A great story - does anyone know a source?

[DavidIsby]

This is a great story. Does anyone know of any reputable source for it?

“In a meeting with Willy Messerschmitt, the head of the Technical Office of the Luftwaffe pointed out that while the speed of the Me 109 was perfectly within requirements, that the Luftwaffe needed was a fighter ‘with the same speed plus greater range and a better rate of climb’.

Willy Messerschmitt, it has been reliably reported, reacted with a flash of temper. ‘What do you want?’ he is said to have shouted, ‘A fast fighter or a barn door’?

… Two years later, these same individuals were forced to run for shelter in Augsburg, which had come under attack by a swarm of Thunderbolt Fighters of the Eigth Fighter Command. At the sight of the powerful fighters strafing deep within enemy terriroty, the official of the Technical Office turned to Willy Messerschmitt with this acid reply:

'Well, there are your barn doors!”

Source: Martin Caidin, Me 109: Willy Messerschmitt’s Peerless Fighter, (New York: Ballantine, 1968), pp. 113-14.