Hitler's Revenge Weapons

by Hitler's Revenge Weapons- The Final Blitz of London (retail) (epub)

  To their credit, the Allied tactical air forces soon realised that, once found, the elusive V2 and ‘modified’ V1 sites had to be reported or attacked without delay, before they ‘went to ground’ or were moved on. This was no easy task, either requiring suitably equipped and armed fighter-bombers to be already airborne in the area awaiting such tasks, held on the ground at immediate readiness close to the action, or by tasking armed reconnaissance sorties on ad hoc ‘seek and strike’ sorties (Chapter Eight). Attempts to employ medium bombers against these targets were short lived; invariably they were too late and too inaccurate.

  It is perhaps understandable that, with the Germans in full retreat in the face of the Allied forces in the west, targeting and weapons employment within and between the two missile camps, the army artillery and Luftwaffe, did not follow the generally accepted principles of war to the letter – or indeed in some cases at all. Take into account, too, the fact that SS-Obergruppenführer Hans Kammler and his staff, ultimately in full control of the V1s and V2, had no previous experience of missile operations and that he was interested only in symbolism reflected in the number of weapons launched, and at what rate, so that the collective offensive/defensive forces were not employed to best effect. For instance, had the principle of ‘concentration of force’ been achieved by synchronising and co-ordinating attacks by the missiles, heavy artillery and air forces, mounted from different directions to thin out the defences more, this could have caused even greater damage in Antwerp port, further demoralising the stevedores, slowing the outflow of men and materials and thus the advance of the Allies across Europe.

  Moreover, both weapons were frittered away against targets of no real military consequence, or, given their known inaccuracies, had little chance of succeeding in their purpose. So it was that several towns in Belgium were targeted with too few missiles to achieve significant success in slowing the Allied advance, while others were aimed, surely more in hope than expectation, at the crucial Remagen bridge over the Rhine, leaving only twenty-two of the 150 available at that time to be launched at London – this only escaping the Führer’s wrath because of the visibly high launch rate. It was to the Allies’ good fortune that failures of this kind saved the three primary city targets (London, Antwerp and Liège) from greater devastation. In fact, the records suggest that there was little or no discussion on target priorities, or weapons’ co-ordination in the final stages of the war, both Kammler and Wechtel sensibly abiding by Hitler’s will to target London, if too late to have any great effect. Nor does there seem to have been any analysis of weapons results, most of the German agents in London having been ‘turned’ (Chapter Four); and no evidence has been found that any agents they might have had in Belgium provided the information on ‘fall of shot’ necessary for the aiming points in Antwerp to be adjusted.

  While the Allied offensive forces experienced great difficulties finding and suppressing the elusive missile targets on the continent, the active and passive defences against the V1 in England were having greater success. Following the inevitable complaints from the airmen that the gunners either lacked the necessary aircraft recognition skills or were a little too ‘trigger-happy’, and from the gunners that the airmen were violating their gun defended areas, Air Marshal Sir Roderick Hill and Lieutenant General Sir Frederick Pile re-organised their fighters and guns to give the best possible chance of avoiding ‘blue-on-blue’ engagements and downing the flying bombs (Chapter Six). A similar situation existed in the air defence of Antwerp where the same invaluable lessons were learned in inter-service cooperation. In neither case, however, were they successful enough, the ultimate defence against the V1s and V2s coming only with the occupation of all the missile launch sites; until then massive resources had to be diverted to counter the V1s. The V2s could not, of course, be intercepted in the air; they had to be destroyed on the ground.

  Attempts to compare the accuracy and effectiveness of the unguided ‘dumb’ bombs dropped from aircraft by either side during the war with those achieved by the V1 and V2 are likely to be inconclusive, given the widely varying statistics available, all of which depended on the timing and circumstances in which they were derived, anecdotal stories suffering likewise – and often with emotions added. The author, who lived in the London suburbs throughout the Blitz of 1940/41, witnessed a very large number of bombs falling in open countryside, some 15 miles or more from the centre of London and with no significant military or industrial target in the area. The Allies suffered too from poor bombing accuracies, various estimates suggesting that, particularly in the early years of the war and at night, the RAF sometimes missed its targets by as much as five to nine miles and even a great deal more, even the much revered Pathfinders of later years being known to get it wrong (vide Operation HYDRA, Chapter Eight). The Americans, flying in daylight, using their excellent Norden bombsights, did better, but all the Allied bomber fleets suffered very heavy losses from the formidable German defences, on many occasions having to jettison their bombs or abort their sorties due to battle damage or bad weather – problems which did not affect the German missiles. In summary, the immature V-weapons were less accurate than the bomber crews could achieve, particularly with their state-of-the-art bombing equipment in 1944/45 but, had the V-weapons been perfected before use, it might have been a very different story.

  Turning to a comparison of destructive powers, there was no variation in the warheads of the V1 (1,870lb Amatol) and V2 (2,000lb Amatol), other than a slight reduction in the updated V1’s warhead to allow more fuel to give greater range, whereas the manned bombers and fighter-bombers, could be fitted with a wide variety of weapons, of different yields, up to the 20,000lb Grand Slam bombs delivered only by RAF Lancasters. The destructive effects of the V-weapons then depended on three self-explanatory variables, penetration, blast and fragmentation, and they in turn depended on the speed and angle at which they struck their targets. In the case of the V1s these variables were unpredictable, the bomb having dived from a relatively low height band of 2,000 to 6,000feet, limiting its maximum penetration. Indeed the author remembers some V1s hitting from a very shallow glide, with minimum penetration but maximum blast and fragmentation, whereas the V2s would invariably hit the ground vertically, at supersonic speeds, resulting in maximum penetration but less widespread blast and fragmentation. The terminal speeds and strike angles could, to a certain extent, be determined by the tactics employed by the delivery aircraft.

  So much for some (but not all) technical comparisons but, for any debate on overall ‘cost-effectiveness’ of the two V-missiles vis a vis the manned bomber, it is vital to view them in the circumstances at the time. To claim that because the entire tonnage of explosives delivered by the V2s did not amount to that dropped in a single thousand-bomber raid on Germany rendered the German rocket offensive a gross waste of money would be a calumny. In the nine-month timeframe of V1 and V2 operations (June 1944-March 1945), when the Germans had their ‘backs to the wall’, with only obsolescent twin-engine aircraft and no heavy bombers, they had no means of striking back other than with these new weapons and it cannot be denied that these caused a great deal of disruption to the Allied war plans, let alone the impact they had on morale, at home and on the continent. The Allies had little alternative but to continue committing much of their air power against the main bunkers and highly elusive launch sites in the Pas de Calais, the complex supply system, and perhaps the environs to the vital Middelwerk plant – more in hope than expectation of success.

  On face value, some cost comparisons can be very persuasive until they are scrutinised closely and qualified, when they may become meaningless. For instance, the total financial cost of the Peenemünde operation has been assessed at four times that of the Manhattan Atomic Project, which produced the atomic bomb but, of course, there were very different objectives here, in different times and in different circumstances; this would not be a fair, like-for-like comparison. For a realistic comparison, manned bomber operations must i
nclude the costs of aircraft development and production, the running costs of the factories, the construction and maintenance of huge airfields and other support facilities, all very vulnerable to air attack. Then there were the recurring costs of aircrew training and replacements for those lost in action to increasingly effective air defences, or for other reasons, all adding to the enormous costs of consumables, such as fuel and weapons. Similar costs applied to the development and testing of the V-weapons, but the only partially successful raids on Peenemünde drove production deep underground at Mittelwerk, immune from Allied ‘dumb’ bombs, leaving only a scattering of component factories prey to Allied bombs. Also, the operating costs of the missiles were relatively low, since they required no expensive airfields from which to operate. The text above only touches on the myriad, contentious arguments on the cost comparisons of the main offensive weapons systems in the latter stages of the war and draws no conclusions. The jury is still out.

  What befell the main players on the two sides? Regardless of the subjective and objective judgements on their strengths and limitations during the Vergeltungswaffen campaign, many stalwarts continued to make their mark on history thereafter, but had they learned from their experiences of the potential of long-range missiles and how best to counter them? The debate on the possibility of missile attacks on Britain may have begun, in slow time, early in the war, admittedly with fragmented, inconclusive evidence on the possibilities and nature of such threats, but it did not get underway in earnest until 1943(Chapter Four). By then, for those who wish to see it, there was plenty of evidence that the Allies should be concerned. Churchill and R.V. Jones were much concerned, but the Chief Scientific Adviser, Lord Cherwell, was not.

  The driving force behind the CROSSBOW campaign, Prime Minister Churchill, fell from political grace in the 1945 election, only to rise again in 1951, and his story needs no rehearsal. The controversial Lord Cherwell, famous for his early disbelief in the German missiles and his sometimes rash predictions, was made Paymaster General for a second time in 1951 and given a seat in the Cabinet before becoming Viscount Cherwell of Oxford in 1956, a year before his death at the age of 71. Duncan Sandys, Churchill’s son-in-law, who was frequently at loggerheads with others in the Crossbow Committee, also lost his seat in Parliament in 1945, but returned as a conservative MP thereafter, most prominently as the Minister of Defence in the mid-1950s when, to almost universal dismay, he reduced RAF fighter numbers to a token force in favour of guided missiles. He was elevated to the peerage, as Baron Duncan Sandys, in 1974. R.V. Jones was appointed CB in 1946 in recognition of his contribution to science and given a Chair at Aberdeen University; he became a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1965 and was appointed Companion of Honour in 1994. He died in 1997.

  It is a strange irony that the fortunes of war sometimes favour the losers, a point well proven in the case of the chief protagonists of the Vergeltungswaffen, Wernher von Braun and Walter Dornberger, the victors wisely foreseeing their inestimable value in the future of rocket science. Both claimed to have predicted defeat in 1944 when they attempted, covertly, to negotiate terms with the US General Electric Company through the German Embassy in Lisbon, which might have got them to America long before the end of the war. Both von Braun and Dornberger pleaded that the original driving force behind their rocket initiatives was the conquest of space but that they had no alternative, given the political and military pressures of the 1930s, but to defer to the Nazis and the imperatives of war – as a means to an end. One Jewish comedian modified the name of a film which featured von Braun, I Aim at The Stars to I Aim at The Stars, but Sometimes I hit London (Chapter Two). In the end, neither was accused of war crimes and did not undergo the sometimes humiliating interrogations which awaited many of their colleagues, the Allies, particularly the Americans, being more interested in them for their potential. So it was that they were separated from their main party of Peenemünde weaponeers at Oberjoch in early May 1945 and taken to Garmisch-Partenkirchen to be interviewed by Dr Richard Porter, a systems engineer for the American General Electric Company. However, as a gesture to the British, and at the instigation of London’s MI14, it was agreed that von Braun could spend seven days in London to be interviewed primarily by Sir Alwyn Crow at the Ministry of Supply. He and Dornberger also contributed to the British Operation BACKFIRE (Chapter Eleven), the latter remaining with the British for a further two years before he too ended up in America, as an employee of the Bell Aircraft Company. Unrepentant, von Braun continued to laugh his way to the bank as he helped America with the space race and their successful effort to put their man on the moon with the giant Saturn V booster rocket in July 1969. Von Braun died in 1977, aged 65.

  No such good fortune awaited the dynamic and ruthless SS-Obergruppenführer Hans Kammler. On the evidence of his driver, Oberscharführer Kurt Preuk, he had escaped to Prague where he had taken cyanide and was buried there on 9 May 1944. Others believed that he shot himself, had himself shot, moved to live in America – or on the moon! Wolfgang Wetzling, who carried out Kammler’s orders to exterminate those found cooking chickens in the woods around Warstein, was captured, found guilty of his crimes and imprisoned for life.

  Those less in the limelight, the Luftwaffe men who produced and operated the V1 flying bomb, were not in great demand, and the Allies showed no interest in bringing the chief operator, Max Wachtel, alias ‘Oberst Wolf ’, to trial (Chapter Four); could he indeed be called a war criminal? Little seems to be known about his ultimate fate, other than in a story that he refused to discuss his extensive knowledge of the V1 and its operation with the Allies unless and until they had found one Isabelle de Goy. This they did, for the two to marry in 1947, after which it is said he became manager of Hamburg International Airport.

  One of the salient principles of war is ‘Maintenance of morale’, of the troops involved and of the civilians affected, and in this the V-weapons played an important part on both sides. Throughout the war Joseph Goebbels developed a highly efficient Ministry of Public Enlightenment and Propaganda, which broadcast continuously to the German masses, by which means many Germans came to believe that London was being ‘pulverised’ under a hail of V1s and V2s, with thousands fleeing the capital in panic, and by claims that these new weapons would swing the war in their favour. To them, their V-weapons were worth every pfennig (penny). Not forgetting the British, Goebbels arranged for the British traitor William Joyce (Lord Haw-Haw) to broadcast a very different version of the war news to that given by the BBC and there is no doubt that the mystique and the ‘fear factor’ attached to the V1 and V2 had an adverse effect on a tired nation’s productivity and morale.

  For them, there lurked a crucial question: why would the Germans spend so much effort on the missiles unless the warheads were going to carry something more sinister than explosives, perhaps a chemical or biological agent? It was certainly to mankind’s benefit generally that they did not, and that the German scientists did not expend their undoubted talents on splitting the atom, or indeed that the hierarchy did not take the simpler expedient of giving the development of the V-weapons greater momentum. Had they done so, and the missiles had become operational six months earlier, the huge assembly areas in England and ultimate destinations of the Allied invasion forces might have come under a devastating hail of flying bombs and rockets. Could such a prospect have resulted in the postponement or cancellation of the invasion or its failure ashore – or even worse? Who knows?

  Chapter 13

  Requiem

  Thousands of monuments litter continental Europe and the United Kingdom, bearing testimony to the tragedies of the Second World War generally and in the particular. Specifically, the new mode of warfare unleashed by Germany in the dying months of war, involving the innovative stratospheric rocket and flying bomb, gave rise to a spate of memorials, the number, of course, being too great to list here. However, a small sample should suffice to illustrate the consciousness and, in some cases the conscience of the perpetrators,
of the twin campaign which killed so many in the trials, construction, deployments and launch of these new weapons of war, leaving death, destruction and misery in their paths. This requiem is limited primarily to the birthplace of the Vergeltungswaffen, Peenemünde, the main production centre at Mittelbau Dora, the first V1 launch area against England, in the Pas de Calais, The Hague and those who suffered in and around London, each having its own agonising tale to tell.

  Let these photographs be a reminder.

  A reminder of the extraordinary detail in which the Germans recorded the PoWs and slave labourers. (Author, Courtesy HTM Peenemünde)

  This evocative mural commemorates the mass grave of slave labourers and PoWs, many clearly executed, found at Karlshagen and reburied in 1968. (Author)

  Known only to God – the author kneels before a memorial to 213 foreign workers at Peenemünde. (Author)

  Tribute to a Russian pilot, Lieutenant M.D. Demjatejew, a PoW at Peenemünde, who stole a Luftwaffe Heinkel 111 bomber from the airfield and escaped back to Russian with nine fellow PoWs. (Author, Courtesy HTM Peenemünde)

  A monument to Russian PoWs buried in the Peenemünde forest, identified by Lieutenant Demjatejew. (Author, Courtesy HTM Peenemünde)

  This plaque at Siracourt, Pas de Calais, laid by French and Russian Second World War veterans, remembers the Soviet PoWs who suffered and died building the V1 launch site there in 1944. (Author)