by Max Hastings
The plane was piloted by Ted Paulton, a former car worker from Ontario, who set forth with the almost suicidal purpose of inviting fighter attack, in order that electronic specialist Harold Jordan – the only Englishman among a crew of Canadians – could monitor a radar frequency of 490 megacycles and record what happened – for as long as he lived. At 4.30 a.m., just west of Mainz, ‘Lichtenstein’ emissions were indeed detected. Through the ten minutes that followed, minutes of appalling tension and apprehension for the Wellington crew, Jordan monitored the strengthening signals as the German fighter edged closer, closer, closer. Flt Sgt Bigoray, the wireless-operator, transmitted a brief coded message drafted by the radar expert, reporting what was happening. Then, as German radar signals swamped his own headphones, the Englishman shouted down the intercom that they would be attacked at any second. Almost instantly a stream of 20mm cannon shells hammered into the bomber, which Paulton flung into a diving turn as the rear-gunner identified a Ju-88 on their tail. Jordan, though hit in the shoulder, scribbled another message for England while the rear-gunner kept firing at the German until an incoming burst wounded him and disabled the turret. Attacks came again and again, inflicting further fragment wounds on Jordan’s jaw and eye.
Then, suddenly, they were alone. The fighter had vanished, leaving four of the Wellington’s crew seriously wounded, the plane crippled, its fuselage riddled. In the cockpit, for the next three and a half hours Paulton nursed his airborne wreck towards home. The port engine throttle was shot away, while its starboard counterpart was jammed at full power; an aileron and most of the instruments were wrecked; the hydraulics were unserviceable. Only the Wellington’s geodetic construction, based on a weave of mutually supporting duralumin strips – a brainchild of Barnes Wallis – enabled it to stay in the air. Jordan and Bigoray felt a sense of despair, because after enduring their ordeal and repeatedly signalling details of the German fighter’s electronic emissions, no acknowledgement was transmitted from base until 4.55 a.m., and by that time the Wellington’s receiver was dead.
At 6.45 a.m. they crossed the French coast near Dunkirk, and thirty minutes later made an English landfall. Paulton decided that the aircraft was too badly damaged to risk an airfield landing: they must ditch in the sea. Bigoray, his legs bleeding from multiple fragment wounds, was obviously incapable of making an escape from a sinking hulk, so instead buckled on his parachute and dragged himself to the rear escape hatch. Over Ramsgate, the pilot gave him the word to jump. The wireless-operator descended safely, carrying a copy of Jordan’s report. Then Paulton bounced the doomed Wellington onto the sea two hundred yards off Deal. It ploughed to a waterlogged standstill, and the crew struggled out through the hatches. To their dismay, they found their dinghy shot to ribbons, and instead had to cling to the sinking wreckage until rescued by local boatmen. This was a rare case in which heroism and devotion to duty were suitably recognised: Jordan, who lost an eye, received a DSO, Paulton a DFC and Bigoray the DFM. The Wellington’s mission provided RAF scientific intelligence with one more among a thousand pieces for its jigsaw of information about Germany’s air defences, secured by airmen who accepted an encounter against odds such as few secret agents would have cared to face.
Yet the outcomes of other technological intelligence campaigns were more equivocal, including one of the highest importance. On 15 May 1942 Flt Lt. Donald Steventon, among the RAF’s most skilled reconnaissance pilots, was on his way to photograph the German Baltic port of Swinemünde when he spotted unusual construction activity below him, at a German airfield on Usedom island. He banked his twin-engined Mosquito and made a short run over Peenemünde, then a name of no special significance to the Allies. When Steventon’s images were examined under the magnifiers of the RAF Medmenham photographic interpretation centre, they could make nothing of three large circular embankments: the Peenemünde photographs were filed. It was only eleven months later, at the end of April 1943, after three more reconnaissance sorties had been flown over the site, that a committee codenamed ‘Bodyline’, appointed by Churchill to study a suspected German rocket programme, concluded that Peenemünde was the hub and heart of whatever diabolic project the Nazis were fomenting.
The V-weapon saga remains one of the most fascinating intelligence studies of the war. German scientific ingenuity commanded well-deserved British respect. As soon as it became plain, and was reflected in Nazi public rhetoric, that Berlin was developing long-range weapons with which to exact retribution for the Anglo-American bomber offensive, immense efforts began in London to identify the nature of the threat. By 1943 the tide of war had swung decisively towards the Allies, who were now vastly strong, especially in the air. Bletchley Park was reading a substantial proportion of the enemy’s secret wireless traffic. Yet despite these advantages, until the Germans began to fire V-1s and V-2s at Britain, Churchill’s intelligence machine remained confused and uncertain about the exact nature of Hitler’s ‘revenge weapon’ programme. The story offers a powerful corrective for those who suppose that Ultra laid bare all the enemy’s secrets: here was an important one, which largely defied penetration.
The Wehrmacht had been experimenting for years with rockets, and the Luftwaffe with pilotless planes. The 1939 ‘Oslo Report’ to MI6 mentioned the significance of Peenemünde as a test station. Only in July 1943, however, did Hitler, exasperated by the Luftwaffe’s inability to retaliate for RAF and USAAF attacks on Germany, decide to commit massive resources to manufacturing new weapons, then still at the experimental stage, that might achieve what his manned aircraft could not by wreaking havoc on Britain. At that stage the British had already been debating for some months the significance of clues that reached them about German rocketry. R.V. Jones read of a conversation between German scientists, overheard in a Berlin restaurant by the Danish chemical engineer codenamed ‘Elgar’, mentioned above, who reported regularly to Broadway. On 22 March 1943, eavesdroppers at the celebrity PoW camp at Trent Park heard two captured Afrika Korps generals, Cruwell and von Thoma, discuss prospects for the rocket programme. A week later, Broadway received a message from a Luxembourg Resistance group, providing scruffy sketches and fragments of information supplied by its own people serving as forced labourers at Peenemünde. This was forwarded via Bern by junior officers, in the absence of the head of station, ‘Fanny’ vanden Heuvel. He returned to the office to rebuke his staff for wasting cipher groups on such nonsense – then received a signal from London saying that the information was of the utmost value, and urging every effort to secure more of the same. On 12 April the British vice-chiefs of staff reported the gist of all this to the prime minister, who decided to take the threat seriously. He appointed his own son-in-law Duncan Sandys, a junior supply minister, to head an ongoing investigation. Its initial report, on 17 May, stated that ‘such scant evidence as exists suggests that [a German rocket programme] may be far advanced’.
Sandys was widely disliked – Alan Brooke promised that he would resign if, as was widely feared though it did not come to pass in the war years, the ambitious young upstart was made secretary for war. Sandys’ appointment transferred management of the Bodyline investigation from the hands of the professional intelligence analysts into those of a politician, and this was no accident: from start to finish, V-weapons were viewed in Downing Street as intensely political. Nothing the Nazis contrived at this late stage could alter the outcome of the war, and thus the military threat from ‘secret weapons’ must be limited, given that German atomic research seemed to have made little progress. But it seemed alarmingly plausible that a revolutionary form of conventional attack could damage ‘Overlord’ – the looming invasion of the Continent – and inflict pain and misery on the weary British people of a kind that might sour the sweetness of victory. An estimate by the Ministry of Home Security, directed by the Labour politician Herbert Morrison, suggested that each rocket which exploded on London might kill six hundred people and seriously injure a further 1,200, and that the Germans might be able to launch on
e such weapon an hour. Here was crystal-gazing of a fevered kind that sustained alarm in Whitehall through many months of 1943 and 1944.
The error that dogged British intelligence activity for over a year was that the Bodyline group supposed the Germans to be working on a single secret weapon, whereas in reality they were testing several different technologies, including a giant gun. A Polish intelligence group based in Paris reported in April on plans for a ‘bomb with wings’ that was evolving at Peenemünde. In August a Danish naval officer provided details of a crashed V-1 that he had inspected, which appeared to have no engine; this prompted speculation in London that it might be a new variant of the glider bombs the Germans were known to be building, for stand-off release from Luftwaffe manned aircraft. There were some harsh exchanges between Medmenham’s photographic interpreters and R.V. Jones, who for all his brilliance was not universally beloved. He often made snap judgements that were inspired but also disputed, and delivered with a rudeness Hugh Trevor-Roper would have respected. Today, when ballistic missiles have been etched on the world’s consciousness for seventy years, the aerial images of what was taking shape at Peenemünde would be recognised by a child. But in 1943, interpreters peering through their fine lenses acknowledged them only as ‘objects’, or ‘vertical columns’. And who can blame them?
Again and again that summer and through the months that followed, the Bodyline group – rechristened ‘Crossbow’ on 15 November – stumbled in its analysis, because of the irreconcilability of the reported characteristics of the artefacts seen at Peenemünde and other sites in Poland and France. On 29 June 1943, MI6 reported that the Germans were building a giant gun with a range of 230 miles. There was also speculation about a rocket that might deliver a ten-ton warhead, a devastating punch. The British were baffled by suggestions that such a missile might be liquid-fuelled, because their own scientists doubted the feasibility of such technology. London asked the Americans and Russians to contribute whatever information they had, and drew blank. Washington said it had nothing to tell. Moscow Centre could have passed on some clues collected by the ‘Lucy’ Ring, but was not much interested in assisting the British with their puny war effort – as Stalin viewed it. Allen Dulles transmitted several 1943 OSS reports about Peenemünde and the German secret weapons programme, which at least provided independent confirmation of British speculations, but R.V. Jones’s lengthy narrative makes no mention of either the Bern station chief or OSS, and it may be that the American cables were never passed to the British.
In the late summer of 1943, the only common ground among the interested parties in London was that Peenemünde was the focus of highly dangerous German activities. Thus, on the night of 17 August its airfield complex, factories and workshops were devastated by 596 Lancasters, Halifaxes and Stirlings of the RAF’s Bomber Command. As a coastal target, the island was easily pinpointed. The raid was highly successful, save that German night-fighters were able to destroy forty of the bombers, 6.7 per cent of those committed, which were operating at extreme range from their home airfields. On the ground, many installations were wrecked and 180 German scientists and engineers, as well as more than five hundred mostly Polish slave labourers, were killed. Werner von Braun, the V-2 programme’s chief scientist, had hoped to initiate attacks on Britain by November 1943. This deadline would anyway probably not have been met, but Bomber Command’s assault retarded it by several months.
On 27 August a new report signed by Duncan Sandys at last recognised that the Germans were developing two different weapons, but fierce argument persisted about the weight of explosive either might deliver. Dr Jones was among those who pointed out that any credible projection showed that the enemy could create only a small fraction of the devastation the RAF and USAAF were wreaking daily in Germany. There nonetheless seemed something profoundly sinister about the notion that the Nazis, by employing infernal machines, might slaughter tens of thousands of British people without risking the lives of their own aircrew; such an assault appeared spiteful and unfair, when the outcome of the war was decided.
American bombers were committed to two attacks against new secret weapon bunkers identified at Watten, in France. These caused the site to be abandoned by the Germans, although Resistance reports showed other, apparently related, construction activity elsewhere in the north of the country. An MI6 informant named Michel Hollard, a travelling salesman for the gazogène engines that powered most French cars of the time, collected extensive information about the V-1 sites through his ‘Agir’ network. Hollard inspected one site himself, disguised as a labourer; in the course of the war he crossed the Swiss frontier ninety-eight times to deliver his material for Broadway before being betrayed and captured, though mercifully he survived.
The Peenemünde raid also prompted the Nazis to shift secret weapon production to underground sites almost impervious to Allied air attack. Some intelligence reports about this development, compiled at enormous risk by Allied informants in enemy territory, failed to complete the tortuous passage to London: in December 1943 a former officer of the French Deuxième Bureau acquired details of the design of V-2 rockets being built at the RAX works near Wiener-Neustadt. He dispatched a message via Madrid, but this never reached British scientific investigators, to whom at that time it would have been invaluable.
On 7 October an Ultra decrypt of one of Baron Ōshima’s reports to Tokyo, dispatched a week earlier, described German plans to start firing long-range guns, accurate up to 250 miles, as early as mid-December. But while the German high command told Ōshima much that was true, it was also feeding him some fanciful information, merely to sustain Tokyo’s stomach for the fight. Doubts persisted within the Sandys group about how far both the Nazis’ public threats to the world and their private promises to allies were mere propaganda. The Joint Intelligence Committee in London remained sceptical, as did Lord Cherwell, Churchill’s influential scientific adviser. In the weeks that followed, Ultra picked up only two relevant military signals, which concerned the flak defences at various secret weapon sites. Almost all German exchanges about the technical aspects of V-weapons were conducted on paper or by landline, and thus remained impenetrable by Bletchley Park.
During the winter of 1943 debate in London about V-weapons became fierce and anxious, because there were so few certainties. On 24 October Duncan Sandys suggested that the Germans might soon be able to start firing rockets at Britain in large numbers, delivering by Christmas a possible total of anything up to 10,000 tons of explosives. This was nonsense, never credited by the likes of Reg Jones, but it nonetheless alarmed the prime minister. Bletchley Park was ordered to maintain a special watch on the signals of the 14th and 15th Companies of the Luftwaffe’s Signals Experimental Regiment, which were known to be involved in the pilotless aircraft programme. At the end of November, new decrypts suggested that what later became known to British people as the ‘doodlebug’ could fly at between 200 and 300mph, for 120 miles.
On 4 December, the Crossbow committee agreed that scores of mysterious ‘ski sites’ which the Germans had been building in the Pas de Calais and other parts of northern France – Hollard’s Agir network identified a hundred – were designed for launching the pilotless aircraft. It was agreed that ski sites, so called for their resemblance to ski-jump launching ramps, should become priority targets for the RAF’s and USAAF’s bombers, though they proved resistant to effective air attack. Urgent studies also began on a defensive response to the V-1, based on the use of fighters, balloon barrages and flak guns. In March 1944 a new Ultra fragment showed that the Germans had improved the weapon’s accuracy. Two months later, the British naval attaché in Stockholm was able to study wreckage from two V-1s which crashed in Sweden. At about the same time, a Wehrmacht chemical warfare specialist captured by the British in Italy told his interrogators he had attended a rocket course at Peenemünde, and gave details – some accurate, others fanciful – of what he had learned about the V-2. In May 1944 also, Bletchley broke an obscure Wehrmacht cip
her being used to communicate between Peenemünde and the V-2 test site at Blizna in Poland. The Park was instructed as a top priority to monitor transmissions in this key, even at the cost of diverting staff and bombes from other important work.
On 13 June 1944, a week after D-Day, the first V-1 flying bombs, primitive Cruise missiles, began to land on Britain. Until the day of their arrival, as both R.V. Jones and the official intelligence history readily concede, the British had scant idea either of the precise nature of the weapon, or of how serious a peril it represented. The last pre-attack estimate by the Air Ministry – on 12 June – suggested that the Germans might be able to drop four hundred tons of explosive in the first ten hours, a wild exaggeration. It came as a relief to the British and Americans that the offensive opened too late to disrupt ‘Overlord’, the Normandy invasion, as had been feared. And it soon became apparent that balloons, fighters and the inherent limitations of the V-1 could contain the assault, deeply unwelcome though ‘doodlebugs’ were to the battered British people.
