlin without attending the ceremony, rather than face their wrath.

Perhaps it is not too much to suggest that Milch found in the Nazis, with their despotic regality and regalia, elaborate rallies and displays, something to appeal to the ardent monarchist he had always been. Although his role as Göring's right-hand man brought him sometimes into arguments with his boss (who was marginally younger than Milch), his loyalty to Hitler and his Nazi kingdom was unquestioning.

And Hitler gave his two airmen a comprehensive slice of the kingdom. They had control of everything from Lufthansa ticket clerks to fighter pilots, and from the secret construction of military aircraft to the gliding clubs, which were now a part of the NSFK (Nazi Flying Corps). Such flexibility made these men the envy of other service chiefs, who had no such access to semi-trained personnel, and no access to Hitler via civil channels. Nor did other service chiefs have such control over the design and development of their weapons, and the supply of them, as the Air Ministry had over the aircraft industry.

But there is little to support the allegation that, even before the Nazis came to power, the German aircraft industry produced fleets of warplanes, thinly disguised as civil aircraft. Of seven major aircraft types used by the Luftwaffe for operations in the Battle of Britain, only two had prototypes flying before 1935. One of these — the Ju 52/3m — was undoubtedly designed as a transport aircraft, as its sale to the airlines of twenty-nine foreign countries, and its brief and unsuccessful career as a Spanish Civil War bomber, indicated. The other aircraft was the Dornier Do 17, which flew in prototype form in the autumn of 1934. But this 'Flying Pencil' was put into storage after flight testing, and was adapted for military use only after being discovered there.

Hitler gained power when the Reichstag passed his Enabling Act in March 1933. The Luftwaffe must be dated from the big aircraft-building programme that started in January 1934. But few of these machines were suitable for modern warfare, for air forces do not start with warplanes: the first need is training aircraft. And so, of the 4,021 aircraft the Luftwaffe ordered in January 1934, 1,760 were elementary trainers (Arado Ar 66 and Focke-Wulf FW 44). Only 251 were fighter types, and all of these were biplanes.

On 1 March 1935, the existence of the Luftwaffe was officially announced. It was accepted as a fact of life by the Allied powers that had forbidden it. In Berlin a huge and grandiose Air Ministry building provided a thousand offices, where ambitious men bickered. Göring had neither the technical knowledge nor the inclination to give the new air force a clear directive. Hitler asked only for the greatest possible number of combat aircraft in the shortest possible time. It was in this atmosphere that all thoughts of a long-range strategic bombing force languished.

There was no strong opposition to the four-engined long-range bomber (possession of which would have totally changed the Battle of Britain), it was simply a matter of priorities. The complex problems of manufacturing such aircraft would delay all the other programmes.

The priorities of the new air force preoccupied the men in the German Air Ministry. Petty jealousies and vicious vendettas flourished as empires were built. Milch was tough enough to handle the men under his command but this did not endear him to Göring. On the contrary, the relationship between the two men became steadily worse as time went on. Frustrated by the technicalities of a new sort of air war that he could not master, Göring condemned them all as unnecessary 'black boxes'. He sought out men who could share his memories of the Red Baron and the wind in the wires. And he gave them jobs.