Why the Allies Won
Page 36
The army leadership wanted to be sure that a viable weapon would result from their investment. In 1936 Dornberger promised them a missile that could deliver a 1-ton warhead twice as far as the famous Paris Gun, the Krupp cannon used in the Great War. For the next six years von Braun’s team of engineers wrestled with the technical difficulty of turning their early experiments into a real weapon. The Dornberger rocket, the A4, suffered from the immature state of research into engines fuelled with liquid oxygen, and persistent problems in the guidance and control systems. Hitler, though aware of the research, did not give it a particular priority, until Dornberger and von Braun visited him in August 1941 to discuss their work. Rocket technology did not alienate Hitler like nuclear fission did. He hailed the new missile as ‘revolutionary for the conduct of warfare’ and promised more money. By June of 1942 the first rocket was ready for launching. Hermann Göring was the guest of honour. Among the sober team of engineers and soldiers, Göring arrived dressed in bright red riding boots with silver spurs, and a vast opossum-skin coat, his hands covered in ruby-encrusted rings. In front of the baroque visitor the research team watched as the 13-ton rocket blasted from its pad and roared into the clouds. A minute and a half later the roar began to get louder again. To the horror of the onlookers the missile plunged into the ground only 800 yards away. The guidance system was still insufficiently developed.
On 14 October 1942 the first successful launch was carried out. The rocket travelled 120 miles and landed within 2½ miles of the target. This was hardly long-range precision, but Hitler was impressed enough to call for production of five thousand. Technical problems continued to plague the rocket, however, and by the summer of 1943 there were still no finished weapons. By that time the Luftwaffe had developed its own pilotless missile, the Fieseler-103 ‘flying bomb’. Both projects emerged as technical possibilities at just the time that Hitler began to search for some means of retaliation against Allied bombing, or some wonder-weapon that might turn the tide of war. On 7 July 1943 Dornberger and von Braun visited Hitler again to press their case for developing the rocket. After a brief discussion, Hitler was invited to the cinema at his headquarters, where von Braun showed a colour film of the successful launch of a rocket. It was an ideal tactic. Hitler was overcome with excitement. He told Speer that the A4 was the ‘decisive weapon of the war’; he agreed to appoint von Braun a professor on the spot, and ordered immediate mass production.76
The new weapons, the air force pilotless bomb and the rocket, were nicknamed ‘Vergeltungswaffen’, ‘weapons of revenge’, which gave rise to the popular abbreviations V1 and V2 respectively. Hitler wanted thousands of them, there and then, to shower down on England and the preparations for invasion. In reality things moved slowly; neither weapon was yet at the stage of development suitable for mass production. The A4 became bogged down in a further round of design changes to cope with the unexpected distortions created by the addition of a warhead. In August 1943 the RAF destroyed the Peenemünde rocket-research base, as news of the secret weapons leaked to the west. Despite this setback Hitler determinedly persisted with the ‘wonder-weapon’ strategy. The whole project was taken from the army and given to the SS. Himmler built a production complex for the rocket deep in the Harz mountains, and promised to fulfil Hitler’s demand for five thousand missiles a month. Thirty thousand concentration camp labourers slaved in the underground caverns in unspeakable conditions. When Speer visited the plant he was met by lines of exhausted, grimy men with ‘expressionless faces, dull eyes’. The brightly lit tunnels, 2,800 yards long, were full of stale air and the stench of excrement. Speer felt numb and dizzy. When he returned above ground he took a stiff drink.77
In the subterranean nightmare of Himmler’s ‘Mittelwerk’, the slaves installed the machinery, the rail track and equipment. One-tenth or more of their number perished every month. By January 1944 production began, with an output of fifty rockets rather than five thousand. Constant technical changes held progress up. Over the whole year only 4,120 were produced. Despite Dornberger’s warning that the rocket was still not fully developed, Hitler and Himmler pushed on with the ‘decisive weapon’. The first fying-bombs were despatched on 13 June, but only ten could be launched, and only five reached London. The first rocket was launched on 8 September. Out of the six thousand produced only 1,403 were fired at Britain, and only 517 actually landed on the capital. Some 5,800 flying-bombs were eventually launched, 2,420 of which reached the capital, out of a total production of thirty thousand. The weapons of revenge killed nine thousand Londoners, but the total tonnage of explosives they contained – approximately 2,500 tons over nine months – represented just 0.23 per cent of the tonnage dropped on Germany by the Allied air force over the same period.78
Neither rockets nor flying-bombs were war winners. The technology was immature, the warheads, even with the high velocity of the rocket impact, which magnified the effects of a ton of high explosive, too small to achieve any major damage, and too imprecise to target particular installations. The weapons ignited the persistent fantasy among Nazi leaders that the fortunes of war could be turned at the last hour by an unforeseen technological breakthrough. The V-weapons programme cost over 5 billion marks, and absorbed tens of thousands of workers. The resources that went to build them could, according to the American Bombing Survey, have produced an additional 24,000 aircraft. Himmler’s brutal efforts to squeeze out the manpower and materials compromised the rest of the war economy, while the research teams were forced to tackle the A4 and the flying-bomb instead of concentrating on projects with greater strategic worth. One of the programme casualties was a ground-to-air missile, ‘Wasserfall’, developed at Peenemünde, which was closer to mass-production and less expensive than the A4. Its strategic value in 1944, as a weapon capable of destroying the heavy-bombers, greatly outweighed the A4, but there were not enough resources to go round and the latter enjoyed Hitler’s personal support. Only a different warhead would have made the A4 worth the effort. Much recent research has attempted to demonstrate that such a warhead did in fact exist, but the evidence is not entirely clear cut. Himmler is supposed to have authorised development of so-called ‘dirty bombs’ using the radioactive waste generated by the nuclear research programme. Small spherical bombs ‘the size of a pumpkin’ were stored in the tunnels of the Mittelwerke, where the rockets were produced. A detonation with conventional explosive could have produced a device capable of irradiating an area of a square mile; but German engineers failed to produce a fuse that could have detonated the dirty bomb in the atmosphere, even if Hitler had approved their use. It has also been claimed that small tactical nuclear weapons were developed out of the research into nuclear energy, but the precise nature of the bomb, if it existed, cannot now be verified.79
There is a profound irony here, for it was fear of Germany’s technological prowess that prompted first the British and then the American government to pursue their own atomic programme with their collective scientific energy. British scientists faced the same scepticism as did their German counterparts when the prospect of an atomic bomb was first suggested in 1940. But Britain faced a situation of desperate isolation, even defeat. In April 1940 a committee of top British scientists was set up to evaluate and report on the possibility of producing an atomic bomb within the likely timescale of the war. The ‘Maud’ committee, as it was known (the word was plucked from a cryptic telegram sent by Niels Bohr, and turned out to be the name of his former English governess), reported in July 1941 that it was possible to produce a bomb either from enriched uranium or from plutonium produced in a reactor. A great deal of experimental work supported their conclusions. They spelt out the industrial costs and problems, even down to the price of producing one bomb per week. On 17 October the decision was taken to proceed. That autumn two American physicists were sent to Britain to examine the atomic programme; they reported back to Washington that the bomb was a realistic project. The day before Pearl Harbor the Office of Scientific Research and
Development approved the research for an atomic bomb.80
In June 1942 the British finally recognised that the industrial and research effort needed to make a bomb quickly was beyond them. America took over the whole project. British scientists were coopted to three ‘secret cities’, one at Oak Ridge, Tennessee, where the uranium separation plants were built, another at Hanford, for the production of plutonium, and the third in the New Mexico desert, at Los Alamos, where the laboratories were sited. In August 1942 the bomb project – codenamed ‘Manhattan’ or ‘DSM’ (development of substitute materials) – was launched. Enriched uranium was produced by electro-magnetic process; plutonium was developed in reactors cooled by liquid helium; graphite, the second of Heisenberg’s moderators, proved the most successful. There were still innumerable technical hurdles to surmount. British scientists had forecast in 1941 that a bomb could be produced by the end of 1943. But even with strong political and military backing, generous resources, a large international team of scientists and engineers and no disruptions from bombing or sabotage, there was still insufficient uranium to produce a bomb by the time the war in Europe was over.
Not until 16 July 1945 was it possible to test the new weapon. Both a plutonium bomb and an enriched uranium bomb were planned, but the test used a plutonium warhead, which generated less fall-out. Early in the morning the Los Alamos scientists made their way to a position some 10 miles from the Alamogordo Air Base site where the detonation was to take place. The weather was poor, and the test, planned for 2 a.m., had to be postponed for three and a half hours. All personnel were instructed to lie face down on the ground with their hands over their eyes until the flash of the bomb was past. At 5.30 a.m. the bomb went off. Otto Frisch, the German emigré who in 1939 helped to calculate the necessary critical mass of U235 to cause an explosion, stood 20 miles away, behind a radio truck for fear of ultra-violet rays. The hills around him were flecked with faint dawn. Suddenly, soundlessly, the hills were glaringly illuminated ‘as if somebody had turned the sun on with a switch’.81 When he looked over the truck he saw a ‘pretty red ball, about as big as the sun’ connected to the earth by a grey stem. One of the technicians who had been placed in a dug-out 5 miles closer to the explosion, arrived back at the main group. He said simply: ‘The war is over.’ General Groves, the military head of the project, replied: ‘Yes, after we drop two bombs on Japan.’82
Both were wrong. Atomic weapons did not win the war, for they came far too late to affect the outcome. Japan was on the point of surrender by the time the two available bombs were used. The technical triumph helped to illustrate how intimately technology and war-making were linked in the western war effort. The war accelerated the technical threshold, and brought the weapons of the Cold War within reach, but no state, even the most richly endowed, was able to achieve a radical transformation of military technology before 1945. The war was won with tanks, aircraft, artillery and submarines, the weapons with which it was begun.
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The fate of German military technology provides one of the central paradoxes of the war. Germany was without doubt a modern state by the standards of the 1940s, but her forces were stage by stage deprived of the modern weapons they needed. While German scientists pioneered the world’s most advanced weapons – rockets, jets, atomic weapons – German forces lacked adequate quantities of the more humdrum petrol-driven equipment. Only later in the war was an effort made to change this balance, but by then the attrition ratio was too far in favour of the Allies to be reversed. Billions of marks were spent on projects at the very frontiers of military science which brought almost no strategic advantage whatsoever.
The paradox can be explained in part by the warped outlook of Germany’s leaders, who persuaded themselves as the war began to turn against them that German science could conjure up a new generation of fantastic weaponry that could reverse the war’s course at a stroke. ‘Retribution is at hand,’ Goebbels told Party leaders in February 1944. ‘It will take a form hitherto unknown in warfare, a form the enemy will find impossible to bear.’83 Towards the end of 1944 Himmler tried to revive atomic bomb research, and to develop a new chemical weapon, the new incendiary ‘N-material’ that was literally inextinguishable. All these projects absorbed men and materials that would have been much better spent in conventional fields, but the fantasy of secret weapons helped to cushion the reality of impending defeat.
There is a second explanation: the German armed forces pursued technical excellence for its own sake. By the late 1930s they had developed the weapons that would in the main be used to fight the Second World War. They were now keen to move on to the next technical threshold to keep ahead in the arms race. At the outbreak of the war they were already at the very starting edge of the world of jets and missiles. When the war came they tried to speed the process of development up, to win the war with the weapons of the 1950s. The result was a technical disaster: shortages of resources, constant political interference, the inherent difficulty of accelerating research work at the forefront of science, all meant that German forces got little operational payback from the new weapons to match the great expense of producing them. The Allies – except for the Manhattan atomic project – stuck with the weapons of the late 1930s, and pushed them successfully to their limits, in most cases overtaking the performance of Germany’s more conventional weaponry. When after the war they came to develop missiles, jets, advanced submarine technology, and a host of other vanguard equipment, they simply took German scientists and blueprints.
By contrast with Germany, the Soviet Union was far less modern, though the difference is often prone to exaggeration. But over the course of the war very great strides were made in all fields of advanced technology. Hundreds of thousands of poorly-educated, technically illiterate Soviet citizens were trained to drive trucks and tanks, or fly some of the world’s fastest aircraft. The Soviet Union had nothing to lose and everything to gain by upgrading her manpower and equipment. For twenty years Soviet communism had preached the virtues of modernisation as the answer to all the country’s problems. Now the gospel was needed more than ever. The struggles of collectivisation and industrial transformation became the struggle for military progress. Soviet soldiers were tough, used to harsh conditions of life and few luxuries. When that hardiness was married to modern technology the mix proved much more effective than many in the west had thought possible. When John Erickson, later a distinguished historian of that modernisation, first confronted the Red Army as a young infantry sergeant in 1945 he was struck by the curious blend he beheld: ‘an army of unwashed, uncouth, lithe Ukrainians, squat riflemen from the central Asian republics, combat medals a-jingle, cradling superb self-loading rifles – but, above all, the tanks in their fungicidal green colouring, the paint just slapped on over those powerful turreted guns’.84 In the end the Soviet army proved just modern enough; but German forces were too modern for their own good.
8
IMPOSSIBLE UNITY …
Allies and Leaders in War
‘Our greatest triumph lies in the
fact that we achieved the impossible,
Allied military unity of action’.
General George C. Marshall, 1945
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THE FIRST TIME that the three Allied leaders came face to face was at the Teheran conference in November 1943. At four o’clock in the afternoon of the 28th, they were to assemble at a small conference room in the Soviet Embassy. Stalin was already waiting for them. Roosevelt was pushed in his wheelchair from the small building in the grounds of the Embassy where the American delegation had been persuaded to stay. Dressed in a blue business suit, he arrived half an hour before Churchill. Churchill had already met Stalin, but to the President the Soviet dictator was an unknown quantity. When Roosevelt entered Stalin ambled towards him, walking clumsily ‘like a small bear’.1 A little later Churchill left the British compound with his retinue to walk the few hundred yards to the conference hall. Soviet secret policemen peered from beh
ind every tree. When he arrived he greeted Stalin cordially and shook Roosevelt’s hand. ‘Everything was so relaxed,’ recalled the American interpreter. ‘It did not seem possible that the three most powerful men in the world were about to make decisions involving the lives and fortunes of millions of people.’2
Teheran was not an ideal location. Roosevelt had travelled 7,000 miles to get there, Churchill 4,000. Roosevelt had suggested the Bering Straits, Khartoum, Cairo, even Asmara in Somaliland, but Stalin rejected them all.3 Stalin chose Teheran only because he said he wanted to stay in close communication with the front in an area where Soviet security could operate freely. No one ran any risks. The city was patrolled everywhere by Soviet agents, guns bulging ostentatiously beneath their jackets; there were 2,500 American troops on hand; Churchill was protected by a whole regiment of Indian Sikhs. The conference room was comfortably furnished, with a large green-covered table in the centre. The leaders, with their interpreters and chief advisers – all except General Marshall, Roosevelt’s Chief-of-Staff, who was out sightseeing because, incredibly, nobody had told him about the meeting – sat in a circle to begin the formal proceedings.4