by R. V. Jones
I tried to telephone Charles Frank, but the lines were out of action. So I wrote a note in case a flying bomb got me during the night, instructing the finder:
17th, July, 1944
In case I am killed during the night 17/18 July, whoever finds this paper must take it at once to Dr. F. C. Frank, Government Communications Bureau, 54 Broadway, S.W.1, and tell him that he will find a square concrete platform in the middle of the clearing at Blizna on Photo 3240 of PR385. It is fed by a carefully curved road leading direct from the rocket workshop, and is parallel to the P.A. launching ramp.
R. V. Jones.
A.D.I. (Science)
Air Ministry.
Finally, now that we were certain about the rocket, we could say from the Geräte numbers that it seemed likely that at least one thousand had already been made.
The day of Tuesday 18th July passed swiftly, most of my time being spent in committee meetings that, fanned by the general alarm, were occurring at a prodigious rate. I knew that at 10 o’clock that evening I was due to appear at the Crossbow Committee in the Prime Minister’s War Room, and would be expected to give an account of the general Intelligence situation. In the two hours between dinner and the meeting I went over all the new evidence regarding numbers of rockets, and so forth, and then left for the meeting. The Prime Minister himself was in the Chair and he was clearly in a ‘testy’ mood, if by that adjective this meant a desire to test every piece of evidence submitted to him. It seemed to me that he had been briefed to ‘gun’ for the Air Staff, and he was in a mood to do so because the public had become increasingly critical of the Government.
This was the first meeting on which I had met him since the beginning of the bombardment and now that I was officially in charge of all V-1 and V-2 Intelligence, I had to answer for everything that had been done. I had the impression that Winston was himself surprised to find that I was going to be the target for his attack. Personally, I had some sympathy with his impatience, which was if anything due to the faults of my predecessors and the rather unwise arrangements that the Air Staff had made during the preceding months. However, I had now to speak for the Air Staff, and I saw that the main hope of defending it lay in getting the attack directed against things for which I myself had been directly responsible, since I could readily answer for any of them.
Winston’s attack grew sharper as the night proceeded, but I began to enjoy it. Claude Pelly was sitting on one side of me, now as the Chief Intelligence Officer of A.E.A.F., and Colin Grierson on the other, since he was still nominally directing countermeasures. They both remained rather miserably silent as I took the whole attack. I was grateful that Archie Sinclair was not there because with his gallantry he would have tried to intervene to defend me, and he would not have had the facts at his fingertips to do so effectively. Portal was of course there, but he remained silent—I hope in the belief that I was well able to look after myself.
The crisis came when I told Churchill that from the evidence I had just evaluated I thought that the Germans must have at least a thousand rockets. At this he exploded, and started to thump the table, saying that we had been caught napping. He then produced, almost word for word, the arguments with which Vera had belaboured me over the washing-up a few nights before. This was too much. If I let him get away with it, I should never morally be master in my own household again, and so I respectfully thumped the table back.
I told him that if we had been caught napping, this was due to his own directive issued before D-Day that in any conflict between requirements for defence and offence priority should be given to the offence, and in my field this meant concentrating on knocking out the German radar. The fact that his army was now safely across the Channel testified to the efficiency with which we had done that job. But, even so, we had not been napping as regards the rocket. I had promised that we would find the Germans again if we drove them out of Peenemünde, and we had indeed found them in Poland. It seemed to me foolish to be surprised that if the Germans thought a weapon worth making at all, they would not have made at least a thousand; and as for the destruction it could do, even if the warhead weighed five tons—which I did not believe—this only meant a total of five thousand tons of explosive on London, which was little more than Bomber Command was delivering on Berlin in a single night. (Albert Speer in Inside the Third Reich retrospectively made the same point: ‘Even 5,000 long-range rockets, that is more than five months’ production, would have delivered only 3,750 tons of explosives; a single attack by the combined British and American air forces delivered a good 8,000 tons’).
Winston then asked questions as to when the evidence had become available. I pointed out that, as for the identification of the rocket on the photographs in Poland this had been done by me personally a few days before, and as for the numbers of what we could consequently say were rockets, these too had only become available in the last few days. Then I added a further detail: the experts had advised us to look for the wrong things, and had we not been so misled regarding the nature of the launching apparatus, which again had only become clear by our own efforts in the last 24 hours, we might have got at the truth earlier. He then asked whether I had told the ‘Prof’ about the launching system and I replied, ‘Not yet, Sir’. ‘Why not?’ he snapped. And I replied, ‘I found it last night, and I have had seven committee meetings to attend since then, Sir’. There was a silence in which none of the Chiefs of Staff or the Ministers present saw fit to intervene until Colin Gubbins, the Head of S.O.E., introduced some unintentional comic relief by saying that S.O.E. had had a report that the rocket was to be steered to its target by a man inside it, who was to parachute out of it during its final descent. The tenseness having been broken, Portal came strongly to my support, testifying to the value of our work throughout the whole of the period, and Winston subsided. Evidently reports of the meeting got out, for Rowley Scott-Farnie, now a Group Captain and Chief Signals Intelligence Officer of A.E.A.F., came to see me a day or two afterwards, and told me that he had heard that I had shut Winston up. If so, I hope that I did it respectfully, because never in my life have I enjoyed a fight so much. Each of us had too much respect for the truth to resort to any subterfuge or sophistry, and we both knew that the truth was what we wanted to get at.
My own memory could perhaps have exaggerated the drama of the encounter, but after the war I received a letter from one of those present, Sir Oswald Allen of the Home Office, who was one of Herbert Morrison’s chief civil servants:
Do I not remember you at the Rocket meetings? Far the youngest present, calm, cool, collected, the only one, or almost the only one prepared to take on the great man in his testiest midnight mood and argue patiently and respectfully with him!
A further comment came at the next meeting of the Crossbow Committee, on 25th July 1944, when an admiral whom I had not previously met, but who had been at the meeting, came and sat beside me and remarked, ‘I thought that you did damned well last week!’, a comment which increased my already warm regard for the Royal Navy.
Immediately afterwards Churchill himself came in, and after we were all seated, but before he formally opened the meeting said to me, ‘Mr. Jones, how many meetings have you had to attend today?’, ‘Six, Sir’, I replied. ‘What are they?’ he asked, and I proceeded to catalogue the first five, some of which had been chaired by men now sitting round the ‘Crossbow’ table. Before I could go on he said, ‘And now this is the sixth!’ ‘Yes, Sir’, I replied, ‘this is the sixth!’ And I thought of reminding him of an adage that I had learnt from my grandmother: ‘Every time a sheep bleats it loses a nibble.’ He then said, ‘I can well see that you can never get any work done if all your time has to be spent in committees. You have my authority to absent yourself from any committee that you do not think worthwhile!’ It was a valuable concession, since almost none of the committees was genuinely useful, and most of them owed their origin to a general panic resulting from too much theorizing on too few facts. My job was to get the facts.<
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Later in the meeting there was the usual discussion of the ideas of our own experts regarding the weights, and one of them remarked that the Intelligence that was coming in was now agreeing nicely with their ideas. This was completely untrue, and Winston, who had been watching me immediately said to me, ‘Is that true?’ He always seemed to know when I was doubtful, because the same thing happened on several occasions, and I must have somehow unintentionally given away my disbelief in my face. I had of course to reply, ‘No, Sir’, to meet with his ‘Why isn’t it?’, and I catalogued the errors in the statement that had just been made. ‘What do you have to say to that?’ he then asked the expert, and the latter began to flounder.
What I was objecting to particularly was the assertion that the Intelligence evidence was starting to agree with the experts’ evidence that the rocket would weigh 32 plus or minus 7 tons when from what I could see of the Intelligence it certainly suggested less than 20 tons. I also noted that the experts were beginning to shift their ground, because only a week before they had said that the weight would be 40 tons. I was pretty sure that they had very little idea of how the rocket was designed and constructed, and that the only way in which we could arrive at the truth was to get more Intelligence.
One of the steps in this direction would be to explore the German site at Blizna if, as seemed very likely, it was about to be overrun by the Russians. I had therefore a week or so before minuted Portal:
It is most desirable that some Air Intelligence officers with a full knowledge of our background should immediately inspect the camp in the event of its capture. You may consider, as I do, that this matter is of sufficient importance to justify a personal approach to Stalin by the Prime Minister.
The approach was duly made and at the meeting of 25th July Winston told us that he had had ‘a very civil reply from Mr. Stalin’. So the party was formed but, unfortunately, instead of the nominations of personnel being left to me, it was taken over by Duncan Sandys so that our ‘experts’ were well represented. Instead of our forming the team, Air Intelligence officers were included in a balancing rather than a primary capacity. One was Wilkinson, who had examined the Swedish rocket, and was obviously a good choice; and I nominated as my personal representative Eric Ackermann, who would be best qualified of the whole party to look at any aspects of radio control which I suspected might be used to fly a rocket along a beam.
In briefing Ackermann, I warned him that I thought the party had already been rendered ineffectual by its composition, but that he should continue with it as long as there seemed any hope. It would be well at this point to dispose of the fortunes of the party as they progressed eastwards. Their first signal, on 31st July, from Headquarters of British Forces in the Middle East included the ominous sentence, ‘Party amalgamating well and very hopeful of good results’. This naïveté did not augur well for matching the wiles of the Russians. On 3rd August a signal from Tehran announced that the Russians were holding them up, because the party had left London without obtaining visas, and part of the signal ran, ‘Position regarding visas unchanged … still confident that Mission will obtain extremely valuable technical information if allowed to visit sites’. Four days later the party was still in Tehran most of them down with dysentery, with two actually in hospital. By this time Ackermann managed to get an independent signal to me saying that the Mission was quite hopeless because of its incompetence, and requesting my permission to return. Since there was plenty of work for him to do on the Western Front, I readily agreed.
Ultimately the Mission reached Moscow, and on 1st September, five weeks after it had set out, there came a signal: ‘We leave Moscow 0520 tomorrow morning.… We are all thrilled to be off at last and intend to do our best’. On 18th September, the Mission was at Blizna, and sent a signal describing its brilliant success: ‘Russian Headquarters were undoubtedly a little sceptical about the existence of such large rockets until they saw us recovering and recognizing parts. This has made deep impression on the Russian officers with us. We may cause a minor sensation in Russian technical circles when we return to Moscow with the parts. Probably this is all to the good as regards future relations between the three countries.’ By 27th September the Mission was on its way back via Tehran, from which there now arrived another signal saying: ‘The Russians have temporarily lost main part of our R specimens in transit between Blizna and Moscow but they have promised to do all in their power to see that they follow us without undue delay’.
What of course the Russians had done was to put every obstacle in the way of the Mission reaching Blizna, while they themselves inspected the site. Then, as Wilkinson told me on his return, the Russians accompanied our Mission throughout the visit to Blizna, and Poles who might not have talked to the Russians gladly came forward to talk to the British, only to have their names taken by the Russians to be listed for their pro-British sympathies. So the Mission probably did positive harm and achieved no good whatsoever. When the crates which the Russians had forwarded to Tehran were brought back to England under top security and opened by members of the Mission, they were found to be not the items which had been packed at Blizna but parts of old aeroplane engines which the Russians had substituted instead. So much for the contributions of ‘experts’!
This diverting débâcle, however, lay weeks into the future and well after the Germans had started to send us rockets direct; in the meantime I had to contend with the continuous sniping that was coming, understandably perhaps, from Duncan Sandys and his array of experts. There were so many complaints made to the Air Staff behind my back that on 26th July I minuted Portal:
I honestly believe that we shall only get the right answer by it being made clear that we are responsible for Intelligence regarding the Rocket, and that this responsibility includes calling in other scientists when we feel out of our depth. We cannot continue if the policy is pursued of calling in more and more experts regardless of their necessity, to discuss the evidence which we ourselves have obtained, and which we think ourselves competent to assess.
Three evenings later I drafted a further note, this time to Inglis, offering my resignation in protest:
I can make no stronger protest. Our sources will be mis-handled: collation will be wild and incomplete: presentation will be political… unless officers can be found who will defend the traditions of Intelligence to the last, so that the Intelligence system as a whole can work out its results in unmolested good faith.
The following morning the note was in my pocket when I saw Inglis, in a last effort to strengthen his resolve to stand by us. Instead he told me that he had decided to remove the responsibility for flying bomb and rocket Intelligence from me and transfer it to Jack Easton, one of his Directors of Intelligence. This drove any further thought of resignation from my mind, because it brought home to me the mess that might result if I ceased to watch the rocket. I told Inglis that whatever else he might do he could not remove from me the function of discovering the scientific and technical nature of the rocket. Since this fell squarely inside the Terms of Reference given to me at the beginning of the war, I proposed to take my investigation as far as that and write up the account to that stage, come what may. I then went to the desk in my temporary office in the Air Intelligence building in Monck Street and placed a notice on the empty desk saying ‘sic transit gloria raketae’ and returned to Broadway.
Another of my minutes to Portal—this time direct—had better luck. I was anxious that the items that had been recovered from the crashed rocket in Sweden should be examined in the greatest possible detail by our Royal Aircraft Establishment at Farnborough, and I had therefore suggested to Portal that an approach be made to the Swedish General Staff, and that we should be prepared to pay any reasonable price. I concluded, ‘Probably if we offer the Swedes the results of our examination, together with any radio jamming equipment which we may subsequently design, the additional price in, say, Spitfires may not be unduly high. Perhaps you would consider action along these lines.�
� A deal was consequently arranged and the relics of the crashed rocket arrived at Farnborough towards the end of July.
Almost at the same time, some items arrived from Poland. The story behind them is truly a saga of which I can only give the merest outline here. The Polish organization for beating the Germans to the sites of rocket impacts had collected various items during the months of the German trials, including one that had fallen without exploding on 20th May 1944 near Sarnaki (about 80 miles east of Warsaw, near the Russian border), in a marsh on the banks of the River Bug. The Poles pushed it deeper into the water until after the Germans had ceased to search for it, and then they recovered some of the parts. These, with parts from other crashes, were placed in a sack, and carried on a bicycle 200 miles south-eastwards—almost back along the rocket’s trajectory—to an area near Tarnow, which offered a suitable landing place for a Dakota flown from Brindisi. The bicycle journey was a precarious one, for it had to be made through the German forces that were now retreating in the face of the Russian advance. On 25th or 26th July S.O.E. Headquarters at Brindisi signalled to the Poles that the Dakota was on its way. It was piloted by a New Zealander, Flight Lieutenant Guy Culliford of No. 267 Squadron (afterwards Dr. S. G. Culliford D.S.O. of the English Department in the Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand), with Flight Lieutenant Szrajer of the Polish Air Force as navigator.
The fate of the mission was in the balance, for unexpectedly two German aircraft had occupied the landing ground, and a small Luftwaffe unit had set up camp. Fortunately, at sunset the Germans evacuated the field, and the Dakota was able to land. The rocket pieces were put on board, along with the Polish Resistance worker, Jerzy Chmielewski, who had been responsible for the watch on Blizna, and who had cycled the 200 miles with the sack on his shoulder. It was then found that the aircraft could not take off, because its wheels were stuck in the mud. His feelings after running the gauntlet of the Germans so courageously, can be imagined. The field was brightly lit by the plane’s lights; and the roar of the motors as the pilot tried to get the aircraft unstuck could very well have attracted any Germans in the area. Thinking that the sticking may have been due not so much to mud as to his brakes failing to release, Culliford in desperation severed the hydraulic pipes with a knife, but the aircraft would still not budge. A crowd of helpers scraped the mud away with spades and bare hands, while local farmers brought up cartloads of planks, ripped from the fences around their houses. These they forced under the wheels, and then laid a track. Culliford had been preparing to burn his machine and its papers when it was at last freed, and he finally succeeded in a brakeless take-off, while the Poles on the ground dispatched a German patrol which, attracted by the activity, was now approaching.