On 1 November Cripps submitted his interim findings. The rocket was, he advised, ‘theoretically possible’, and the stillunexplained earthwork at Peenemünde might be the ‘giant mortar’ for which everyone had been seeking. A little later the Ministry of Supply produced some highly imaginative drawings suggesting what it might look like – they envisaged an 80 foot object not unlike a giant milk bottle, poised on a giant seesaw or trundled into position on a trolley to be raised to an acute angle for firing – and searching for these totally fictitious structures now added an extra burden to the work of the interpreters at Medmenham. On the same day as Cripps’s first report Cherwell reaffirmed in a private memo to Churchill his belief ‘that we shall not suffer from rocket bombardment, certainly not on the scale suggested’, adding a barbed postscript: ‘As I am often believed to be responsible for giving you scientific advice, it would perhaps be well to mention the fact that I am sceptical about this particular matter.’
Churchill’s response to the two contradictory memos of 1 November was to ask Cripps, on the following day, to
hold a short inquiry, of not more than two sittings, into the evidence, as apart from the scientific aspects, of the long-range rocket. At the same time it would be well to assemble what arguments there are for and against:
the pilotless airplane, and
the glider bomb operated by a directing aircraft from a distance.
These two latter requirements were, inevitably, to divert the investigation from giving a clear answer to the single question concerning the rocket. Equally unfortunately, but also perhaps inevitably, he decided to invite Lord Cherwell to form, with himself and Duncan Sandys, a three-man tribunal, before which witnesses could be cross-examined, the tribunal being assisted by a scientist and an engineer hitherto unconnected with the inquiry. This quasi-judicial procedure did not appeal to that least judicial of men, Lord Cherwell, and he now set out to prejudice what might have been called the court of appeal, the Prime Minister, by writing privately to him before the Cripps inquiry had even met. ‘It appears’, wrote Cherwell, ‘that the Ministry of Aircraft Production’ – i.e. Cripps’s own department – ’is now planning measures even more far-reaching than were envisaged in 1939 in order to meet a danger whose existence is not certain.’ He also tried to throw doubt on the credentials of the man he considered the chief ‘prosecution’ witness for the rocket. If Cripps, commented Cherwell, preferred ‘to accept the assurance of Mr Lubbock – who has not hitherto been conspicuously successful in rocket design . . . against the view of Dr Crow, who has made successful rockets . . . there is nothing more to be said.’
The ‘trial’ of the evidence for the rocket’s existence began on 8 November 1943 in a room in the Cabinet Offices, with one witness after another, including a three-man contingent from Medmenham, traversing the now familiar ground. The ‘case’ had hardly opened when it took an unexpected turn. Wing Commander Kendall revealed the discovery of a whole new series of concrete ramps in the Pas-de-Calais, all pointing towards London, and Cripps immediately adjourned the proceedings to allow more photographs to be studied. The following day was, as it happened, that of the Lord Mayor’s Luncheon (to which the traditional annual pre-war banquet had now shrunk), and Churchill took the opportunity in his speech at the Mansion House to remind the nation of the secret-weapon danger:
We cannot . . . exclude the possibility of new forms of attack upon this island. We have been vigilantly watching for many months past every sign of preparation for such attacks. Whatever happens they will not be of a nature to affect the final course of the war.
The following day the Cripps inquiry heard that more possible launching sites had been discovered, and these dominated its further discussions and its second report, submitted on 17 November: ‘There is no doubt that the Germans are doing their utmost to perfect some long-range weapon . . . though there is no evidence of its materialization before the New Year at the earliest.’ As for its nature, the ‘court’ put the ‘Rocket A-4’ fourth and last in its ‘order of probability’, after ‘glider bombs, pilotless aircraft’ and ‘long-range rocket, smaller than A-4’. Even this heavily qualified acceptance of the rocket, however, infuriated Lord Cherwell. ‘What can you expect from a lawyer who eats nothing but nuts?’ he grumbled to his staff, an odd comment from a man who, in the absence of his favourite Port Salut cheese, lived largely on stewed apple and rice.
With the Cripps report the rocket inquiry was shunted into a siding. On 18 November, with his own agreement, since his ministry had its hands full with pre-D-Day problems, Duncan Sandys’s special inquiry came to an end, though it was agreed he would attend whenever secret weapons were on the Chiefs of Staff’s agenda. The Joint Intelligence Committee, reporting to the Cabinet’s Defence Committee, would continue to keep an eye on the whole secret-weapons field, but this was only one of its responsibilities and Dr Jones doubted if this would be adequate. ‘My section’, he had written to the committee’s chairman on 15 November, when he learned what was proposed, ‘will continue its work, regardless of any parallel committees which may arise, and will be mindful only of the safety of the country.’ In fact his section too, before long, was to have an even more urgent responsibility than hunting down the rocket – that of deceiving the German radar stations in the area where Operation Overlord was soon to fall. The Defence Committee, the senior policy-making body below the War Cabinet, formally endorsed, on 18 November, Cripps’s conclusion that ‘no serious attack by rocket . . . was likely at any rate before the New Year’, and also agreed ‘that there was a reasonable prospect of our receiving at least a month’s notice before any heavy attack could develop’.
On 27 November 1943 the former secret-weapon codename, ‘Bodyline’, most commonly applied to the rocket, was replaced by ‘Crossbow’, which was used principally about the flying bomb. On 2 December the flying bomb’s triumph over the rocket, at least in London, became complete with the discovery of a pilotless aircraft on a ramp at Peenemünde identical with those discovered in France, and seeming to point to an imminent attack of this kind. On 28 December Herbert Morrison’s Civil Defence Committee, taking another look at the formerly dreaded rocket, decided that ‘on the new appreciation the weight of attack is very much less’ than that previously contemplated and Morrison himself, previously the chief alarmist in the government, argued ‘that it is undesirable to make plans for any more extensive evacuation of priority classes than is absolutely necessary’. By the end of the year the rocket was definitely in eclipse. ‘It is now thought’, the committee learned on New Year’s Eve, ‘that the form of attack likely to be used first by the enemy would be pilotless aircraft, although the possibility of long-distance rockets being utilized, probably at a rather late stage, would certainly not be ignored.’
Once convinced that the rocket existed, Herbert Morrison had all along taken the danger from it more seriously than his colleagues and at the first meeting of the Civil Defence Committee in the new year, on 18 January 1944, he raised the question of a public warning system – essential, he thought, both to reduce casualties and to maintain morale. He was a good deal more confident than the Air Ministry experts that radar would detect each missile as it was fired, or at least before it arrived, but recognized, in the draft public announcement he had prepared, that the interval between warning and impact would be desperately short:
There will be no time for preparations. People who can reach their shelters in less than a minute should go to them immediately. Failing such protection – in a corridor or stairway away from windows, under a strong table or bed or stairs. People caught in the street should, if there is not a shelter handy, run into the nearest building or lie down flat in the gutter or beside a low wall. Get under the best cover immediately.
Owing to the nature of the attack no ‘Raiders passed’ signal will be possible. Each . . . warning should be regarded as lasting for five minutes and after this time has elapsed work may again be resumed.
Until Air
Defence of Great Britain (formerly, and later, known as Fighter Command) was able, via a special electrical system, to give a simultaneous alarm in the endangered areas, it was proposed that ‘four rounds will be fired in quick succession from light anti-aircraft guns from a selected number of battery sites’, but this crude and temporary system would be replaced as soon as possible by ‘a number of maroons fired simultaneously’; sounding the sirens would take too long. Morrison also proposed that, just before the attack was expected to start, people should be warned of the necessity of keeping the Germans guessing where their missiles had landed:
The public are warned not to communicate, by word of mouth or otherwise, any information as to whether [rocket] shells have fallen, where they have fallen, or the extent of the damage done by them. The enemy will be anxious to obtain such information as a guide to the range and accuracy of his weapon and even quite general statements, if they fall into his hands, may assist him.
All this seemed sensible enough, but the Civil Defence Committee were dubious. Even a preliminary announcement at this stage was ruled out, on the grounds it might cause needless alarm, and there were doubts about the value of a short-term warning. A headlong rush to take cover might, it was feared, cause a disastrous crush in the narrow tube-station entrances, production would be interrupted, and some timorous workers, once underground, might ‘remain there indefinitely or even fail to come to work at all’. For the moment the preparations stayed secret.
Meanwhile the Chiefs of Staff were trying to decide whether the ‘ski sites’ discovered in northern France – so called after the shape of their most prominent building – which were rightly associated with the flying bomb, or the ‘large sites’ detected earlier, assumed, in most cases correctly, to be connected with the rocket, presented the more urgent problem. At a meeting on 25 January 1944 a sharp differences of opinion emerged. The Chief of the Air Staff, Sir Charles Portal, ‘considered that SIRACOURT and WATTEN should be attacked on the highest priority, the necessary effort being at the expense of attacks on “ski” sites, and that SOTTEVAST and LOTTINGEM should be raised to the highest priority’ a little later. ‘Sir Alan Brooke’, meanwhile, the minutes recorded, ‘queried the wisdom of diverting effort from the attack on “ski” sites to large sites at this juncture’, while Lord Cherwell, no doubt present because secret weapons were on the agenda, made a typically unhelpful, and grotesquely wrong, contribution. ‘He was not convinced that the large sites were in fact rocket projectors for the attack of targets in this country. Possibly they were some form of anti-invasion defences’ designed to put down a ‘heavy concentration of gas on the beaches’. It was also decided to look into the possibility ‘of capturing for cross-examination purposes technical personnel concerned with the construction of large sites’, to try to establish just what the Germans were up to, and of ‘staging commando raids against “CROSSBOW” sites’. These last ideas never in fact came to anything, but bombing was something the Allies could accomplish, and between the start of the major ‘Crossbow’ bombing effort, on 5 December 1943, and 12 June 1944 more than 8000 tons of bombs were to be directed against all four ‘large sites’ so far mentioned, plus another three examined later.
On 10 February 1944 the Ministry of Home Security sent a ‘Most Secret’ letter to the Regional Commissioners of the six Civil Defence regions most likely to be affected – they included the cities of Southampton, Portsmouth, Bristol and Plymouth – setting out the arrangements for reporting suspected ‘Crossbow’ incidents, now subdivided into those caused by ‘Diver’, the new code-word for pilotless aircraft, and those attributed to ‘Big Ben’ (officially one word, but usually typed as two), the cover-name for the rocket. The need for continuing secrecy was stressed, with even wardens and police officers being kept in the dark, so that ‘reliance must be placed on [Civil Defence] Controllers and Chief Constables picking out and investigating any report which suggests the possibility of CROSSBOW attack’.
Two weeks later, on 22 February 1944, perhaps in deference to the Home Secretary’s wish to alert the public to the coming danger, Churchill specifically referred to both secret weapons in the middle of a long review of the war situation in the House of Commons:
There is no doubt that the Germans are preparing on the French shore new means of attack on this country, either by pilotless aircraft, or possibly rockets, or both, on a considerable scale. We have long been watching this with the utmost vigilance. We are striking at all evidences of these preparations, on occasions when the weather is suitable and to the maximum extent possible without detracting from the strategic offensive against Germany.
Following this speech Morrison’s civil servants diligently redrafted the announcement to be issued at the appropriate moment and the Civil Defence Committee spent a happy session on 27 April 1944 in that most agreeable of occupations, rewriting someone else’s draft, making such amendments as substituting ‘excessive alarm’ for ‘panic’. There was some opposition, too, to the whole idea of a widespread warning, on the grounds this might ‘involve the stoppage of work throughout, say, the whole London area for five minutes every time a single rocket was fired’. It would, it was thought, be helpful to consult trade unions and employers on the subject, though how this was to be done without breaching the security that enshrouded all rocket preparations was not explained. That no warning might be possible does not seem to have occurred to anyone, and the substance of Morrison’s announcement was left intact, promising the citizens of London – slightly different arrangements were proposed for Portsmouth, Southampton and Bristol – a display at once noisy and colourful:
When it is known that a rocket is on its way the special warning for London will be a number of maroons fired simultaneously and their short, sharp explosions will be accompanied by whistles and red flares which will shoot up to about one thousand feet. The flares will burn for about eight seconds and will be visible by day or night. A single short wail like the first wail of the Alert will at the same time be executed on the air-raid sirens. . . . There is no occasion for panic or alarm. People in the areas affected have already stood up to far worse bombardment than anything the enemy can achieve by his new weapon; its employment is in the nature of a ‘last throw’ and steps are being taken with all possible speed to eliminate it or reduce it to negligible proportions.
The warning system planned by the government might have been even more impressive than the authorities envisaged if the reminiscences of an airman placed in charge of one improvised maroon on a site in the Fulham Road are typical:
This appliance consisted of something like mortar barrels, a supply of canisters containing firework mixtures similar to Roman Candles and firework rockets combined – one made the flare, the other made the bang. It was to be fired by a car battery and wires leading to the barrels. I give thanks that we never had to fire these things. . . . It would, to my mind, have been . . . disastrous to us standing around such a contraption.
For his men, too, the non-arrival of the rocket at this period provided an unexpected bonus:
My crew at that time consisted of three North Country lads who asked if I would let them have leave to go along the road to watch Fulham Football Club. I gave them a certain spot to stand so that I could get them recalled should an ‘operation’ occur, [but] we never had cause to ‘operate’.
9
WE HAVE BEEN CAUGHT NAPPING
In reply to a suggestion by the Prime Minister that we had to some extent been caught napping, Sir Charles Portal said that . . . the evidence had been most closely watched.
Minutes of the ‘Crossbow’ Committee, 18 July 1944
With the arrival of the flying-bomb in mid-June and the rapid escalation of the first few uncertain shots into a continuous major bombardment, it finally became clear that when they boasted about their secret weapons the Germans had not been bluffing. For the moment the Civil Defence Committee was preoccupied with the effects of this new attack, which included the possibility of a disast
rous hit on ‘one of the Charing Cross tunnels’ of the London Underground beneath the Thames, which could result in a destructive tide of water flooding through 57 miles of lowlying tunnel at a speed of 15 m.p.h., which, Herbert Morrison warned in a note to the Prime Minister on 23 June, might ‘put the tubes out of action for months’. A rocket was even more likely to pierce a vulnerable tunnel, and this was to be a recurring fear in the coming months. The vast exodus from London, estimated at one and a half million people, which followed the arrival of the flying bombs made planning for what might happen if ‘Big Ben’ followed ‘Diver’ a little easier. But to Morrison the outlook still seemed dark, and on 27 June 1944 he spelt out his fears in a long memorandum on ‘The Flying-Bomb and the Rocket’:
I am apprehensive of what might happen if the strain continues, and, in addition to flying-bombs, long-range rockets are used against the metropolis. . . . I have a high degree of faith in the Londoners and . . . will do everything to hold up their courage and spirit, but there is a limit and the limit will come. . . . Some installations which . . . seem to be destined for firing the weapon are nearing completion and may be operational in a matter of a fortnight or so. No very accurate estimate of the scale of attack is available but a theoretical calculation on admittedly scanty information gives a maximum of some 700 tons every 24 hours. . . . In the heaviest attack London ever experienced (May 1941) about 450 tons of HE only were dropped in a night and the Civil Defence personnel . . . much more numerous than they are now, were severely strained and could not have held the position much longer. . . . German propaganda . . . has in this context promised ‘a further turn of the screw’. We must neglect no possible method of preventing it.
Hitler's Rockets: The Story of the V-2s Page 14