by Hitler's Revenge Weapons- The Final Blitz of London (retail) (epub)
These stones commemorate the deaths of 2,000 service personnel and civilians killed in the RAF and USAAF raids on Peenemünde in 1943 and 1944. (Author)
This stone, in the rocket trials area at Peenemünde, remembers the first A4 (V2s) fired there in 1943. (Author)
As the number of deaths resulting from the brutal treatment of the PoWs and slave labourers at Mittelbau-Dora rose, so did tell-tale smoke from the crematorium. (Author, Courtesy Mittelbau)
This classic photograph, taken by a US Army photographer at the SS Boelcke Barracks, Nordhausen, on 11 April 1945, encapsulates the horror of war, the dead, dying and horribly emaciated bodies of the Mittelwerk PoWs and slave labourers attributed to Nazi brutality but also to the RAF raids on the town on the nights of 3-5 April. (Author’s Collection)
This tablet, on a wall in Sloan Square, London, remembers the deaths of 76 US Army servicemen and three civilians caused by a V1 on 3 July 1944. (Author)
War takes its toll on heritage, as this plaque in the Guards Chapel testifies. (Author, Courtesy The Guards Chapel)
The altar, silver cross and six candles remained in place when a V1 shattered the remainder of the Guards Chapel in London on 18 June 1944. (Author, Courtesy The Guards Chapel)
A memorial stone, deep underground, remembers the RAF airmen lost in raids against Mimoyecques. (Author, Courtesy Mimoyecques)
A memorial to Joe Kennedy Jr in the Mimoyecques caves. (Author Courtesy Mimoyecques)
An English Heritage Blue Plaque marks the spot where the first V1 to land in London struck Grove Road, Bethnal Green, on 13 June 1944, killing 6 and injuring 30. (Author)
The V2 which landed on crowded shops in Lewisham on 25 November 1944 killed 168 people and injured many others is marked by this plaque. (Author)
A stone commemorates all those who suffered from the V2 attacks in the Chiswick and Brentford area, the first in London having struck Chiswick on 8 September 1944. (Author)
Epilogue
In an amazing feat of innovation, improvisation and determination, leading to remarkable scientific achievements in the late 1930s and early 1940s, Nazi Germany led the world in rocket and flying-bomb technology, far ahead of any other country. That they did so, with so little initial reaction in Britain, was due in part to the conviction among a few eminent scientists, especially Frederick Lindemann (later Lord Cherwell), that such evidence as emerged, at first in snippets but later in an veritable avalanche, had been ‘planted’ or was sheer propaganda. They also asked how, if Britain had not achieved any real success with a rocket, necessarily powered by liquid fuel to give it the range to reach London, could the Germans have done so? There was scepticism, too, in Germany. Despite strenuous efforts on the part of the main protagonists of the stratospheric, supersonic rocket, (Wernher von Braun and Walter Dornberger), some within the German political and military establishments, including the Führer, were slow to grasp the war-fighting potential of the two missiles. This scepticism, on both sides, would influence the in-service dates and effectiveness of these weapons, and the defences against them.
The V-weapons may not have achieved what the Führer and many others in the Third Reich had hoped for, and even expected, that of winning the war for them ‘in the final innings’, but it would be a calumny to see them as ‘complete failures’, as several authors have claimed. True, they were inaccurate, had insufficient range, their warheads were too small and, above all, they came too late to alter the course of the war. They may not have ‘terrorised’ most Londoners, or prevented supplies passing through Antwerp or Liège, but for a variety of reasons they had proved more than a nuisance to the Allies. The endless, often contentious, debates which raged in London alone on the likelihood of rocket and/or flying-bomb attacks on the Allies, and what defensive measures might be put in place against such exigencies, absorbed great minds and consumed valuable time at a critical stage in the war. Before and during the V-weapons campaign the Allies were forced to commit a great deal of the manpower and material originally earmarked for OVERLORD and the strategic bombing of Germany, to CROSSBOW targets, many of which were in friendly countries such as France, Belgium and Holland, which pleased the Führer, who said ‘every bomb dropped (by the Allies) on a CROSSBOW target was one less on the German heartland’. So it was that the V-weapons contributed to Germany’s war effort in many ways.
In the Allied camp, it had been taken for granted that the Germans would lose the war before the V1s and V2s took to the skies, and throughout their short operational life there remained no doubt that they would, but they did influence Allied plans and tie up thousands of Allied aircraft, AA, men and women in the last year of the war, thereby delaying their advance through Europe, and thus the end of the war. Typically, the need to cut off and suppress the missile launch sites proliferating in west Holland in the summer of 1944 caused Eisenhower and Montgomery to change their plans for crossing the Rhine from the ideal flatlands west of Wesel, to the more hazardous areas around Arnhem, with disastrous results for Operation MARKET GARDEN.
Why did the Germans continue to pour precious resources, in manpower and material, into their production and delivery of the V1s and V2s at the expense of the defensive measures they so urgently needed to stem the Allies’ advance towards Nazi Germany, and to counter the heavy bomber raids on their cities? Did the Germans really believe Joseph Goebbels’ very persuasive propaganda that these ill-proven missiles would turn the tide of war in their favour, or could there have been a more sinister possibility, certainly postulated in London, that the missiles were about to be re-equipped with chemical, biological – or even nuclear warheads?
It could have been so much worse for the Allies. The bombardment of London made no military sense, it was simply Hitler’s obsession with retaliation in kind for the heavy air raids on German cities. Had the missiles been concentrated on the invasion assembly areas, the embarkation ports and disembarkation beaches, where military men and equipment were massed together in highly lucrative targets, the results could have been catastrophic for the Allies. Eisenhower is known to have suggested that this might have led to the postponement, even cancellation of Operation OVERLORD.
I find no good reason to disbelieve Wernher von Braun’s claim that he, his mentors and cohorts approached the new world of supersonic, stratospheric rocketry primarily to explore the mysteries of space but that, in the circumstances at the time, they had no sensible alternative but to cede to Nazi demands for military applications. Of course there is some evidence, albeit perhaps difficult to prove, that von Braun himself, and others in his team, were complicit to some extent in war crimes, but given their inherent value to the Allies, pragmatism prevailed. So it was that their post-war employment with the Allies, mainly with the Americans but to a lesser extent the Russians and the British, made good use of their hard-earned expertise in rocket and flying-bomb technology to help put a man on the moon, while developing future weapons of war. Perhaps the world should be grateful that dedication to these weapons diverted great scientific and technical minds away from early interest in nuclear research.
Looking at the war as a whole, those who remember the death and devastation in London during the 1940 Blitz (and I was one), not to mention that wrought on Coventry, Bristol, Hull and other provincial towns in Britain, or the German brutality in occupied countries, could be puzzled by Germany’s use of the word Vergeltungswaffen, meaning ‘retaliation’, to describe the indiscriminate employment of V-weapons. The Allies did at least attempt to bomb, with precision, specific military or industrial targets within urban conurbations, whereas the V-weapons were unashamedly ‘area terror’ weapons when hurled at London, Antwerp, Liège et al. Verzweiflung, meaning ‘desperation’, might have been a more appropriate term for the V-weapons.
However, my sister and I had no such lofty thoughts as we rowed on that peaceful lake in Epping Forest. For us, and for those not directly affected by these weapons, life went on very much as usual. It was, of course, very different for tho
se who suffered directly in this ‘last gasp’ offensive; their pain, loss and anguish can only be imagined but at that late stage of the war I think it most unlikely that Herr Hitler’s Vergeltungswaffen would have brought Great Britain to its knees.
There remains one unanswered question. What difference would the V1s and V2s have made to the outcome of the war had not the many, self-inflicted delays prevented the missiles from becoming more effective, achieving greater accuracies and arriving on the front line in greater numbers, say, one year, or even six months earlier.
We will never know.
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