A bluish-red pillar of fire – pure, defined, sublime – exploded from the base of the rocket motor. Lying in his darkened room in Scheveningen, Graf could still relive every one of the ten seconds during which it burned. The solid roar of the plume in that enclosed space; the vibrations as the motor struggled to free itself from its restraints; the heat on his face; the overwhelming sweet smell of burning fuel; the exhilarating sense of power, as if they had briefly tapped into the sun. When it was over, the bunker seemed plunged into night and the silence rang in his ears. He stayed immobile for half a minute, staring at the spent motor, until von Braun turned to him. No smile for once, but an utter and intense seriousness.
‘Listen to me, Rudi,’ he said. ‘This is the absolute truth. The road to the moon runs through Kummersdorf.’
Graf signed a contract with the army that very afternoon: ‘to assist, under the direction of Wa Prw 1/I, on the conception of, and conduct of experiments on, a liquid-fuel reaction-motor test stand at Main Battery West, Kummersdorf’. In return, he would be paid fourteen marks a day. Money he could give to his parents.
When they got back to Berlin, they went out for a drink to celebrate.
‘Tell me, did I see you in SS uniform not so long ago, riding a horse?’ He couldn’t resist asking.
‘Oh, that?’ Von Braun waved his cocktail dismissively. ‘I only joined the SS riding school at Halensee – not the SS itself. I’ve resigned now. It doesn’t hurt to get to know these people. Besides, I like riding.’
He was to use exactly the same tone in 1937, when Graf had noticed a swastika badge in his lapel for the first time. ‘You’ve joined the Party?’
‘Technically. I’m number five million and something. Now, now, Rudi – don’t give me that look! You won’t get much support these days if you aren’t prepared to show some commitment. I don’t have to go to meetings or anything like that.’
And again in 1940, when they had entertained some bigwigs from the SS at Peenemünde, and he had turned up in the black uniform of an SS Untersturmführer – blond-haired, broad-shouldered, chin jutting, looking like an illustration from Das Schwarze Korps. ‘It’s purely an honorary rank. Himmler insisted. Don’t worry – as soon as these fellows have left, it’s going right back in the closet.’
A knock at the door of the hotel room. The voice of Sergeant Schenk: ‘Dr Graf? It’s after midnight.’
He had not realised it was so late. At some point he must have fallen asleep. He sat up in bed and stared with regret at his burned-out cigarette. It would be the last he would be able to enjoy for some hours.
‘Thanks. I’m coming.’
He picked up his torch from the nightstand, switched it on and shone it around the bedroom. Its thin light showed the sort of modest seaside accommodation he remembered from childhood holidays: an armchair, a chest of drawers, a tiny washbasin in the corner with a mirror above it, a wardrobe. Beside the wardrobe was a small roll-top desk and an old office chair that he had managed to scrounge soon after his arrival and where he sometimes sat and worked. He flicked the beam back to the wardrobe and let it travel up the centre of the doors to the suitcase lying on top. He hadn’t looked at it for weeks.
He got off the bed and turned on the overhead light. He closed the curtains, dragged the chair next to the wardrobe, stepped up and took down the case. It was old, made of good-quality scuffed brown leather. Von Braun had given it to him just before he left Peenemünde. ‘Do me a favour and look after this, will you?’
‘What is it?’
‘Insurance.’
He laid it on the bed, snapped open the catches and lifted the lid. Inside were a hundred or more small cardboard cartons, each containing a roll of 35 mm microfilm. They looked to be undisturbed. He had occasionally wondered if he should find a better hiding place, but it had always seemed to him wiser simply to leave it where it was. He was sure no one would think of bothering with it. Even so, he plucked a strand of hair from the side of his head and carefully placed it in one of the catches before he closed it and put it back on top of the wardrobe. He turned off the light and descended the stairs.
Outside in the darkness, he could hear the whistle of the train approaching, the heavy clank of its wheels on the tracks as it crept slowly through the town at the end of its long journey from the rocket factory in central Germany. It took him less than two minutes to walk to the railway station, but the train beat him to it. He heard the exhalation of steam in the distance as the locomotive came to a stop.
The scene that greeted him had a certain surreal glamour, as if a movie star had arrived in town: hundreds of men waiting in the sidings under arc lights, breath billowing in the cold; a huge convoy of vehicles of all descriptions – transporters, tankers, bowsers, some with their engines already running – deployed alongside the flatbed trucks. The locomotive had halted so that the first of the missiles was directly positioned under the big crane that straddled the line. Already the technical troop were clambering over it, pulling away its tarpaulin, guiding the crane’s steel cables into position. Once it was hoisted out of the way and swung over onto one of the transporters, the train would inch forward and the next missile would be lifted clear. The warheads were packed separately in big metal drums. Further down the train were the fuel tankers.
The soldiers had been trained to work quickly to get the rockets unloaded before daybreak, but tonight they seemed to be going through the procedure even faster than usual, and Graf guessed they must have been told that the regiment was under orders to conduct twelve launches by the end of the day. He could see Biwack standing with Huber. The colonel was gesturing, no doubt explaining what was happening.
Graf stood watching for a while. There would be nothing for him to do until the first missiles had been taken to the tents in the woods for technical checks. Their dream had come true, he thought, if not exactly as they had envisaged it. They had indeed created a Rocket Aerodrome.
He started to feel cold. That damned salt water again! It conducted the cold as effectively as it conducted electricity. He turned up the collar of his coat and moved towards the train.
6
AT 5.34 A.M., THE REGIMENT fired its first V2 of the day. Its orange flame rose like a sun in the wintry forest, setting light to the tops of some of the surrounding fir trees as it lifted into the darkness. The roar split the Sunday-morning silence over The Hague, bringing hundreds to their bedroom windows to see what was happening. The clouds over the sea glowed red for an instant then went black again.
Five minutes later, the missile struck Longbridge Road, a modern residential street in Ilford, Greater London, demolishing three houses. In the central house, number 411, which suffered a direct hit, Maud Branton and her daughter Iris, aged nineteen, were killed instantly; her husband Sidney was pulled out of the rubble but died later the same day in Barking Emergency Hospital. Next door, in number 413, Frederick and Ellen Brind were also killed outright; their twenty-month-old grandson, Victor, was taken to hospital but was pronounced dead on arrival. Also killed was one of the Brantons’ neighbours on the other side, Charles Berman, aged thirty-nine. In all, eight died and another eight were seriously injured.
The second rocket, launched two and a half hours later at 8.02 a.m., veered almost a hundred miles off course and plunged harmlessly into the North Sea, close to the shingle strand of Orford Ness in Suffolk, where the explosion was observed by some startled early-morning fishermen casting their lines from the beach for mackerel.
What happened to the third missile remains a mystery. It took off perfectly at 10.26 a.m., but there is no record of an impact anywhere on the British mainland. Presumably it must have exploded in mid-air, perhaps during re-entry.
Twenty minutes later, at 10.46, the fourth missile was fired. It hit Orion Cottages in Rainham, Greater London, close to the River Thames. Two people were killed: Albert Bull, a thirty-nine-year-old firema
n, who died in the blast, and his five-year-old son, Brian, who succumbed to his injuries later the same day at Oldchurch County Hospital. Thirty people were seriously hurt.
The day’s fifth launch, at 11.20 a.m., landed on a modern detached house in Manor Road, Chigwell, killing Stanley Dearlove, aged forty. Six others were seriously injured.
The sixth rocket, fired at 12.50 p.m., struck 41 Gordon Avenue in Walthamstow, killing fifty-five-year-old Lilian Cornwell and seriously injuring another seventeen people.
Less than an hour later, missile number seven, launched at 1.39 p.m., scored a direct hit on All Saints’ Church in East India Dock Road – remarkably, only two hundred yards from McCullum Road, Poplar, where a V2 had struck on Friday night, killing fourteen. It brought down the church’s Georgian roof and the eastern side of the nave. Luckily, the main Sunday service was over. Even so, it killed four adults and one eleven-year-old boy, Aubrey Hing. Nineteen people were seriously injured.
Eleven minutes after that, an eighth missile plunged down on to Billericay in Essex, hitting some trees and exploding prematurely, seriously injuring two people.
* * *
—
Thirty-five miles away, in Danesfield House, Kay was at her desk beside the window on the first floor, her head bent over her stereoscopic magnifier. The two great skills of photographic interpretation were, first, the concentration to study the same area for months or even years, until one knew it is as well as one’s own back garden; and second, the memory to spot the minute change that indicated enemy activity. If a lot of people walked across a field, for example, the trampled grass would show up lighter than the surrounding area. To what were their tracks leading? Was that odd shape a tank? A gun? The arrival of camouflage was a sure giveaway that something was going on. And it was surprisingly easy to spot, camouflage on the ground being mostly a matter of blending in colours, whereas in a monochrome image taken from an altitude of more than 20,000 feet it showed up as a difference in tone. But trees were an infallible camouflage – unchanging, impenetrable, a uniform dark grey blanket, even in winter, even if they were deciduous. There was simply nothing to see in the woods around The Hague. They mocked her hours of effort.
She lifted her head and rotated it to relieve the stiffness. Her eyes ached. Even so, she was in a better state than she had been the previous evening. She had slept deeply, without dreams, as if her mind had been determined to heal itself. She had barely been aware of Shirley’s coughs and sneezes, or of Maud and Lavender, her two other roommates, coming in tipsy and giggling at nearly midnight, after a double date with a couple of pilots at the Hare and Hounds. And Sunday morning was the blissful high point when they took their bath. They were each allowed four inches of hot water a week, and they pooled their ration to ensure one full tub and followed a rota to determine who went first. Today it had been her turn to go last, but for once she didn’t mind the greyish water and floating hair; it was luxury enough simply to wallow in the lukewarm depths and wash away the last of the dust. She wondered how Mike was doing. She thought she might call the hospital in a minute, not to try to speak to him, just to ask a nurse how he was. There could be no harm in that, could there?
She returned her eyes to the magnifier.
Hers was a strange sort of war, observing the panoramic struggle as if she were a god on Mount Olympus. She felt guilty at how absorbing she found it: more like an extension of Cambridge than proper military service. Her call-up papers had arrived in her pigeonhole at Newnham on her twenty-first birthday in the spring of 1941. The day after her final examination in June, she caught an early train from Cambridge with orders to report to an RAF base in Gloucester for basic training.
That had been an eye-opener for a convent girl from Dorset. Accents so thick – Geordie, Scouse, Glaswegian – and so studded with swear words she could barely understand what they were saying. The Nissen hut slept thirty, with a separate latrine and bathhouse. On her first night she heard shrieks of pain from one of the cubicles and tapped on the door politely: ‘Are you all right?’ ‘No, I’m fucking well not all right, you posh cunt, I’m having a fucking baby!’ It became a catchphrase for the rest of their training, as they drilled and marched and exercised, struggled with their ill-fitting uniforms and drew their meagre pay (one shilling and eight pence a day): ‘Are you all right?’ ‘No, I’m having a fucking baby…’
At the end of two weeks, they were told where to report next. She was the only one assigned to RAF Medmenham. She cried when she left the others. They had become her closest friends. The first person she saw when she arrived at Danesfield House was Dorothy Garrod: ‘I put in a word for you, dear. You’ll find the work quite stimulating. I believe I have now recruited the entire department of archaeology…’
She was promoted to aircraftwoman 1st class.
The following May – 1942 – the duty intelligence officer gave her a folder of photographs taken from a Spitfire 40,000 feet over the north German coast. ‘Tell me something. You have a degree in history. Did the Romans ever get as far north as the Baltic?’
‘Yes, it was where they got a lot of their amber. Why?’
‘Would they have built any amphitheatres up there?’
‘I shouldn’t have thought so, no. Actually, certainly not.’
‘Then what the devil are these?’
She studied the coverage of what appeared to be an island, with an airfield and a lot of construction under way. They certainly looked like amphitheatres – one huge elliptical embankment and three big circular earthworks in the woods very close to the sea. What could they be? Empty reservoirs, possibly? She checked the map reference to see where the photographs had originated. Peenemünde, Usedom. The name meant nothing to her. That had been the start of her relationship with the rockets.
‘Kay! You’re back from London? I heard you were in a car crash.’
Wing Commander Leslie Starr, her section leader, had come up quietly behind her and bent his head next to her ear. He ran his hands over her shoulders and squeezed the tops of her arms. ‘The Wandering Starr’, they called him. ‘But you’ve got a cut…’ He touched her temple. ‘How are you feeling?’
She turned to look up at him and at the same time managed to twist herself free. ‘More or less human now, thank you, sir.’
‘Glad to hear it.’ She couldn’t have made her distaste more obvious if she’d slapped him in the face. He didn’t seem put out. She supposed it must happen to him all the time. ‘I gather the V2 launch site coverage is signed out to you?’
‘Yes, sir. I had a day off. I thought I’d run over it again to see if we’d missed anything.’
‘And have we?’
‘I’m afraid not.’
‘Damn.’ He picked up one of the photographs and held it out at arm’s length to examine it, frowning, chewing his lip. For the first time, she noticed that he looked unusually agitated. ‘Stanmore’s just been on to say they’ve tracked eight V2s so far today, five on target.’
Stanmore was shorthand for Bentley Priory, another stately home, this one on the northern edge of London, which served as the headquarters of RAF Fighter Command. Its Filter Room monitored all incoming enemy aircraft.
‘Eight? In one morning?’
‘That’s on top of the four yesterday, one of which hit Woolworths in Deptford and killed more than a hundred and fifty, mostly women and children.’
‘Oh God.’ She put her hand to her mouth. That must have been the blast she’d heard on Chancery Lane.
‘Another hit Holborn. Plus there were five on Friday. I’ve been told to drop everything and go up for an emergency meeting at the Air Ministry right away.’ He glanced at the photograph again, and then at her, weighing her up. ‘You’d better come with me.’
‘Yes, sir. What do you want me to do?’
‘Sit there and look pretty.’ He tossed the photograph back onto the des
k. ‘Meet me in the hall in ten minutes, okay?’
‘Yes, sir.’ The prospect of an hour or more in the back of a car with the Wandering Starr was not appealing. ‘Sir,’ she called after him. ‘I’ll need authorisation to take these out of the building.’
‘I’ll tell Registry.’ He half turned to go, then turned back again. ‘If you were in London yesterday, you must have heard them.’
She felt herself redden. ‘I did, sir, yes.’
‘Bloody Germans – never know when they’re beaten.’
After he had gone, she gathered the photographs together and put them back in the file. Ten minutes didn’t give her much time. She hurried out of the room and down the stairs, back to the hut to collect her greatcoat and put some make-up in her bag. By the time she reached the main hall, he was already waiting. She cast a wistful glance at the public telephone. No chance of ringing the hospital now.
Outside, he held the car’s rear door open for her.
‘Do you mind if I sit in the front, sir? I don’t want to be sick all over you.’
Before he could object, she slid in next to the driver. The car crunched over the gravel and pulled away down the long drive. After tapping his foot irritably for half a minute, Starr grunted and opened his briefcase. When they turned onto the Henley road, Kay wrapped herself in her greatcoat, closed her eyes and pretended to doze.
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