Great fires were painting the ubiquitous fog, now thickened with stinking smoke, dark red. Bright flames were darting from many places on the roof of the drawing-offices. Glowing sparks whirled upwards in dense clouds of smoke. The attic windows shone red. Some rafters on the residential building roof were on fire. All round us, on the roads and in the grounds, the hissing thermite incendiaries shone dazzlingly white.
Von Braun was dispatched to try to save the drawing office or at least ‘to get the safes, cabinets, records and drawings out’ and Dornberger himself set off ‘along the main avenue to the command shelter’, a melancholy progress:
The old office hut, where the accounts department, the printing and binding trades and smaller ancillary businesses were still housed, was enveloped in flames and past all hope of saving. . . . I could see a small fire beginning on the roof of the boiler house. . . . I sent men up to the roof. . . . Flights of bombers were passing uninterruptedly over the Works. There was a distant, hollow rumble of many bombs falling, mingled with the noise of A.A. guns. . . . Alternately throwing ourselves down and leaping up again, we reached the west side of the Measurement House, containing the Instruments, Guidance and Measurement Department . . . the most valuable part of the Works. The windows were dark. Behind the building a big fire seemed to be raging. I rushed round the corner and beheld the Assembly Workshop on fire in several places. The big entrance gates, 60 feet high, were burning. Tongues of flame shot, crackling and hissing, out of the shattered windows of the wings. Iron girders, twisted and red hot, rose above the outer walls. Parts of the roof structure collapsed, crashing down into the interior. . . . I looked at the windows in the east facade of the Measurement House. Many of them shone brightly. . . . The heat . . . had set fire to the wooden sashes. I took my two men along and we divided the floors between us. Fire extinguishers hung in front of almost every door. In fifteen minutes we had saved the Measurement House and with it an indispensable element for the continuance of our work.
The huge display of flares over a supposedly thinly populated stretch of the Baltic coast had attracted the attention of many of the night-fighter pilots milling aimlessly about over Berlin, and some members of the ‘freelance’ ‘Wild Boar’ squadrons set off at once in their direction, wreaking havoc among the Lancasters and Halifaxes of the third wave. Realizing at last that they had been duped, the Germans also ordered up several squadrons of Messerschmitt 110s based near Copenhagen, and these harried the returning bombers on their flight home, usually the time when losses were heaviest.
Duncan Sandys had waited at RAF Wyton for the return of Group Captain Searby (who had himself to shake off a pursuing night-fighter on the way back) and the other Pathfinders of 83 Squadron and, on hearing their encouraging news, at once telephoned Churchill, at the ‘Quadrant’ conference in Quebec. Later that day the Air Ministry sent a confirmatory telegram:
586 aircraft dispatched to attack RDF establishment PEENEMÜNDE last night. 41 missing.5 Weather was clear over target and preliminary reports suggest that a successful attack was made in spite of an effective smoke screen.
The loss rate, just under 7 per cent, though high, was acceptable for a once-for-all effort on a uniquely important objective, in which almost 1600 tons of high explosive and 250 tons of incendiary bombs had been dropped, and early that afternoon the interpreters at Medmenham found that the first post-raid pictures, taken by a Mosquito at 10 a.m., showed that the place at which they had peered through their stereoscopes through so many weary hours had changed almost beyond recognition:
There is a large concentration of craters in and around the target area and many buildings are still on fire. In the North Manufacturing Area some 27 buildings of medium size have been completely destroyed; at least four buildings are seen still burning. . . . Severe damage has been done to the buildings of the factory and laboratory type probably serving the supposed ‘projection installations’ and the aerodrome. The accommodation for personnel has suffered very severely.
Group Captain Searby was awarded an immediate DSO and received a congratulatory letter from ‘Bomber’ Harris, whose tactics had been brilliantly vindicated: only one Mosquito had been lost over Berlin, of the nine which had tied up virtually the whole German night-fighter force. An analysis of the 400 photographs brought back by the Peenemünde raiders revealed that ‘it is probable that nearly all aircraft bombed within three miles, and the majority within one mile, of the aiming point’. On 21 August, when Duncan Sandys submitted his tenth report to the Chiefs of Staff, he was soberly confident:
There is every indication that the raid on Peenemünde was most successful. . . . A large part of the living quarters were annihilated and many buildings in the main factory area were destroyed. From preliminary assessments of damage it would seem unlikely that any appreciable production will be possible at PEENEMÜNDE for some months.
The Chief of Staff had already, two days earlier, turned down a generous offer by the US 8th Air Force to finish the job off in daylight. There was, they believed, nothing worthwhile left to destroy.
This indeed was how it must have seemed to Dornberger on the miserable, smoke-wreathed morning of Friday, 18 August. He had seen his own ‘stamp collection . . . shotguns and hunting gear’ lost in his burning house and the great establishment he had virtually created destroyed around him. But, as always, action lifted his spirits. When ‘the canteen manager . . . appeared . . . hatless, in torn clothes, hurt and singed by phosphorus bombs’, he was instructed ‘to go and get coffee and soup ready at once’, and Dornberger set off on a tour of inspection by bicycle. Things, he soon discovered, were not quite as bad as they had seemed during the night. ‘The waterworks were undamaged.’ So, too, was ‘the assembly hall for experimental rockets’. Even more important ‘the big assembly hall of the pre-production works’ was still standing, though ‘nine 1000 lb bombs and many phosphorus and stick incendiaries had penetrated the concrete roof and exploded or burnt out in that huge place. . . . Machines and material had been hit by bomb splinters. There were hits in the outer side aisles, big holes in the masonry of the walls. But the damage was not really serious.’
As it became light Dornberger reached ‘the settlement’, the residential estate for the German staff, and here, as he put it, ‘Death had reaped a rich harvest’, among those who had not fled along the coast to Zinnovitz when the bombing started:
Soldiers of the Northern Experimental Command, Labour Service men and some of the staff were feverishly working to open up buried cellars, clear slit trenches, rescue furniture from burning houses and remove fallen trees, beams and other wreckage. I saw the bodies of men, women and children. Some had been charred by phosphorus incendiaries. I hurried along the beach road to Dr Thiel’s house. It had been destroyed by a direct hit. The slit trench in front was just a huge crater.
It was a scene which, thanks to Dornberger himself, was soon to be repeated on a far larger scale in southern England, but this thought does not seem to have crossed his mind as, ‘shaken to the very soul’, he huried to the school being used as a temporary mortuary and ‘stood before the remains of Dr Thiel, his wife and his children’. Thiel had been one of the inner circle of rocket researchers ever since 1936, and, wrote Dornberger, ‘my heart overflowed with gratitude for all he had done for our project’; without his work on developing its motor and perfecting the mixture of propellants there might, indeed, have been no A-4. However, to a soldier death was commonplace. ‘I pulled myself together. The most important thing now was to help the living.’
With von Braun beside him Dornberger flew over the site by air in a light Storch aircraft, their first view of it by air since the triumphant return from the visit to Hitler a month earlier. He was ‘struck to the heart by this first comprehensive view of the destruction’ and ‘on landing . . . could only mutter wearily: “My poor, poor Peenemünde!” ’ But the arrival that morning of Albert Speer, who flew on to report to Hitler on what had happened, helped to cheer him up, as did t
he discovery that ‘material damage to the works, contrary to first impressions, was surprisingly small’ and that ‘the test fields and special plant such as the wind tunnel and Measurement House were not hit’. The damage that had been done, he turned to his advantage. Once the main administration building had been made usable again, burnt timbers were laid across the roof to mislead subsequent reconnaissance sorties and, where they did not actually block a road, craters were not filled in. ‘We maintained the effect of complete destruction for nine months, during which we had no more raids,’ he later recalled – a vital nine months, for ‘the project could not be prevented now from coming to fruition’.
What was the true balance sheet for the Peenemünde raid? To set against the 40 heavy bombers and one Mosquito missing in action, at least 39 German fighters had been lost, 9 of them shot down and the rest victims of each other, of their own anti-aircraft guns, and of collisions on the ground, owing to the chaos that had developed in the skies over Berlin and on the airfields around it. This fiasco also brought the RAF its most distinguished victim of the night, General Hans Jeschonnek, for whom the news around 7 a.m. that Peenemünde had apparently been destroyed proved the last straw, after being harangued by Hitler the previous day and bawled at in the early hours by Goring. He wrote a reproachful, but still loyal, suicide note before shooting himself. ‘I cannot work with Goring any more. Long live the Führer!’ Of 12,000 people living on the Peenemünde ‘campus’, 8000 of whom, including dependants, were directly concerned with rocket production, 732 had been killed. Only 120 were German; the rest, in Dornberger’s words, ‘consisted of Russians, Poles, etc.’ The British were to pay a heavy price for the mis-aimed bombs which had killed them. Previously these forced labourers had been a valuable source of intelligence, a source which now wholly dried up.
The loss of accommodation on Usedom was rapidly overcome by billeting bombed out people all over the surrounding area and collecting them by special transport. No premises not absolutely essential were repaired, thanks to a captured airman cheerfully passing on to his interrogators the information he had been given at briefing that Peenemünde would be bombed again and again until it was destroyed. The immediate effect on rocket testing was slight, for Test Stand VII had not been seriously damaged by the few stray bombs that had landed near it. Nor was production seriously interfered with, thanks to the foresight shown back in March when it had been ordered that ‘production blueprints, special tools and so forth’ should be maintained elsewhere. But the cumulative effect of the raid, and of the loss of life and general disruption it caused, was substantial, undoubtedly justifying the lives and effort devoted to Operation Hydra. Winston Churchill, in his post-war memoirs, considered that ‘The attack on Peenemünde . . . played an important part in the general progress of the war’ and that ‘but for this raid Hitler’s bombardment of London by rockets might well have started early in 1944’. This is to claim too much. Dornberger put the delay in resuming work at ‘only four to six weeks’, though no doubt to achieve full production took longer. Goebbels, in mid-October, made a similar estimate. ‘The English raids. . .’, he wrote, ‘have thrown our preparations back four or even eight weeks, so that we can’t possibly count on reprisals before the end of January.’ R. V. Jones, reviewing all the evidence long after the war, concluded that ‘the raid must have gained us at least two months’ – ‘very significant’ months, as he points out.
The bombing of Peenemünde, although much the most serious, was not the only blow to befall the A-4 programme that summer. On 22 June 1943, six weeks before Operation Hydra, sixty Lancasters had been sent against the former Zeppelin works at Friedrichshafen on Lake Constanz, in the belief that early-warning radar installations were being built there. The attack, carried out without loss, was spectacularly successful, though undertaken for the wrong reason. The factory was in reality being converted to turn out 300 A-4s a month, a target now unlikely to be achieved. On 13 August 1943, four days before the great Bomber Command assault on Peenemünde, the US 9th Air Force had made an equally fortunate mistake, sending a heavy force of Liberators to destroy the Messerschmitt works at Wiener Neustadt in Austria as part of its long-standing campaign against German fighter production. Only after the war was it learned that Wiener Neustadt was manufacturing rocket components.
7
REVENGE IS NIGH
Our hour of revenge is nigh!
Adolf Hitler, broadcasting from Munich, 8 November 1943
Less than a week after what Dornberger described as Peenemunde’s ‘flaming night’ Speer and Himmler spent a long session with Hitler discussing the A-4 programme. Speer’s report, on Sunday, 22 August 1943, made a deep impression on Hitler, even though he had never visited the place,6 and he now ordered that the ‘pilot factory’ there should not be expanded for mass production, as intended, but that manufacture of A-4s on the site should continue only until a safer location had been developed. Pre-production work on the A-4 would be taken over by a new plant at Traunsee in Austria, codenamed ‘Cement’, and the principal testing range for rockets would be transferred from Usedom to Blizna, a small village near Debice in Poland, and about 170 miles south of Warsaw.
The name Blizna now began increasingly to feature in the intelligence reports about the A-4 reaching London. Before 1940 it had been notable only as the site of the confluence of the River Vistula and River San, but then the inhabitants had been evicted to make way for a huge SS training camp, 20 kilometres square, the work being done after 1941 by Russian prisoners of war, deliberately worked and starved to death, and by the occupants of a small concentration camp now set up in the area, known as Heidelager, or ‘the camp on the heath’, a name now transferred to the whole establishment. The decision to move rocket research to Blizna led to its being expanded still further. The existing railway siding, linked to the main railway line from Cracow to Lvov, was lengthened, new roads and barracks were built, and, after a visit from Himmler on 28 September 1943, a full-scale programme of camouflage was put in hand. ‘The outlines of cottages and outbuildings’, a Polish historian noted, ‘were brought from Germany; fences were erected and linen hung on them; dummies of men, women and children stood around, and flowers were sown.’ But there was one sinister addition to this idyllic picture. ‘At the railway siding trains began to arrive composed of long flat trucks, covered with canvas, hiding long objects’, a development rapidly reported to the Cracow District of the Polish Home Army by the Poles of the Forestry Commission, allowed by the Germans to remain in residence when the rest of the population were deported. Apart from them it was now a solidly German area, with no fewer than 16,000 troops in the main barracks. Another 400 were stationed six miles away, with SS officers to keep an eye on them, near what had been earmarked as the main A-4 launching and test site. Blizna reminded Dornberger of Kummersdorf, where the rocket programme had begun: ‘in the thick woods of fir, pine and oak’ there was ‘a big clearing measuring a little over half a square mile. A small, stone-built house and a dilapidated thatched stable stood there in complete isolation’. Under SS General Hans Kammler, however (of whom much more will be heard), in charge of the building programme, no time was wasted in creating a new, if more modest, Peenemünde in Poland. ‘A concrete road, built in a few weeks, led from the nearest main highway to our testing ground. . . . During October and November, huts, living-quarters, sheds and a large store were erected close by.’
The whole rocket programme was now coming increasingly under the control of the SS, that ‘state within a state’ – originally set up to protect the Nazi regime against disaffection – which had steadily spread its tentacles over every part of the nation’s activities. Speer, for all his professed innocence of the worst aspects of Nazism, raised no objections to Himmler’s invasion of his own specialist field, munitions production. ‘The Führer orders’, he noted loyally in his office diary after the meeting of 22 August 1943, ‘that, jointly with the SS Reichsfuhrer [i.e. Himmler] and utilizing to the full the ma
npower which he has available in his concentration camps, every step must be taken to promote both the construction of A-4 manufacturing plants and the resumed production of the A-4 rocket itself.’ Speer seemed delighted with the turn events had taken. ‘The A-4 men’, he told a conference in Berlin approvingly on 26 August, ‘have met with the strongest support from the SS in accelerating rocket production.’
On 9 September 1943 the Long-Range Bombardment Commission, set up to advise on the manufacture and use of both main secret weapons, under the chairmanship of Professor Petersen, and with Dr Saur of the Ministry of Munitions, now, in his own words, ‘a fanatical disciple of this project’, in attendance, tried to tie von Braun down to firm delivery dates for the operational version of the A-4. Hitherto only rockets with dummy warheads had been fired, and Petersen dealt briskly with von Braun’s reluctance to bring the ‘live’ trials forward from mid-November to mid-October, observing that though ‘the most unexpected surprises might crop up . . . the earlier we invite these surprises, the more quickly we shall be able to overcome them’. This pressure for results probably reflected the growing faith of all the Nazi leaders in the rocket. A mass turnout of Nazi ministers and senior officers, summoned to the Wolf’s Lair on 10 September 1943, heard Hitler predict that the bombardment by both secret weapons could begin in February 1944, but it was the A-4 on which he set the highest hopes. ‘The Führer’, observed Goebbels in his diary, ‘is hoping for great things from this rocket weapon. He believes that in certain circumstances he will be able to force the tide of war to turn against England with it.’ That month Dornberger was formally appointed Commissioner for the A-4 programme, responsible to the C-in-C of the Home Army, Colonel-General Friedrich Fromm, for any remaining development of the rocket that was needed and for ‘the formation and final training of field units for operations.’
Hitler's Rockets: The Story of the V-2s Page 10