A bombardment of 800 tons of high explosive a month, though exceedingly unpleasant, was substantially less than Londoners had managed to endure and the Civil Defence services to cope with during both the blitz and the flying-bomb assault. Why, then, had the Germans gone to so much trouble and expense to produce such a modest return? To the rigidly limited mind of Lord Cherwell the rocket’s uneconomic cost/ destruction ratio had proved an insuperable stumbling block, but Dr Jones, in his report, proved more imaginative:
A rational approach brought us nearest the truth regarding the technique of the Rocket. When, however, we try to understand the policy behind it we are forced to abandon rationality, and instead to enter a fantasy where romance has replaced economy. . . .
Why, then, have they made the Rocket?
The answer is simple: no weapon yet produced has a comparable romantic appeal. Here is a 13 ton missile which traces out a flaming ascent to heights hitherto beyond the reach of man and hurls itself 200 miles across the stratosphere at unparalleled speed to descend – with luck – on a defenceless target. One of the greatest realizations of human power is the ability to destroy at a distance.
Forty copies of the report were circulated, including a highly accurate sectional drawing of the A-4, but were immediately withdrawn, on Duncan Sandys’s insistence, as unfair to some of the experts he had consulted. With its issue, however – for the main facts about the rocket were now established beyond argument – ‘my Intelligence task’, Dr Jones later wrote, ‘was over’. One important gap in the picture remained – where the rockets were being made – for the British knew only that the main factory was located ‘somewhere in central Germany . . . operating in conjunction with a concentration camp “Dora” ’. Its location, at Nordhausen, was only discovered on 31 August, but made little difference, since it was virtually impregnable to air attack.
About the small sites earmarked by the Germans for launching rockets nothing could be done, but with the ‘large sites’ suspected to be connected with the offensive – though some were, we now know, intended for other, though equally dangerous, purposes, such as storing flying bombs or (at Mimoyecques) housing a new type of long-range gun – it was a different story. On 6 July Watten, first devastated a year earlier and now intended to house a liquid oxygen plant, was wrecked again by a 12,000 lb ‘Tallboy’ bomb, able, as ‘Bomber’ Harris testified, to ‘penetrate 12 feet of concrete’ and set off an earth tremor producing earthquake-like effects. A ‘Tallboy’ also literally raised, and then brought down, the roof of another suspect construction, at Siracourt, in fact intended for flying bombs, not A-4s, while the Todt organization’s masterpiece, the ‘roofed-in’ quarry at Wizernes, fulfilled Hitler’s prediction that it would never be finished. ‘Persistent air attack with heavy and super-heavy bombs so battered the rock all round that in the spring of 1944 landslides made further work impossible,’ complained Dornberger. Work was in fact restarted, only to attract more bombs. ‘The construction itself has not been hit by the new six-ton bombs,’ it was reported to him on 28 July, ‘but the whole area around has been so churned up that it is unapproachable.’ The Americans loyally joined in, on 4 August sending four battered Flying Fortresses loaded with 9 tons of high explosive, against Watten, Wizernes, Mimoyecques and Siracourt, the crews baling out while the ‘drones’, as they were known, were directed on to their targets by radio, but the results were disappointing. Two more, sent on a further sortie against Watten two days later, also achieved nothing.
A considerable proportion of the Allies’ bombing effort was now being directed against ‘Crossbow’ targets, including – always more acceptable to the ‘bomber barons’, since this could be fitted into their long-term area offensive – factories believed to be connected with rocket manufacture. The first successful blow of this kind, as mentioned earlier, had come by accident, when an A-4 factory at Friedrichshafen was bombed in the belief that radar parts were being manufactured there; and during the Gomorrah raids on Hamburg in August 1943 a factory making special vehicles for the A-4 launching units was, by lucky chance, also destroyed. Hydrogen peroxide plants were singled out for bombing when this was still believed to be the rocket’s fuel, and the US 8th Air Force bombed two at Ober Raderach and Düsseldorf, between 2 and 9 August 1944, as well as one at Peenemünde itelf. On 24 August American aircraft dropped nearly 300 tons of bombs on a factory near Weimar believed to be making rocket components and in the following week two suspected ‘radio beam’ stations and – now that the rocket’s true fuel was known – five liquid oxygen works were similarly harassed. But most of the effort was still against the ‘large sites’, the air marshals preferring targets near at hand which seemed to be definitely connected with the rocket, rather than more distant factories whose use was uncertain. In the fourth week of August 1764 tons of bombs were directed at rocket-linked targets, but only 266 tons of this total were aimed at ‘industrial and production centres’ believed to be connected with rocket production, plus 223 tons directed at liquid oxygen production, probably the most worthwhile target, and 41 tons designed to knock out the ‘radio beam stations’, wrongly supposed to guide the rocket to its target. The rest, 1234 tons, was devoted to ‘large sites’.
This vast effort reached its peak around the end of August. On 31 August and 1 September Bomber Command dropped nearly 3000 tons of bombs on supposed storage bunkers, bringing to 118,000 tons the total dropped by both Allied air forces on all secret-weapon targets since the first attack on Peenemünde twelve and a half months earlier, of which 20,000 had been directed at places primarily connected with the rocket. More than 82,000 tons had been delivered since mid-June, of which about 8000 had been ‘rocket-orientated’. The price for the whole campaign, most of it incurred between then and the end of August, had been 450 aircraft lost and 2900 aircrew. Most of these were British, but the US 8th Air Force had lost 63 Flying Fortresses or Liberators in more than 16,000 sorties. These were far from negligible figures and put in a different perspective Cherwell’s constant cry that the rocket was uneconomic, for they had been incurred before a single A-4 had been fired in anger and when the total German dead amounted to only a handful of scientists and their families.
The new, and much less frightening, forecasts for the rocket’s destructive power and rate of fire, and the dwindling away of the flying-bomb nuisance to one or two a day, until none at all arrived between 1 and 4 September 1944, led to a marked relaxation of tension in Whitehall, encouraged by the excellent news from across the Channel. In those heady days when the Allied armies were racing across France and Belgium towards the very frontiers of the Reich, and the war seemed likely to end, as had long been hoped and planned, in September, it was hard to believe that a whole new type of bombardment might still begin. Herbert Morrison’s Rocket Consequences Committee, once the chief dispensers of gloom, now led the premature rejoicing, and the committee’s report to the War Cabinet on 5 September 1944 struck a cheerful note:
Since the date of our appointment the position has undergone a fundamental change, as a result partly of the latest intelligence about the rocket and partly of the progress of the Allied armies. . . . The possible average weight of combined rocket and flying-bomb attack . . . is up to 80 tons of HE a day falling in London Region, which should be compared with the average of 48 tons a day experienced during the worst week of flying-bomb attacks. Rocket attack may start at any time from now onwards, but the enemy is unlikely to be able to launch rockets or flying bombs against London on any appreciable scale after the Allied armies have crossed the Franco-Belgian frontier. . . . We have therefore directed that . . . plans . . . to meet the contingency of severe rocket attack should so far as possible be kept on a paper basis.
The committee went on to report encouragingly on all the problems that a few weeks earlier had seemed so formidable, such as creating ‘Citadel’ accommodation for civil servants, providing hospital beds, preventing news of the first rockets’ arrival reaching the Germans and, above all, e
vacuation, where the problem now was not so much the fear of a panic flight from London as of ‘a drift back . . . as a result of . . . the rapid growth of optimism about the end of the war’. They urged, none the less, that there should be ‘no relaxation of offensive action’ to prevent ‘the initiation by the enemy of rocket attack during the probably short time left to him in which to do so’. The Vice-Chiefs of Staff, however, decided on the following day, in the official historian’s words, ‘that rocket attacks on London need no longer be expected’, endorsing the view expressed four days earlier by the Joint ‘Crossbow’ Priorities Committee, which selected targets for attack, that the rocket menace would disappear once (as was about to happen) ‘the area in northern France and Belgium 200 miles from London was “neutralized” by the presence of our land forces’. It was left to Air Marshal Sir Roderic Hill, alerted by his chief intelligence officer, to point out that western Holland was well within rocket range of the UK and still in Nazi hands. But no suspicious sites had been detected there and his voice went unheeded.
The flying bombs had come as an unwelcome shock to the public, and the politicians had been dismayed at their resulting unpopularity. Everyone wanted to believe that it was now all over bar the shouting, and though when the Germans had coined the term ‘V-1’ (Vergeltungswaffe or Revenge Weapon No. 1) for the flying bomb back in July, the prospect that it would be followed by V-2, the rocket to which Churchill had publicly referred back in February, now seemed remote. ‘Allies nearing Nazis’ reprisal weapon depots. We may soon wrest secret of V-2 from enemy,’ asserted the Evening Standard on 25 August. The Allied advance might ‘stop . . . Hitler’s chance of ever using the much boasted V-2 rockets,’ suggested its fellow London evening newspaper, the Star, on the same day. The News Chronicle struck an equally cheerful note in a front-page story on Monday, 4 September. ‘V-2 may never start,’ it predicted. ‘Can it be fired from inside Germany? It is thought improbable.’ The Daily Express, always a paper to look on the bright side, was even more encouraging next morning. ‘The Germans were known to have four V-2 launching sites in northern France. They are all now either captured or in the range of our massed guns. Are there other V-2 launching sites in Germany? This is considered unlikely. And there is substantial evidence to indicate that the rockets may never be sent against Britain.’
So similar and detailed were the press stories – the Daily Express even carried an account of the captured quarry at Hautmesnil and of the Germans’ problem with airbursts during rocket trials – that it seems likely they were reflecting official guidance. Up to now the Ministry of Information had been involved mainly in preparations for intensifying the existing censorship if and when the rockets started to fall. It had also, as the Chief Censor himself described,
prepared complete plans for carrying on the work of the news and the censorship divisions continuously in the basement of the Ministry. . . . Accommodation had been provided there for the representatives of the British press and for the Dominions and United States correspondents and we were expecting to be marooned there while London was being devastated by the huge twelve-ton rocket.
Now that it had a happier tale to tell, the Ministry made the most of it and, far from restraining the more optimistic statements by members of the government, did its best to secure them the widest possible publicity.
Although it was Duncan Sandys whose remarks were to be most widely quoted and remembered, it was in fact Herbert Morrison who led the rejoicing and first used a phrase about ‘the Battle of London’ that was soon to become notorious. Morrison, Lambeth-born, had always considered himself a Londoner first and foremost and on 6 September delivered a long and jubilant statement in praise of his native city:
London has been in the front line in the final victorious phase of the greatest war that history has ever known. . . . There may conceivably still be trials in store for us before the Allied armies have rooted out the last of the vipers’ nests, but Hitler has already lost the Battle of London as surely as he has lost the main battle of France. . . . The day has come when London can openly rejoice in the great part she has played in the overthrow of Nazism.
That day Morrison advised the Cabinet that no further action was needed on any of the recommendations made by the Rocket Consequences Committee, and on the following morning Duncan Sandys held an even more widely publicized press conference, which seemed to establish beyond question that the secret-weapons danger was over. Behind the scenes this had already caused a great deal of ill-feeling. The Air Ministry, which had borne the brunt of the public’s and, even more, the Prime Minister’s criticism over the flying-bomb, was naturally anxious to take the chief credit for defeating it. It proposed that the Secretary of State for Air, Sir Archibald Sinclair, or his deputy, the Parliamentary Secretary, Harold Balfour, should preside, assisted by a suitable air marshal who, it was learned, had actually asked Duncan Sandys for his notes. Churchill was furious. Sinclair, he pointed out in an angry memo to Ian Jacob on 4 September, was away and Balfour had not been involved in ‘Crossbow’. ‘I forbid the slightest change’, wrote the Prime Minister categorically, ‘in the arrangements which have been made by the Ministry of Information. . . . A statement to the press can only be made by the chairman of the committee set up by me with Cabinet authority.’
Although one Air Ministry official protested to Ian Jacob that it was their minister who was responsible to parliament for air defence, Churchill, perhaps fortunately for the civil servant concerned, never saw this letter, since he was by now on his way to Canada. It was therefore, and very justly, Duncan Sandys, who got most of the limelight when the reporters assembled in unprecedented numbers in the largest conference room that the Air Ministry headquarters, at Senate House in Gower Street, could provide on Thursday, 7 September 1944. The Minister of Information, Brendan Bracken, was in the chair, and the C-in-Cs of Ack-Ack Command and Air Defence of Great Britain, Frederick Pile and Roderic Hill, sat beside him, but it was Duncan Sandys whom everyone wanted to hear. His opening statement, ‘Except possibly for a few last shots, the Battle of London is over’, made headlines everywhere, often with its qualifying phrase omitted. Even less attention was paid to his brief exchange with an unidentified journalist which still survives in the official transcript of the proceedings:
Question: Is there a V-2 weapon, sir . . . ?
Mr Duncan Sandys: . . . I am a little chary about talking about the V-2. We do know quite a lot about it . . . which perhaps is more than you have at the moment, but in a very few days’ time I feel the press will be walking over these places in France and they will know a great deal more about it than we do now.
This occasion brought Duncan Sandys firmly, for the first time, into the public eye and was a personal triumph. That evening he held a celebratory cocktail party at his flat in Vincent Square at which Dr Jones, who had not been invited to the press conference, was a guest, and next day, Friday, 8 September 1944, Brendan Bracken, like Sandys and Cherwell a close and trusted confidant of the Prime Minister, sent him an enthusiastic account of the occasion and its subsequent coverage, duly enciphered as signal ‘Cordite No. 23’:
Duncan Sandys held the largest press conference I have seen since I came to this ministry. His account of how the government handled the flying-bomb menace was beyond praise. He spoke for more than an hour and answered many questions and at the end he was cheered by the press and, as you know, the press are a hardboiled lot. The newspapers are full of Duncan’s praise and his speech has been reported in every part of the world.
11
IGNITION!
‘Ignition!’
Firing order to German rocket units, 8 September 1944
As one by one the dates on which the rocket was to make its operational debut approached and slipped past, it began to seem that it would never be used in action. But at last, after a demonstration at Blizna in May 1944, its future commander, General Metz, fixed what everyone felt to be a realistic target – September. On 31 August General D
ornberger, still resenting his displacement by Kammler, was present at a final planning meeting in Brussels presided over by the elderly and amiable General Heinemann, commander of 65 Corps, but the real power, it soon became clear, belonged to his much younger and more forceful Chief of Staff, Colonel Eugen Walter, of the Luftwaffe: the corps headquarters, responsible for both secret weapons, ‘interleaved’ army and air-force officers. Nominally General Metz, recently brought back from the Eastern Front, was in charge of A-4 units, but it was Kammler who had called this late-night meeting and he soon demonstrated that he considered himself (as special commissioner for the A-4) in charge of everything to do with the rocket, from research to launching. Colonel Walter, who for practical purposes had ousted his own superior, General Heinemann, was now pushed aside in his turn. He first consulted Supreme Headquarters on Kammler’s status then asked to see his written orders, but a man enjoying Himmler’s support was not to be defeated. Kammler, Dornberger complained later, had ‘never done a single day’s military service nor enjoyed any military instruction whatsoever’ but he now ignored his superior officers and countermanded Metz’s instructions. The rocket attack, which should have started on 5 September, was postponed while they made a further appeal to headquarters, and General Jodl and his staff tried to save the face of their subordinates before capitulating. They failed. On 2 September Colonel Walter was told that Kammler would direct the A-4 offensive and would not be answerable to his nominal superior, General Heinemann, an arrangement personally confirmed by Hitler. Metz, a general without an army, now dropped out of the picture.
Hitler's Rockets: The Story of the V-2s Page 17
