by John Keegan
The explosions might have been mistaken for those of flying bombs; but there had been no visual or radar observation of that missile, whose characteristics were by then all too well known. Moreover, very late in the day, the British intelligence establishment had at last accepted the reality of the threat. At a meeting held on 18 July, with the Prime Minister in the chair, R. V. Jones presented a paper summarising what was known of the rocket so far. The evidence consisted of reports by the Poles from Blizna of rocket firings, of similar reports from Peenemünde, of Enigma decrypts of German signals reporting flight details observed and, most tellingly, of physical evidence of a rocket misfired into Swedish territory on 13 June. Two British technical experts had been allowed to inspect the wreckage, which had subsequently been shipped to London. It was a baffling consignment, since the V-2 concerned had been used as the carrier for an experimental Waterfall anti-aircraft rocket; but the wreckage was complete enough to reveal that the rocket contained a turbo-compressor; which pointed to liquid fuel, internal guidance vanes and some radio-control equipment. Taken together, the evidence suggested that the Germans had fired between thirty and forty rockets in June and that the missile had reached a state of development “good enough, at least for a desultory bombardment of London.” Churchill was furious. “We have been caught napping,” he burst out, banging the table.31
He had some reason for displeasure. Lord Cherwell’s doctrinaire dismissal of the feasibility of a rocket had caused delays; so, later on, had the tendency, typical of all intelligence bodies, for some of those involved to withhold evidence from others, on the grounds that they wished to be sure of its significance before passing it on. It was also seen, later, that not enough credibility had been attached to evidence extracted by interrogation from two prisoners of war. Eventually, too, it was realised that photographs of Peenemünde had shown rockets in their firing positions as early as 1943; they had simply not been recognised for what they were, being mistaken for “towers” connected with launching, instead of being seen as V-2s standing on end.
At the same time, it can be seen in retrospect that the British intelligence experts might be forgiven. Their fault was not obtuseness but ignorance, the result of a quite remarkable aeronautical backwardness in both Britain and the United States. Aeronautical science in both countries had achieved great success during the pre-war and war years in designing and developing highly successful fighters and bombers—of an entirely conventional type. While they, however, were building the Spitfire, Flying Fortress, Lancaster, Mosquito and P-51 Mustang, the equal or superior of their German equivalents, and the means by which Germany’s cities were flattened during the strategic bombing offensive and the bomber fleets which achieved the devastation were defended, the Germans were achieving a higher and quite revolutionary level of design and development. Between 1936 and 1944 they built and flew the first practical helicopter (the Focke-Achgelis FW-61), the first turbo-jet aircraft (the Heinkel He 178), the first cruise missile (the FZG-76 or V-1) and the first extra-atmospheric rocket (the A-4 or V-2).32 It was an astonishing achievement, largely conducted in complete secrecy. Only the small size of Germany’s industrial base, compared to that of the United States, prevented it from dominating the skies during the Second World War.
Of all four achievements, helicopter, jet aircraft, cruise missile, rocket, the development of the V-2 was by far the most impressive. While Lord Cherwell, a scientist of formidable intellect, was denying that a liquid-fuelled rocket was feasible, Wernher von Braun was already perfecting his fourth model of such a missile. Having begun as a schoolboy enthusiast, working entirely alone, he had engaged the support of the German army, secured funds from the German state, learnt how to generate and control huge volumes of hot gas produced by the combustion of liquids, how to insert guidance devices in the exhaust and how to moderate his rocket’s rate of ascent until it could achieve a ballistic trajectory dirigible by an on-board guidance system. Between 1932 and 1942, when the first successful test firing of the A-4 was staged, it is no exaggeration to say that von Braun, still only in his thirtieth year, invented what would become both the intercontinental strategic ballistic missile and the space rocket.
Little wonder that the British scientific intelligence establishment of 1943–44, still fixed in the belief that rockets could only be propelled, and then for short distances at low speed, by solid fuel, were left to flounder among the miasma of vague agent reports, inexplicable air photographs, Enigma scraps, ill-informed prisoner-of-war interrogations which was all the intelligence machine supplied, seeking a focus. Lacking as they did the scientific and technical knowledge then enjoyed in abundance by their enemies, it is not surprising that the experts were “caught napping.” They did not know, could not imagine what it was for which they were looking. They were like men from the age of the mechanical calculator striving to perceive the nature of the electronic computer.
It was very fortunate for the British that the later stages of the V-2’s development proved fraught with difficulty for the Germans. Having supervised a perfect flight—with a missile not burdened by a warhead—as early as 3 October 1942, when an A-4 performed its characteristic slow-motion departure “as if being pushed by men with poles” before tilting gracefully into a ballistic trajectory and disappearing from sight at 3,000 mph, von Braun thereafter was racked with difficulty. Towards the end of 1943, when the rocket was approaching the production stage, it became apparent that between 80 and 90 per cent of firings ended in failure. Sometimes the rocket would fall back to earth at the firing point or explode when it had reached a height of only 3,000 feet, or would disintegrate on re-entering the atmosphere, or would split above the impact area, leaving the body behind while the warhead continued on course. Disintegration made assessment of the reason for failure very difficult (though providing the resistance fighters of the Polish Home Army with plentiful wreckage to forward to London; one Pole cycled 200 miles with components to reach an airstrip from which a liaison aircraft carried them back). The root of the trouble was mechanical: vibration caused breakages, particularly of electrical relays inside the rocket body. Re-entry caused shocks which broke its structure. Eventually, after 65,000 modifications, including a complete re-engineering of the nose cone containing the one-ton warhead, the rocket began to perform with reasonable consistency.
By then, however, the planned date for the inception of the “revenge” campaign had long passed. The flying-bomb operation had already been effectively defeated, by the capture of the sites from which it was launched; brilliantly effective though the V-1 was as a cheap and simple weapon, it suffered from the limitation of short range and its need for a static launching platform. The V-2 was potentially much more difficult to neutralise. Its complexity and high cost were offset by the simplicity of its launch system, which allowed it to depart from any point where a few square feet of hard surface to sustain the thrust of its exhaust gases could be built or even found. Indeed, in some respects, the Meillerwagen, which both transported the weapon and raised it to the vertical, was as brilliant a conception as the rocket itself. Variants remain a key component of all medium-range ballistic missile systems today.
The V-2’s only physical vulnerability lay in its operating crew’s dependence on storage facilities and certain ancillary factories. Its production, centralised in the underground works at Nordhausen in the Harz Mountains, staffed by slave workers, was impervious to bombing; the roof was 300 feet thick. Its existence, moreover, was not discovered until late 1944, and it was recognised as an unprofitable target. When, therefore, in late July 1944 the British at last became aware of the V-2 threat, the only means available to reduce it were seen to be bombing attacks on the rocket storage centres and on the facilities producing its key constituents, particularly liquid oxygen. By then, however, most of the “large sites,” as they were known to British intelligence, had already been heavily bombed and severely damaged; in any case, loss of bases in France and Belgium soon forced the V-2 units
back into Holland, where, as General Dornberger had always wished, they operated from improvised sites supplied from centres deeper inside Germany on a hand-to-mouth basis. The German retreat forced the early abandonment of the two main liquid oxygen supply sources, at Liège in Belgium and Wittringen in the Saar, reducing the Germans to dependence on smaller sites difficult to identify and locate.33
Those surviving supplied only just enough fuel to keep up the V-2 bombardment. It sufficed, nonetheless, to sustain a diminishing delivery of rockets until 27 March 1945. What permitted the V-2 firing batteries’ survival was their brilliantly simple method of operation. It took only fifteen minutes to position the Meillerwagen—it might be in a suburban street—and push the missile erect. Tanker trucks then fuelled it, while a mobile generator was linked by cable to supply power. The crew then took cover in a slit trench which had been dug while installation took place. The command team, in an armoured vehicle, finally initiated the launch procedure; fifty-four seconds after ignition the site was ready for evacuation. An hour after arrival the Meillerwagen could be on its way. Little surprise that, though the Allied Expeditionary Air Forces flew missions to catch the V-2 teams in the act, none was successful.
The only other means considered to reduce the weight of the V-2 attack was the use of deception, by a variation, much celebrated in the post-war literature of espionage, of the management of human intelligence. Throughout the war, the Germans infiltrated agents into Britain: about 70 before 1940, some being “agents in place” before war broke out; another 220 arrived during the war, of whom 120 were intended to make their way to other countries. The Germans were able to organise infiltration at this level because a steady stream of escapees from occupied Europe, 7,000 to 9,000 a year, the vast majority seeking to join their own armies-in-exile, reached Britain by one means of emigration or another.34
The British counter-espionage services collared almost every agent who arrived hidden among this annual stream. Only three are known to have eluded detection and only five others, once identified, refused to confess. Out of those apprehended, the British were able to form a body of double agents, some of whom had radio sets supplied by the Abwehr or other means of communication with base; one at least, code-named Tricycle by the British, was so trusted that he was allowed to journey to Lisbon during the war to consult his German controllers. Until 1944 the double agents did little more than feed German wishful thinking with reports of depressed morale in the besieged island, though some assisted preparations for D-Day by reinforcing German belief in false orders of battle. As with almost all human intelligence operations at low level, the day-to-day reporting of the double agents was of banal, mundane detail. It differed little from the material fed to controllers by the war’s numerous intelligence fraudsters who, operating on their own account for one side or the other or both, had correctly detected in the appetite of intelligence organisations for information of any sort the means of making a living. Whitaker’s Almanac, the Encyclopaedia Britannica, old newspapers, the BBC World Service—all grist to the world of such fantasists’ “product.” Eminent among the crew was the man code-named Garbo by the British, who set out to sell himself to the Germans as a pro-Nazi British resident. Operating at the outset exclusively from Lisbon, he assured his Abwehr controllers that “there are men here in Glasgow who would do anything for a litre of wine.” Then, transferring his double loyalties to the British, he arrived in his notional operational area to set up a network of twenty-seven completely fictitious agents, whose expenses, paid to him in cash by the Abwehr, eventually amounted to £31,000. At the end of the war he was appointed a Member of the Order of the British Empire and retired into private life unharmed by the enforcement agencies of either of his paymasters.35
Garbo (in real life Juan Piyol Garcia, a Spanish citizen) supplied the Germans, when he was not allegedly organising the sabotage activities of Welsh nationalist fanatics, with enormous quantities of information, all carefully distorted by his British controllers, about the domestic affairs of the United Kingdom under German attack. It was absolutely natural, therefore, that the Germans should turn to him for first-hand information on the effects of the V-weapon campaign. The approach led to one of the most troubled passages in British intelligence management during the war. As early as January 1941, the various intelligence authorities, by then persuaded, correctly, that there were no German agents left at liberty and at work within the United Kingdom, decided to set up an organisation (soon known as the Twenty Committee, after the appropriate Roman numeral, XX, or double cross) which would deceive the German masters of controlled agents—whether they had been captured and turned or had deliberately turned themselves in—by relaying falsified information. The aim, as defined by J. A. Marriott, one of the directors of the Twenty Committee, would be to supply the Germans with “so much inaccurate information that the intelligence reports furnished by the Abwehr to the German High Command based on that information would themselves be misleading and wrong.”36
What ensued verifies the accuracy—in spirit if not exactness—of anything the best writers of spy fiction, John le Carré foremost, portray about the workings of the organisations they describe. The inner ring of the Twenty Committee’s operatives included, beside Garbo and Tricycle, who were exceptional, Brutus, a Polish air force officer escapee, and Mutt and Jeff, two Norwegian escapees who had reached Britain by boat, all three real people infiltrated under Abwehr auspices, but also the entirely fictitious Mullet and Puppet, venal British businessmen, Balloon, an army officer embittered by dismissal from the service, and Bronx and Gelatine, two ladies with friends respectively in the Foreign Office and the armed forces. The latters’ friends were extraordinarily lax about the safeguarding of official papers, whose contents duly made their way back to Berlin, but all of the Twenty Committee’s people did their bit. Most of what they communicated was “chicken feed”—true but useless tittle-tattle—but the identification, particularly by Garbo, of nonexistent Allied divisions before D-Day contributed significantly to the misappreciation by the German Foreign Armies West office of where the Allies intended to land.
It was with the appearance of the V-weapons, however, that the double-cross system achieved its most sophisticated effects, though at the price of heavy heart-searching at the highest level of British government. Soon after the flying bombs began to fall, it was realised that, by relaying false reports of their accuracy, it would be possible to persuade the Germans to shorten their range, thus shifting the Mean Point of Impact (MPI) south and east of Tower Bridge, believed to be the Germans’ chosen MPI, towards the open countryside on the fringe of London. The Germans themselves were eager for news of where the bombs fell and had actually ordered Garbo, before the campaign began, to leave London so that he could report damage in safety. He was sent details of a reporting technique—Brutus and the fictitious Tate were similarly instructed—which would relate the explosion of the pilotless weapons to time of impact. The British realised that by giving details of flying-bomb arrivals correct as to time but wrong as to place—too far to the north or west—they could cause the Germans to shift the MPI away from London’s crowded centre towards its less densely populated suburbs, so diminishing both casualties and destruction. The policy was hotly debated at Cabinet level, where allegations of “playing God” were levelled, but prevailed. It was continued during the V-2 rocket offensive and it seems to have had an effect. Ironically, during the flying-bomb offensive, the Germans were chiefly misled not by double-cross agents but by a man operating on his own account, known to the British as Ostro, located in Madrid and selling “facts” to the Germans based on newspaper reports and his own imagination. Among his achievements was a report (believed) of the destruction of Big Ben; Ostro was a self-creation of whom any spy novelist would have been proud. His information appeared to be confirmed by a Luftwaffe photographic reconnaissance flight of 6 September 1944, the first flown since January 1941, which allowed Flak Regiment 155 (W), the flying-bomb la
unching unit, to take credit for all the damage revealed.37
The double-cross system does seem to have shifted the MPI of the V-2 rockets away from the aiming point. Treasure, a mysterious double-agent under the Twenty Committee’s control, sent reports during October which appear to have persuaded the Germans to shift the MPI away from east-central London down the line of the Thames estuary. The British official historian concludes that, but for that alteration, “1,300 more people would probably have been killed, 10,000 more injured and 23,000 houses damaged—to say nothing of the disruption to the economy and disruption of the country which would have resulted from the concentration of destruction which the Germans believed they were achieving between Westminster and the docks.”38
So “spying,” in the popular sense of the term, did at least play its part in British resistance to the V-weapons campaign. It was only one part, however, of a remarkably varied intelligence effort, including not only humint of several distinct sorts—the anonymous treachery of the Oslo Report, double-agency, resistance reporting and direct espionage—but also what today is called “national technical means,” in the form of photographic reconnaissance, as well as sigint and a great deal of theoretical analysis.
To assess the relative importance of the different elements of the intelligence plot is not easy. Clearly the significance of the Oslo Report was very great; though less than specific in many aspects, it did indicate the trend of German military scientific research—towards, in particular, guided and pilotless weapons—and what it did not mention was as significant as what it did. It included, for example, no suggestion that Nazi Germany was attempting to develop nuclear weapons, and given the belated, weak and diffuse espousal of a nuclear programme by the Nazi state, it was accurate in that respect. On the other hand, the Oslo Report, after arousing initial interest, was almost forgotten, for several years after 1939. Only when other intelligence, received at the end of 1942, alerted the British to rumours of pilotless weapon development was the report resurrected. Perhaps the most valuable clue it then provided was the reference to Peenemünde as a testing site.
