by R. V. Jones
As I recommended this course of action to ‘George’, I realized well that what I was doing was trying to keep the mean point of impact in the Dulwich area, where my own parents lived and where, of course, my old school was. But I knew that neither my parents nor the school would have had it otherwise. ‘George’ said that he would adopt the plan, and we waited to see what would happen. Somehow, though, the dilemma got out, and it was discussed at the political level, with Duncan Sandys now back in the picture. Both he and Lindemann supported the policy we had already put into effect, but it was opposed by Herbert Morrison, whose constituency was a nearby one, Lambeth, and who seemed to think that the attempt to keep the aiming point short was an effort by Government officials and others in Westminister, Belgravia, and Mayfair, to keep the bombs off themselves at the expense of the proletariat in south London.
This was the second time that my own ideas about the bombardment of London differed from those of administrators and politicians. In the previous year, Herbert Morrison’s adviser, Sir Findlater Stewart, had produced a paper on the evacuation of London in the event of a rocket bombardment, which seemed to me altogether to underrate the spirit of the Londoners, introducing proposed measures with such phrases as, ‘If panic is to be avoided’. I could not help commenting that although I was at the meeting as a scientist, I lived in London, my parents were in London, my wife and family were in London, and never had I seen such an insult offered to the people of London. There was little further discussion.
I was not present at the meeting at which the deception policy was discussed, but Herbert Morrison was in the chair in Churchill’s absence, and he finally ruled that it would be an interference with Providence if we were to supply the Germans with misleading information, because this might mean that some people would be killed through our action who might otherwise have survived—overlooking the fact that what we were hoping to do, while it undoubtedly might involve such cases, would also enable more to survive who might otherwise have been killed. ‘George’ came and told me of the ruling, asking what he should now do. Whether or not it is relevant that Nelson and I were both born on 29th September, I could not help recalling his comment at Copenhagen, and I did not even have to substitute my deaf ear for his blind eye, for I remarked that I had not been present at the meeting, and the decision was so incredible that I would only believe it if I received instructions in writing; and so until that time my instructions to ‘George’ were to continue as we had started, which he accordingly did.
When we overran Wachtel’s headquarters two and a half months or so later, we were able to see the results of our work, for he had recorded the points of impact of the flying bombs, both as reported by the agents and as plotted by his own organization on sample bombs which had been fitted with radio transmitters. We had not known beforehand of these radio-transmitting samples, which, in correctly indicating that the bombs were falling short, contradicted the agent’s reports which showed that they were tending to over-shoot. Plate 24 is a reproduction of Wachtel’s own battle map showing both the radio plots and the spies’ reports. A written comment by Wachtel’s organization (which had been aiming at Tower Bridge rather than Charing Cross) on the discrepancy stated that the agents were particularly reliable, and therefore their information was to be accepted, and that there must be something wrong with the radio D/F method.
In this helpful conclusion, Wachtel was supported by the evidence of photographic reconnaissance, which incidentally revealed one of the biggest surprises of the whole war. It turned out that there seemed to have been no German photographic reconnaissance of London from 10th January 1941 to 10th September 1944. We had expected that the Germans would have flown regular reconnaissances of the whole of southern England, but Fighter Command had been so effective in interception that the Germans had not succeeded in making a reconnaissance of London for three years and nine months, no more than fifty miles inside our coastline, while our photo reconnaissance pilots were often flying over five hundred miles of German occupied territory. I knew of no more startling contrast in the entire war, a joint tribute to Fighter Command and to our Reconnaissance Units.
I had a slight inkling of the situation before we captured Wachtel’s map, because I had read a glowing tribute to the new German twin-jet fighter, the Messerschmidt 262, which a secret Luftwaffe report said was so good it had succeeded in a photographic reconnaissance of London ‘hitherto considered impossible’. By good fortune for us, there was cloud over much of south London, while north of the Thames it was clear, so the bomb damage plots compiled from the sortie were blank for an area south of the Thames, while there was plenty of damage north of the Thames—but much of it was not due to the flying bombs at all but to the late raids of Spring 1941. Wachtel’s organization was, naturally, only too anxious to claim as much damage as possible, so they proudly showed all the 1941 damage, which was not of course there on the January 1941 photographs, as due to their weapon. By good luck, therefore, the photographic evidence appeared to support completely what the agents had been telling them.
It is possible to make a very rough estimate of the reduction of casualties in London caused by the flying bombs tending to fall short. The Official History, The Defence of the United Kingdom, states that, in all, 8,617 bombs were launched from the sites in France, of which 2,340 reached the London Civil Defence Region. These caused casualties of approximately 5,500 killed and 16,000 seriously injured. Figure 28a shows the distribution of points of impact during the first twenty-four hours of the main campaign when, of the 90 bombs plotted, only about 30 fell inside the built-up areas. If the same pattern had been shifted northwestwards by about four miles, roughly 45 out of the 90 bombs would have fallen in built-up areas, increasing the casualties and damage by fifty per cent. Assuming, therefore, that the Germans had quickly discovered their error and lengthened the range, up to fifty per cent more casualties might have been incurred in the campaign, or up to 2,750 more killed and up to 8,000 more seriously injured. Even if only a fifth of these figures is ascribed to the success of our deception, it was clearly worthwhile.
There was a happy postscript to this story at one of my Staff College lectures after the war. I had recounted the events that I have just described, and at the end of the lecture one of the Directing Staff stood up and said that he could complete my story. He was Group Captain (afterwards Air Chief Marshal Sir Alfred) Earle who explained that during the war he had been Air Secretary of the War Cabinet, and had been present at the discussion which had resulted in Herbert Morrison’s incredible ruling. Earle had wondered what he could do, and then the bright idea struck him that he should persuade the Cabinet that the matter was so secret that the instruction to give the Germans correct information should not even be put into writing, ‘And’, he said, ‘I knew that that would be enough for you!’
The actual flying bomb incident that remains most in my memory occurred on Sunday 18th June when Charles Frank and I were both in the office. Shortly after eleven o’clock I was on the telephone to Bimbo Norman at Bletchley when we heard the unforgettable noise of a flying bomb. Norman could hear it over the telephone, too, and then the engine cut out. I remarked to him that this was going to be pretty near, and that we were getting under our desks. There was a deafening explosion, and I can remember Norman’s voice saying, ‘Are you alright? Are you alright?’, and I assured him that we were. I then went out of the office to see what had happened, and found that the bomb had fallen about 150 yards away on the Guards Chapel. It had struck during Sunday morning service, and had killed 121 of the congregation and the Coldstreamers’ Band, including their Director of Music, Lieutenant Colonel Windram, one of the most human of military band conductors, who used to delight us in St. James’s Park by telling us about every piece of music he was about to play. There was nothing for me to do, for the Guards had everything under control, and were already carrying out the dead. But that sight, coupled with the sea of fresh green leaves that had been torn from the plane t
rees in Birdcage Walk, brought home to me the difference between one ton of explosive in actuality and the one ton that we had predicted in the abstract six months before.
Despite the considerable successes of our fighters—and these were obtained at some risk to themselves, since an exploding flying bomb was not the safest of atmospheric companions—too many bombs were still getting through. Attacks on the launching sites were not very profitable since in their new form these were difficult to discover and easy to replace. Both Bomber Command and the Eighth Army Air Force had bombed them without substantial effect. The eight major supply sites were therefore an attractive alternative, and so Bomber Command was invited to attack them. Despite heavy attacks on 16th and 17th June, the rate of fire had not slackened off, and the Commander-in-Chief was therefore doubtful about the value of further attacks until the need could be justified. His doubts were well founded, for the eight sites turned out to be part of the original ski-site programme, and were not used in the ‘modified’ site campaign.
The resultant limited success of our various countermeasures, perhaps coupled with the tragedy of the Guards Chapel only a few hundred yards across St. James’s Park from Whitehall, worried the War Cabinet. On 19th June the Prime Minister formed the ‘Crossbow’ Committee of the War Cabinet to report on the flying bomb and rocket and the progress of countermeasures, and on 20th June he decided that he would hand over the chairmanship to Mr. Sandys, who therefore came right back into the picture, and in a commanding position. Along with the Commanders-in-Chief of the appropriate Commands and various senior serving officers and scientists, I became a member of the Committee.
Shortly after this, there were changes in the Air Staff arrangements the strain was beginning to tell on Colin Grierson, for whom I was profoundly sorry. He had been thrust into a very difficult post only a week or two before the flying bomb campaign opened, and he found himself having to work in a field in which he had had no previous experience. We had helped him as much as we could, but Frank Inglis, the Assistant Chief of Air Staff (Intelligence) sent for me at the beginning of July and told me that he had decided to relieve Grierson of his Intelligence responsibilities and hand all such responsibilities regarding the German retaliation campaign over to me from 6th July. This was very late in the day, but at last I had a chance of co-ordinating all our Intelligence efforts.
One of my first steps was to make sure that the Americans were completely in the Intelligence picture, since the Eighth Army Air Force was being asked to undertake much of the bombing of the flying bomb organization along with Bomber Command. I therefore asked Bob Robertson, who was now Eisenhower’s Scientific Adviser with the rank of a four-star General, whether he would come right into our organization as my deputy for all flying bomb and rocket matters, and he very willingly agreed. A further step in the same direction was to try to bring Military Intelligence and Air Intelligence closer together, because relations were showing signs of strain. The War Office felt that the Air Ministry and the politicians were now completely obsessed by the flying bomb and were paying no attention to the rocket. Indeed Matthew Pryor, whose alarm about the rocket in April 1943 had aroused all the political interest, had just written a report which suggested that the Air Staff were now ignoring the rocket; I met him and told him that however much other branches of Air Intelligence might be preoccupied with the V-1, my own Section had been watching for the rocket as keenly as ever, and I persuaded him to come across from the War Office and join us for the duration of the threat, with the particular responsibility for studying the military organization associated with the rocket while I took responsibility for the technical details.
As for the flying bomb, its violence did not seem to be affected much by Allied attacks on either the launching or the original supply sites. It seemed that the bombs must be distributed from some other sites, and reports began to come in from the French about three underground storage depots. The largest of these was at St. Leu d’Esserent, in some caves in the Oise Valley just north of Paris. The second site was at Nucourt, northwest of Paris, where there were also limestone caves, and the third at Rilly-la-Montagne, south of Rheims, in a railway tunnel. The caves at St. Leu had been used in peacetime for growing mushrooms, and the French very helpfully supplied us with detailed plans. I therefore recommended that these underground storage sites should be attacked, and in the last week of June the Eighth Army Air Force made heavy attacks on both Nucourt and St. Leu. At the former, 241 flying bombs were irretrievably buried and another 57 seriously damaged.
St. Leu, however, was less vulnerable, owing to the greater thickness of the limestone roof, which required heavier bombs than were available in the American Air Force. It was an ideal case for ‘Tallboy’, the big streamlined bomb developed by Barnes Wallis, but even then it would require careful aiming and a precise knowledge of the tunnelling if the bombs were to be dropped in the right places. Fortunately we knew the exact positions of the tunnels from the French, and in urging the bombing I had said at an Air Staff conference that I was prepared to go to 617 Squadron to brief them myself. This offer may have been taken somewhat amiss by the Commander-in-Chief, who strongly discouraged any direct contact between the Air Staff and his squadrons, so Rupert Cecil drove me out to High Wycombe to see him. As soon as we met, he said that before I said anything, he would like to tell me what he thought. For ten minutes or so, he spoke sheer good sense, saying that he had ordered a raid for that same night, and then asked for my comments. I replied that what he had said to me was exactly what I had come to say to him, and he then showed us where he had placed the main aiming point. I showed him the French plans, and suggested that the aiming point should be moved some 200 yards south-east, since his aiming point was displaced by this amount from where I knew that the main entrance tunnel ran. So far from resenting my interference, he then picked up the telephone to speak to Air Marshal Cochrane, the Air Officer Commanding No. 5 Group, which was to carry out the raid, and said, ‘I say, Cocky, about the raid tonight. I have Dr. Jones here and he thinks that we ought to move the aiming point 200 yards to the south-east to hit the main tunnel. Do you think that we can change it?’ This was agreed.
The raid took place on 4th/5th July and was extremely successful, to judge by the subsequent aerial photographs. In contrast with Nucourt, we did not get the detailed German returns for the number of flying bombs wrecked, but we knew that it could have been holding 2,000, and the site was rendered almost useless. The German Commandant reported that many of the tunnels had collapsed, and that the approach roads were impassable. Moreover, we saw the effects in the reduced rate of fire against London which fell from an average of 100 a day before 7th July to fewer than 70 a day for the next ten days.
The reduction in the rate of bombardment worked more in our favour than the launching figures suggest by themselves, because our defences were then less saturated and thus able to achieve a higher rate of success. Before the attacks on the caves we were shooting down around 40 per cent of the bombs entering our defences, and this rose to well over 50 per cent after St. Leu had been bombed. The original Wachtel plan had been to fire the bombs in salvoes, so that while one bomb was being engaged several others would get through the defences. Fortunately he never achieved the necessary synchronization.
In our successes so far, fighters had played much the larger part, shooting down 924 bombs by the middle of July compared with 261 by the guns and 55 by balloons. Several authorities, including Roderick Hill and Robert Watson-Watt, thought that the guns would do better if, instead of being sited near London and therefore behind the fighters, they occupied a belt on the coast, where they could shoot over the sea. Professor Edward Selant, who had been associated with the proximity fuse development in America, told me towards the end of the war that he himself had suggested this same deployment before the V-I campaign opened, but that Anti-Aircraft Command did not accept it at the time. The Americans had provided us with the SCR584 gun-laying radar and predictor, and also the new
proximity-fused shells which, although originally a British invention, had been developed and engineered in America, and these were now to produce a profound effect. In his postwar despatch (supplement to the London Gazette of 19th October 1948) Roderick Hill said that the guns had originally been deployed on the North Downs because the plan ‘had been drawn up at a time when jamming of our radar by the Germans was a threat which could not be neglected’. So here was the same concern about German jamming which had made A.E.A.F. so distrustful of our Intelligence before D-Day. The manifest success of Intelligence and the consequent bombing of German jammers now removed this fear, and so there was no further inhibition about moving the guns and their radar to the coast. The move was a courageous and tremendous feat of organization. 800 guns, 60,000 tons of stores and ammunition, and 23,000 men and women were moved to the coast in a few hours, and during the week the vehicles of Anti-Aircraft Command travelled a total of 2¾ million miles. Within 48 hours the new deployment was effected, and the guns were immediately more successful, their rate rising from 50 bombs a week before the move to 170 bombs a week after it. The fighters, now more restricted, dropped from 180 to 120 a week, but the overall gain was substantial.