Hitler's Rockets: The Story of the V-2s

by Norman Longmate

  If . . . elevation errors . . . were reduced to 3° . . . the bombardment would become much more central, while the intensity in, say, Westminster would be increased more than twofold for the same number of rocket firings. If in addition Westminster were made the aiming point instead of Wapping, the intensity here would be increased by a further factor of two.

  And, like the Crossbow Committee’s report of six weeks before, Dr Jones had nothing to offer for the government’s comfort:

  It is possible that the Germans have now found the trouble, for during the first few days of January the tail appears to have been proportionally smaller. 25

  The total impotence of the defence forces against the rocket was by now evident. The Air Defence of Great Britain had always been a misnomer so far as the V-2 was concerned, but Fighter Command, which replaced it in mid-October 1944, had no more success. The services which worked with it were equally ineffectual. ‘One form of enemy raid’, later admitted the historian of the Royal Observer Corps, ‘the ROC could do little about: the V-2 rocket . . . was not susceptible to the fighters, radar or the ROC.’ All the observer posts could do was ‘give a bearing and angle on rocket trails which could be seen rising from the continent and also to inform centre of the approximate position of impact’. The very first V-2, at Chiswick, proved symbolic, for it gave the crew of Post 17/ D.2, in the adjoining borough of Acton, as they reported ‘The biggest shaking we ever had’. As the bombardment went on, the Observer Corps continued to enjoy a grandstand, if distant, view of it. ‘Sightings from the Midlands’, confirmed the Corps’s historian, ‘were frequent, but . . . on the night of December 29, 1944 . . . half a dozen posts south-east of Manchester reported a V-2 which hit London 200-odd miles away.’

  For the Commander-in-Chief of Ack-Ack Command, General Sir Frederick Pile, whose batteries had finally justified their existence during the flying bomb offensive, the realization that they could once again do nothing but watch proved particularly disagreeable. Pile was determined to find some way of countering the V-2, though under no illusions about the scale of the task:

  Here we had a target that was travelling at over 3,500 miles an hour, or about five times the speed of sound. It was no use puncturing it if we did not detonate the warhead . . . and the warhead was not only protected by a casing of quarter-inch steel, but was also . . . a fraction of the whole rocket. . . . The majority of people – even the more enlightened ones – thought that it was an impossible problem for us to solve . . . Fighter Command, when we put the matter up to them, were not exactly encouraging in their attitude. But . . . it was some measure of the seriousness of the situation that Fighter Command agreed that if I could produce scientific data to support an outside chance of 100 – 1 against hitting any rocket my proposals might go forward to higher authority.

  The technical problems were enormous. Radar sets ‘designed to detect aircraft flying at heights up to 30,000 feet and at ranges of up to 30,000 yards’ had to be modified to ‘detect rockets . . . at heights of more than 300,000 feet and at ranges of up to 140,000 yards’, while ‘we had only two seconds in which to make our prediction, for the guns had to be fired when the rocket was still more than 30 miles from London’. The hope was that a horizontal curtain of shells could be put close enough to a descending rocket for it to set off their proximity fuses, but even General Pile estimated the maximum likely rate of kills at only from 3 to 10 per cent of the rockets actually engaged, and most of the experts put the chances of success much lower. Sir Robert Watson Watt, the leading authority on radar, assessed them at 1000 to 1; the Army Council’s scientific adviser, Professor Ellis, at 100 to 1; a panel of scientists, asked for an independent opinion, at 30 to 1 at best, assuming that 400 rounds could be put in the path of a particular target.

  In the event, by the time operational trials were beginning to seem promising, the rockets had ceased to arrive, and the ‘textbook’ answer to the offensive proved to be the only one ever tried, a counter-offensive against the launching sites and the production and supply system which served them. Because, presumably, of the difficulty of mounting standing patrols over the suspect areas, no sustained attempt seems to have been made to try to catch the rockets while still moving slowly enough to be intercepted, just after lift-off, though at least one astonished pilot found himself, as he later reflected, ‘in a perfect position’ to do so, while flying a Mosquito on intruder operations:

  As we cross in just north of The Hague we see a white flame pulsing at ground level and, because nobody has told us that V-2s don’t take off with a rush like a child’s firework rocket, we don’t realize what we are looking at. A pity, because . . . it would have been nice to be able to say that we had shot down a V-2.

  One Spitfire pilot also caught a V-2 just as it left the launching pad and pursued it with cannon fire, but missed, and the only known claim to have destroyed a rocket in flight – duly recorded in a symbol painted on the fuselage of his aircraft – was made, it would not have surprised members of the RAF to learn, by ‘a Yank’. The left-waist gunner in a B-24, his aircraft, on a routine mission over Holland, was flying at 10,000 feet when, according to a fellow crew member, ‘a telephone pole with fire squirting from its tail’ passed smack through the middle of the group, until, so the gunner claimed, a burst from his 0.5-calibre machine gun sent it crashing back to earth.

  Destroying the rockets at source proved as hard as intercepting them in flight. The location of the Central Works was known by mid-October 1944, and ‘tallboy’ bombs for bringing down the roof became available from November – previously they had been husbanded for use against the Tirpitz, which Bomber Command had now sunk – but Nordhausen remained extraordinarily difficult to attack. The bombs aimed at it fell mainly on the adjacent labour camps, adding their inmates to the long list of the rocket’s victims, and were far less effective than the general attack on transport in the area.

  The launching sites were attacked not because anyone hoped to achieve very much from the attempt but because there was no better alternative. Here, too, the Allies were operating under difficulties. No sooner had Dutch agents signalled the location of one of Kammler’s batteries than it moved elsewhere, while saturation bombing of the surrounding area was ruled out by the presence of Dutch civilians. All that could be done was to plaster with bombs and gunfire any suspect clearing or roadway – with no guarantee of hitting any useful target – and to send constant missions over Holland to let fly at anything military-looking that was spotted. Everything, including the weather, which often made the ground, let alone individual sites or vehicles, invisible from the air, aided the Germans and helped once again to demonstrate the limitations of supposedly invincible air power.

  The V-2 absorbed a vast amount of effort which might otherwise have been directed against the enemy armies. In the opening phase of the campaign alone, between 15 October and 25 November 1944, nearly 10,000 sorties were flown by the Second Tactical Air Force, based on the continent, against the district between The Hague and Leiden, and around the Hook of Holland. Fighter Command flew 600 more from British airfields, much of the burden being borne by the Spitfire, employed as a fighter-bomber. During November and December 1944, 12 Group dispatched machines laden with two 250 lb bombs whenever the weather permitted against suspected storage areas at Wassenaar, Voorde and Hus te Verve, and repeatedly strafed with bombs and cannon fire the Haagsche Bosch, the ‘Hyde Park’ of The Hague, an attack also being delivered on the Hotel Promenade, believed to contain Kammler’s headquarters. If they achieved little, these attacks at least made possible such morale-boosting reports as that which appeared on the front page of the Daily Mirror on Tuesday, 5 December:

  Power-diving 5000 feet though a rapidly closing gap in thick cloud, RAF Spitfires raced against deteriorating weather to pinpoint a V-2 storage depot and vehicle park in Holland yesterday. More Spitfire bombers made pinpoint attacks under equally bad weather conditions on V-2 erection and launching sites.

  On Christm
as Eve 33 Mark XIV Spitfires, from 229 and 602 Squadrons RAF and 455 Squadron, Royal Australian Air Force, managed, by refuelling in Belgium, to increase their load to one 500 lb and two 250 lb bombs each, and aimed them against a block of flats thought to house rocket troops near the Haagsche Bosch. It was badly damaged and had to be evacuated, but requisitioning new accommodation presented no problems for the Germans. Attacks were also made on Leiden station, rightly suspected of being a rocket collection point – they were taken from there to the De Wittenburg area of The Hague to have their warheads fitted – and on the Langehorst estate and Duindigt racecourse, which were favourite launching sites betweeen November 1944 and January 1945. But as the RAF’s own historians admit, these efforts were ‘largely ineffective’, being kept up because they were ‘the only riposte the Royal Air Force, or indeed the armed forces of the crown in general, could make’.

  For years the ‘bomber barons’ had maintained that they held the real key to victory, but they too proved impotent against the rocket. On 22 December 1944 Herbert Morrison urged, in a paper addressed to the Chiefs of Staff, that the heavy-bomber force should be used against the launching sites in The Hague, which could, he argued, be annihilated. The following day General Ismay tendered their professional advice firmly rejecting the suggestion. To do the job thoroughly, they believed, would require a force of 150 Lancasters to make ten sorties each, resulting, if normal accuracy was achieved, in complete devastation within a radius of 600 yards of the aiming point, and some damage for twice that distance. The loss of life of friendly civilians was, the Chiefs of Staff advised, unacceptable, especially as the Germans would simply recommence operations elsewhere. Herbert Morrison persisted in his campaign until the matter reached the Cabinet, where on 18 January 1945 the Chiefs of Staff firmly squashed it.

  We . . . strongly recommend that heavy bombers should not be employed to attack rocket installations in Holland, but that present efforts to destroy them by precision bombing with individual aircraft should be intensified, and we understand that this recommendation [when made in December] was accepted.

  That a heavy-bomber attack would have been either ineffectual or, for the Dutch, catastrophic, there seems little doubt, but in any case the weather kept the Allied air forces grounded day after day. In the first two weeks of January nearly one-third of the 300 sorties mounted against The Hague had to be abandoned, and in the second two weeks only nine attacks were launched. Seven armed reconnaissances, in search of targets of opportunity, were attempted, but only two completed, and the only real success of this period came on 22 January 1945, when four squadrons of bomb-carrying Spitfires knocked out a liquid oxygen factory at Alblasserdam. Another such factory, at Loosduinen, was attacked five times between 3 and 9 February, the pilots, in the official historian’s words, ‘trickling their bombs towards the target’ from the one open side; on three others it was surrounded by civilian houses. About a third landed in the target area and it was believed that the factory had been put out of action. Mostly the Allies’ response to the steady rain of rockets on London was, however, merely to ‘strafe’ suspect wooded areas, and ‘the general results’, the RAF’s historian admitted, ‘must be described as meagre’.

  No one liked acknowledging that the Germans, on the verge of defeat, had outwitted and out-generalled the Allies. On 26 January 1945 the Cabinet Defence Committee urged that precision bombing should be intensified, with assistance from the medium bombers of the Second Tactical Air Force, that SOE should be asked to extend their operations against rocket-orientated activity – it does, in retrospect, seem remarkable that British agents and saboteurs achieved so little – and that the Central Works should be bombed. Variations in the number of rockets arriving did suggest that RAF activity over Holland helped to keep down the number of daytime launchings, and Fighter Command now redoubled its efforts, especially against the Haagsche Bosch. Reconnaissance on 24 February showed that, if there had been Meillerwagen there, they had gone, and the Duindigt racecourse now became the main object of attack, along with a transport park located north-west of Rotterdam.

  That week rocket arrivals reached a new peak, of more than ten a day, intensifying the discontent already widespread in the affected areas, and even some of those which had so far escaped lightly. On 24 January Herbert Morrison had obtained Cabinet consent to respond favourably to a request from Alfred Barnes, Labour MP for part of East Ham, that he should discuss the rocket situation with all the MPs for London constituencies, and this seems to have cleared the air for a time. On 20 February, however, William P. Sidney, the recently returned Conservative MP for Chelsea, now serving in the army in a position that made him, as he explained, aware of ‘the main facts of the situation’, wrote a private letter to the Prime Minister:

  As a London Member, I am deeply concerned about the possibilities of an intensification of the long-range rocket attack. . . . The average number of incidents per 24 hours remained very steady at 7 for nearly four weeks and has lately risen to 10. It seems quite probable that this figure may rise still further to 17 to 20. If such a rise were accompanied by a shifting of the mean point of impact 3 or 4 miles to the west, the results would be very serious indeed. . . . I know . . . that it is the policy to inflict the minimum of injury and damage to Dutch life and property. Nevertheless I cannot refrain from asking whether by a comparatively small increase in the strength of the air forces devoted to attacking the launching sites, effective delays and interruptions could not be imposed on the enemy’s supply system and greater embarrassment caused him during the launching operations. . . . A fairly small diversion of effort now might save a great many casualties later both in this country and in Holland.

  This letter was referred to General Ismay, who reported that two more Fighter Command squadrons, as well as the Second Tactical Air Force, were now being diverted to attack rocket targets, and William Sidney was invited to hear this explanation for himself, at Downing Street. He remained dissatisfied, repeating, a note of 1 March by the Prime Minister’s staff revealed, that in his view heavier bombing was needed to improve the situation. Meanwhile other MPs were also becoming alarmed – and none with more reason than the Conservative Member for Ilford, Major Geoffrey Hutchinson, who as mentioned earlier, on 24 February, four days after William Sidney’s letter to Churchill, had written to the Secretary of State for Air to ask for a meeting. Some of what was said on this occasion can be deduced from a letter Sir Archibald Sinclair wrote to the clearly discontented MP on 2 March, which set out the familiar arguments about the danger to Dutch civilians, but also dealt with an entirely different issue.

  The idea that we are influenced in any degree whatsovever by the situation of the palace of the Queen of Holland is utterly fantastic. The queen is not in residence there, and the situation of her palace has never entered into our calculations.

  By now dissatisfaction about the V-2s was widespread, as the Prime Minister’s private secretary, J. H. (later Sir John) Peck, formally warned him, in a note on 26 February:

  I think you should know that the daily post contains a growing number of letters about rocket attacks from your constituency [Epping] and from Ilford and the most seriously attacked areas in East London and Essex. Unlike the letters when the flying-bombs were at their worst, they are for the most part not anonymous or couched in abusive terms. They do, however, make three points:

  There is an underground feeling that if the main weight of attack had been falling not on the East End but on the Whitehall area and Buckingham Palace, far more vigorous attempts would have been made to counter the attack.

  If the rocket sites are being spared heavy bombing attacks in order to save Dutch life and property, they would much prefer if there have to be victims that they should be Dutch rather than English.

  They ask for some public announcement which would show the discontented members of the population that the government took some interest in them and would inform them whether any serious attempt is being made to put an end
to rocket attack.

  I understand that Sir James Hawkey [a leading local Conservative and former mayor of Woodford] is becoming rather anxious abut the attitude of the constituency. The Secretary of State for Air is considering whether he can include in his ‘Estimates’ speech next week some references which will reassure the districts most affected by rockets that they have not been forgotten or neglected.

  General Ismay wrote on the same day to the Prime Minister repeating the Chiefs of Staff’s opinion that the only real way to stop the rockets was to liberate Holland. Churchill was clearly not impressed. On 28 February he sent a note to his private office which he presumably intended should reach the ears of their opposite numbers in the Air Ministry and the latter’s military ‘masters’: