Hitler's Rockets: The Story of the V-2s
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Morrison’s suggestions ranged from ‘commando raids’ on suspected launching sites to threats of reprisals against selected German towns ‘or the use of gas’, but when the Cabinet discussed the paper that day practical objections were put forward to all of them, although there was one ray of hope. The army was already succeeding where, at least in the case of the flying bomb, the RAF had failed, for of seven ‘large sites’ believed to be intended for launching rockets two had already been captured and a third had been abandoned. The remaining four, though frequently bombed, might, it was thought, still be used. Typically, Cherwell seized the opportunity to try once again to discredit the rocket’s existence. The ‘large sites’, he suggested, might be designed for ‘a larger type of pilotless aircraft’, but, also typically, he left himself a loophole. ‘The Paymaster-General’, the minutes recorded, ‘said that the production of a rocket on the scale suspected would be extremely uneconomical. It did not follow, however, that the enemy would not adopt this form of attack.’ On 30 June Cherwell sent Churchill a long and detailed paper to prove – contrary to the true facts – that he had been right in every particular in his predictions about the flying bomb and therefore, by implication, that he was right about the rocket. A long and time-wasting inquest followed, tactfully ended by Ian Jacob in a note to the Prime Minister on 14 July:
Lord Cherwell consistently challenged the possibility of such a weapon, whereas the Chiefs of Staff and the Joint Intelligence Committee equally consistently held that the rocket should be taken seriously. . . . It is a bit early yet to say who was wrong.
During the opening months of 1944 the most urgent preoccupation of all the military departments had been Operation Overlord and most secret-weapon intelligence had concerned the flying-bomb. The radar watch that Dr Jones had set up on signal activity around Peenemünde had yielded evidence of only ‘an occasional attempt to plot the track of a rocket’, but the fortunate move of the main A-4 testing centre to Blizna now began to produce a steadily increasing flow of information. The Polish Home Army, though it operated in secret and underground, was well organized, with its own intelligence departments and scientific advisers. Its attention was directed to Blizna after it was learned that a carload of German secret-weapon specialists killed in a road accident in Warsaw came from that area, and by January 1944 rockets, their warheads filled with sand so that large fragments of the missile often survived the impact, were coming down over much of the countryside to the north, north-east and west of the little village, and some as far north as the River Bug. As members of the Forestry Commission, still able to move fairly freely, reported, these mysterious objects demolished buildings and uprooted trees, as well as causing craters 20 metres wide, and the Polish historian previously quoted has described the clandestine war which now developed in this sparsely populated corner of eastern Europe.
Motorized patrols stationed in the countryside . . . would rush to the scene of the explosion, seal it off and gather up all the fragments and parts of the mechanism. . . . Patrols of the Home Army did the same and almost every day a race took place between the Germans, acting openly, with every technical facility at their disposal, and the underground army, which had to operate in secret but was on its own territory and received willing assistance from the local population. In the fight to get there first, shots were exchanged several times.
Ultra intercepts, emanating from Bletchley, also drew attention to Blizna, for one signal revealed that the Germans were seeking details of a crater near Sidlice, 160 miles north-west of it, too far to have been made by a flying-bomb. A subsequent reconnaissance on 5 May, however, merely confused the issue, for the photographs revealed a flying-bomb launching ramp, not a Peenemünde-style ‘earthwork’ and, with D-Day approaching, there was no immediate response to Dr Jones’s request for further flights.
Realizing the importance of their discoveries, the Poles conceived two somewhat desperate plans: to seize the Blizna base by force and hold it long enough for the accompanying scientists to learn its secrets; and to hijack a train near Blizna, transfer the rocket on board to a lorry and remove it to a secret hideout in the Lower Carpathian mountains, where it could be examined at leisure. Fortunately neither operation proved necessary, for at dawn on Saturday, 20 May 1944, a rocket landed, almost undamaged, in swampy ground on the bank of the River Bug, near the village of Klimczyce, close to the town of Sarnaki, eighty miles east of Warsaw. The Poles managed to get there first and pushed their treasure deeper into the bog, till it was totally covered. A few days later three pairs of horses, aided by ‘troops’ of the 22nd Regiment of the Polish Home Army, dragged it from the mud and transported it by cart to a local barn where it was dismembered by the flickering light of candles and hurricane lamps, under the direction of an engineer who had been in Auschwitz, like the head of the Research Committee of the Home Army, and, most exceptionally, been released. For ten days he commuted between his home in Warsaw and the village of Holowcyze-Kolonia, where the rocket was hidden, until, by ill-chance, he was arrested by the Gestapo for a totally different offence, though he survived this experience too. Meanwhile a professor specializing in radio research, and another who was an authority on propellants, had studied material brought to them by couriers and made two important discoveries – both promptly relayed to London – that at some stage the rocket was radio-controlled and that it contained concentrated hydrogen peroxide, a well-known source of oxygen.
While work was continuing on the rocket held by the Poles and plans were being worked out to transport the essential parts of it to London, the first A-4 fragments had already reached London from a totally different source. Just after 4 p.m. on Tuesday, 13 June 1944, exactly twelve hours after the first flying bomb had landed in Kent, an A-4 fired from Peenemünde to test the Wasserfall anti-aircraft missile installed in it went spectacularly astray and blew up over open countryside at Knivingaryd, near Kalmar,9 on the Baltic coast of Sweden, about 200 miles south-west of Stockholm and about 190 north-east of Peenemünde. A man directly below was blown from his horse and the main part of the rocket carved out a 13-foot-wide crater in a cornfield. The first reports, relayed to London via the Air Attaché in Stockholm and based partly on the Swedish press of 15 June, confused the rocket with the flying-bomb, of which a specimen had also recently gone astray, but those in the know soon realized the truth. ‘The projectile exploded in mid-air and released a bomb weighing about 500 kg, which caused a tremendous crater in the soft ground,’ ran the first account. ‘A local farmer who managed to recover fragments . . . before the military arrived on the scene stated that they contained Swedish ballbearings . . . while part of the radio mechanism was made in Italy.’ Further details followed two days later, including a reference to ‘two electric motors driven by accumulators’.
The Kalmar rocket caused tremendous embarrassment all round except to its real beneficiaries, the British. Owing to some understandable confusion, because it was a Wasserfall missile that was being tested not an A-4, Peenemünde at first denied responsibility for the incident and when the truth came out Dornberger was ‘summoned to the Führer’s headquarters to receive a reprimand, with the consoling comment that Hitler was in a towering rage’. By the time Dornberger got to Rastenburg Hitler, in his unpredictable way, had changed his mind. ‘It was’, he told General Jodl, who passed the comment on to Dornberger before sending him away again, ‘quite a good thing for the Swedes to realize that we could bombard their country from Germany; they would be more inclined to be cooperative in negotiations.’
But international times had changed. ‘There is no reason’, suggested Afton Tidningen (Evening News), ‘why Sweden should oblige the Germans’, and, alarmed by the public revelation that the rocket included Swedish-made components, the Swedes cordoned off the crater and refused to let any Germans past to recover the fragments. According to one account a German detachment tried to get to the crater by posing as undertakers’ men, complete with hearse, while the mishap was variously ascribed t
o the controlling engineer being so astonished by his first sight of an A-4 taking off that he had jerked the main lever in the wrong direction, and to his not knowing what to do when he lost visual contact with the missile in cloud.
The end of the affair was even more colourful. Precisely what bargain the Swedish government struck remains uncertain : according to one report it secured two squadrons of brand-new tanks in exchange for two tons of miscellaneous wiring and scrap metal from the shattered rocket. At all events, the Air Attaché in Stockholm managed to dispatch photographs of some of the components to London and, pending the arrival of the two plane-loads of parts, in mid – and late July, two Air Technical Intelligence Officers were flown to Sweden to provide an interim report. This proved in some respects misleading, for it seemed at first that the costly and complex electronic control equipment would be uneconomic unless it was part of a delivery system with at least a 4½ ton warhead. The discovery of radio equipment, in fact linked to the Wasserfall rocket being carried as a ‘passenger’, suggested that the A-4 would be radio-controlled, while the presence of hydrogen peroxide seemed to bear out the reports from Poland that this would be the missile’s fuel. However, at least the rocket’s dimensions now seemed settled, for a message from Poland, on 27 June, which put them at 40 feet (12.2 metres) by 6 feet (2.7 metres) agreed with those of the ‘objects’ detected at Peenemünde and with calculations based on the pieces retrieved from Kalmar. The return of the officers sent to Sweden yielded an important piece of new evidence – that one of the pumps used to feed the combustion chamber was lubricated by the liquid it was circulating, which pointed unmistakably to liquid air or liquid oxygen as the rocket’s fuel.
Further study of the photographs from Peenemünde and Blizna now at last began to throw light on the continuing mystery of how the rocket was launched. The presence in the latter of a rocket lying horizontally on a trailer and the absence of any tower-type construction, such as had previously been seen at Blizna, led Dr Jones to scrutinize the surrounding area closely, revealing ‘a square about 35 feet wide’ linked to the rocket workshop by a gentle curved road. This he correctedly identified as the rocket’s launching pad, from which it would take off unaided. The supposed ‘projector’ was merely the frame – in fact, though this was not yet known, part of the Meillerwagen – which surrounded the missile while it was prepared for firing. The 40-foot-high columns observed on earlier pictures of Peenemünde were now explained: they were rockets waiting to be fired.
As so often, one discovery was rapidly followed by another, for, as the Allied forces broke out in Normandy, both prisoners and intended launching sites fell into their hands. One soldier admitted that his unit had been responsible for selecting and building small sites for storing and launching rockets and one – of the ‘sunken road’ type – soon afterwards fell into British hands at the Chateau du Molay, west of Bayeux. In contrast to the ‘large sites’ to which so much attention had been directed, the whole platform, including hard standing for the launch vehicles, measured only 69 feet (21 m) by 33 feet (10 m) and a sketch, prepared on the spot by a team sent for the purpose, cleared up another long-standing puzzle. A strange pattern ‘laid out on the sands at Peenemünde’ now appeared to have been built ‘to see whether the proposed curves in the loop roads’ serving the launching platform ‘could be negotiated by whatever transporters were to carry the rockets’.
With his family having gone away to Cornwall to escape the flying-bombs, and D-Day safely past, Dr Jones now had leisure in the evenings to puzzle over another outstanding and important question, the likely scale of attack. Ultra intercepts referred to the sending back of ‘apparatuses’ to Peenemünde from Blizna and these, he now guessed, were rocket warheads. As No. 17053 had been dispatched on 17 June and No. 17667 in early July (i.e. 614) the total of rockets likely soon to be ready for use, allowing for the period not covered, was probably at least 1000.
On 16 July 1944 Dr Jones had written an interim report on his findings, which within the next day or two, so fast was information now coming in, was in some respects, he realized, inaccurate, but of the reality of the rocket threat there could no longer any doubt. ‘I did not want’, Dr Jones later wrote, ‘to destroy my old professor’, nor put him in a position where ‘he might try to argue to the end and. . . . Churchill would be torn between the facts and a loyalty to his most trusted friend.’ He therefore warned Cherwell privately of the accumulating evidence before the crucial meeting of the ‘Crossbow’ Committee scheduled for 10 p.m. on Tuesday, 18 July 1944, in the Cabinet War Room, at which his recent report was the main item of business.
The Prime Minister, it rapidly appeared to Dr Jones’s now experienced eye, ‘was clearly in a . . . mood . . . to test every piece of evidence submitted to him’ and ‘briefed to “gun” for the Air Staff’, reflecting the current public discontent at the government’s failure to prevent the flying-bomb arriving. The minutes of the discussions were, however, discreet and detached:
Although there had been considerable fragmentary intelligence regarding the German Long-Range Rocket for a year or more . . . it was only within the last fortnight that it had become possible to establish definitely which intelligence referred to the rocket. . . . It was believed that about 150 experimental rockets had been manufactured and that perhaps up to 1000 production models had been made. . . . Evidence from Poland suggested that 50 per cent of the rockets fired might fall within a circle of ten miles radius. . . . The maximum range appeared to be about 200 miles, but it was probable that the effective range would not exceed 150 miles.
At the mention of a possible stockpile of a thousand rockets, Churchill, Dr Jones recalls – though the minutes omitted this dramatic detail – ‘exploded and started to thump the table’. Even the minutes reveal his evident displeasure:
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 and all action that could be thought of had been taken so far as could be done without harming the essential interests of OVERLORD.
The unfortunate Dr Jones, less culpable than anyone, now faced the Prime Minister’s full fury, patiently explaining the reasons for his conclusions and that, having had to attend seven meetings that day, he had not yet had time to inform Lord Cherwell of his discovery, made only a few hours before, that ‘the projector’, on which hopes had been pinned of detecting and destroying the launching sites, was a myth. Eventually, to Dr Jones’s relief, the Prime Minister calmed down, giving him a reputation among his colleagues as the man who ‘had shut Winston up’. Herbert Morrison ‘urged that every possible counter-measure should be taken to prevent the attack’, but his intervention was hardly necessary, for Churchill himself was now firmly in the ‘rocket party’. ‘The highest priority’, it was agreed, should be given to bombing the nine major German hydrogen peroxide plants, and to developing means of jamming the rocket’s supposed radio control system, though ‘control might well be automatic’. ‘Marshal Stalin’, Churchill reported, ‘had agreed to render us all assistance to obtain information from Debice [i.e. Blizna] when the Russian forces capture that area’ and the US Air Force had that day ‘carried out a heavy attack on Peenemünde’. If both allies agreed, the British government were prepared ‘to threaten the enemy with large-scale gas attacks in retaliation should such a course appear profitable’. With this cheerful prospect before them, the participants in the meeting filed out into Whitehall in the small hours to get what sleep they could, punctuated by the explosions of flying-bombs, now arriving in a more or less continuous procession.
10
THE BATTLE OF LONDON IS OVER
Except possibly for a few last shots, the Battle of London is over.
Duncan Sandys, MP, 7 September 1944
Churchill’s late-night meeting of 18 July 1944 brought the subject of the rocket to the top of ‘Pending’ trays throughout Whitehall and two days later prompted a long essay in
self-justification from Lord Cherwell. ‘I am’, it began untruthfully, ‘most reluctant to waste your time (or my own) in arguing to what degree on past occasions I was right or not’, and went on to claim that he had, of course, been right. ‘I did not’, insisted Cherwell, ‘assert that the rocket was impossible . . . but it seemed to me extraordinary, when . . . the pilotless airplane was available, that the enemy should divert the huge effort required to develop an immensely more difficult alternative method. And if he has, I do not think he has employed his scientists to the best advantage.’ This remained Cherwell’s contention throughout the coming months – as though in some way people killed or injured by a rocket would be consoled to learn that the Germans were using their resources inefficiently – and, no doubt in the hope of causing more trouble, he added that, ‘not having been shown all the secret evidence’, he could not ‘offer a view on the likelihood of attacks in the near future’. The totally false implication that Cherwell was being kept in the dark brought an angry inquiry from Churchill, and during the next month numerous officials were drawn into the argument, only ended by a note from Ian Jacob to the Prime Minister on 25 August assuring him that ‘No secret information is withheld from Lord Cherwell.’