Most Secret War
Page 41
In any event, I had the responsibility of warning the Air Staff if there was any threat to Britain which might require action on the part of the Royal Air Force, and in addition I was Head of the Scientific Section of M.I.6, advising on the direction of our agent effort, and of the direction of our code-breaking activities. So besides passing on to Sandys any information we might obtain, and making efforts to get it by means that might not occur to him and his advisers, I would continue to collate all the information as a reserve if he and his organization ran into difficulties.
It was a straight Intelligence problem, and I could therefore plan an attack with the resources at my disposal. Agents could be briefed; and in particular there was hope of information coming through the army of foreign labourers that had been recruited to work at Peenemünde. P.R.U. could be asked to photograph the Establishment there, and I was able to brief the pilots in detail. Felkin and his colleagues, who had of course provided the vital stimulus with the von Thoma conversation, could also be briefed.
In addition, there was one very long shot, in fact the longest that I made in the entire war. Contemplating the problem of monitoring the flight of a rocket from the ground, I recalled the story that Carl Bosch told me about the shells from the long-range gun1 in World War I, which seemed to disappear ‘into the blue’ and were only found later, much further along the line of fire than expected, because a meteorologist who knew about the firing of the gun also happened to receive reports of three meteorites arriving at 20-minute intervals after three shots had been fired from the gun with this same interval between them.
Now, in World War II, the problem might be eased by following the rocket by radar. If, therefore, rockets with a range of 200 kilometres were being fired from Peenemünde then they would probably be fired east-north-eastwards up the Baltic, and quite possibly a set of radar stations would be strung out on the north coast of Germany, so as to follow the rocket over its trajectory. It would obviously be a very difficult job for the radar of those days, since the rocket would be moving ten times faster than an aircraft, and therefore the radar operators would have to be very expert. The German Army did not have much radar, and it would probably have to turn to one of the other two Services. Somehow, by that time I knew enough about German radar to say that the most expert operators were thought to be in the 14th and 15th Companies of the German Air Signals Experimental Regiment. I therefore told Norman at Bletchley of my line of thought, and asked him to see that Bletchley and the Y Service generally followed those two companies as closely as possible, and above all to let me know whether one or other of them moved up to the Baltic coast and showed signs of deploying itself from Peenemünde eastwards.
While we were putting this Intelligence attack into operation, there began to appear signs that I did not like. Sandys must have heard about me sooner or later, and indeed Lindemann made sure that he did so. For the one positive criticism that Lindemann could make of Sandys was that he would have been better advised to get in touch with me than to set up a separate organization. Not only was there no contact between us but I began to sense signs of a move to ‘corner’ all the information. In particular instructions were issued that all photographs of Peenemünde were to go only to Sandys. This caused some discussion, and indeed disturbance, in the Photographic Reconnaissance set-up, all the more so since I had been briefing the pilots personally on how to take the photographs.
My contacts at all levels with P.R. were of course very good. So good, in fact, that on one occasion Peter Stewart asked me confidentially whether Wavell was my uncle. When I told him that we were not related, I asked the reason for his question. Apparently someone had complained that I got a far better service from the Photographic Reconnaissance organization than anyone else, and that this was because Claude Wavell was my uncle. I can only conclude that the complainer had heard someone say that it might be a case of nepotism and had looked up a dictionary. Anyway, from that moment onwards, Wavell became ‘Uncle Claude’ for the rest of the war, and no uncle could have done more for us.
Curiously, it was Peter himself who had a relative in his organization, for his father, ‘Pop’ Stewart, a former Brooklands racing motorist, served under him as a squadron leader. And it was ‘Pop’ Stewart and his colleague Roddie Nicholson, who played an essential part in my finding the first rocket. When they heard of a veto on the Peenemünde photographs going to anyone but Sandys, ‘Pop’ said to me, ‘Our instructions from the Air Staff have always been to pass any photographs to you that might interest you, and so we propose to see that you get a copy of every photograph that goes to Sandys’.
In contrast with aerial photographs, reports from secret agents had of course to come through me, so that although I only saw aerial photographs some days after the Sandys’ organization, I saw the agents’ reports some hours earlier. There were two in particular in June 1943 that remain in my memory; they came from two Luxembourgers whom the Germans had conscripted into the army of foreign construction workers at Peenemünde. One was Leon Henri Roth, a student aged 20, who had been expelled from school for starting a Resistance cell. Along with other Luxembourgers he was sent to Peenemünde, and succeeded in getting letters through to his father, who was a member of a Belgian network, telling of the development of a large rocket which made a noise resembling that of a ‘a squadron at low altitude’. The other Luxembourger whose report I remember was Dr. Schwagen, afterwards Director of the Laboratoire Bactériologique de 1’Etat in Luxembourg, who sent through an organization known as the ‘Famille Martin’ a report and sketch which reached me on 4th June. It is shown in Figure 17, and it clearly mentioned a rocket of about ten metres length, and showed where it was assembled. It also stated that for firing it was mounted on a cubical structure. Dr. Schwagen survived the war but tragically Roth, who was a student, was killed by fire from an American tank in 1945, while escaping with two Frenchmen in a German military car; he was posthumously awarded the Croix de le Résistance and the Médaille d’honneur de 1’Etoile, and was re-interred in Luxemborg in 1968.
Fig. 17. A Luxembourger’s message and sketch smuggled out of Peenemünde, June 1943. The poor quality is due to the original having been transmitted by microfilm. ‘P7’ was Prüfstand (test stand) 7, the oval enclosure visible in Plates 19 (a) and (b)
Besides these reports from Peenemünde itself, there was an interesting one on 22nd June which came from a source in one of the Weapons Departments in the German High Command. This spoke of ‘winged’ rockets with remote control and launched by catapults, the intended target being London. Thirty catapults had been constructed of which fifteen were already serviceable. Although Hitler was pressing, the starting date of the bombardment had had to be postponed from the beginning to the end of July. We had no means of judging the reliability of this report, which was typical of many that now flooded in. Assessing them became extremely difficult, especially since the concern generated by the Sandys enquiry resulted in ill-considered questionnaires being sent out to all parts of our agent network. Briefing agents is a considerable art. With some you can tell them the whole story of what you already know, and you can trust them to use this information to guide their own enquiries. Others who are not so reliable will often take what you have already told them and feed it back to you with embellishments to cover up the fact that their own enquiries have been unsuccessful. This factor was to bedevil the rocket enquiry for the whole of the following twelve months.
The evidence from Photographic Reconnaissance was free from this difficulty, in that it was objective; but, even then, what one could see in a photograph was often a matter of subjective interpretation. The first sortie, on 22nd April, showed a large establishment with an enormous cloud of steam; although we did not recognize the cause of this until later, it was probably the condensed exhaust from the test of a rocket jet. And as the air photographs came in through May and June it was clear that there was great activity at Peenemünde both at the establishment and at the nearby airfield. A specia
l section was set up at Medmenham, the Photographic Interpretation Unit, to undertake the interpretation for Duncan Sandys. In this he was unlucky because the principal interpreter assigned to the task supplemented his powers of observation by a remarkably fertile imagination. What were in fact catapults for flying bombs were, for example, interpreted as ‘sludge pumps’, a theory perhaps coloured by the interpreter’s previous experience as an engineer with a river Catchment Board after his Cambridge Ph.D. thesis on classical hydraulic engineering—a thesis which was not accepted because, he claimed with rueful humour, Cambridge could not find as examiners either an engineer who knew Latin and Greek or a classical scholar who knew any engineering.
Since I only received the photographs from ‘Pop’ Stewart some days after they had been available at Medmenham there ought to have been nothing left for me to discover. The history of sortie N/853 is therefore revealing. Its photographs of Peenemünde were taken on 12th June. They were available at Medmenham the following day, and when the Prime Minister visited Medmenham on 14th June he was shown them by Sandys’ interpreter, who issued his interpretation report on 16th June. I first saw the photographs on 18th June; after a quick lunch I was studying them with a stereoscope, convinced that sooner or later we must catch a rocket in the open, although we had little idea what its size and appearance would be, apart from the Luxembourgers’ evidence that it was about ten metres long. The definition of the photographs was not good (Plate 19(a)), and I knew that by this time the Medmenham interpreters had had at least five days to study them: there ought to have been no pickings left. But suddenly I spotted on a railway truck something that could be a whiteish cylinder about 35 feet long and 5 or so feet in diameter, with a bluntish nose and fins at the other end. I experienced the kind of pulse of elation that you get when after hours of casting you realize that a salmon has taken your line—especially when someone else has had an exhaustive first chance at the pool.
To Frank I said in as level a voice as I could ‘Charles, come and look at this!’ He immediately agreed that I had found the rocket, which I then showed to Edward Wright. Now the only question was how we should play the advantage that the discovery had given us in demonstrating to the Intelligence world and the politicians that the ‘old firm’ had done it after all, despite all the effort and fuss that had been created by the Sandys approach, and despite a five days’ handicap in seeing the photographs. If any justification were needed for our having continued to watch, this was it.
If Medhurst had still been in Intelligence, I would have gone to him. But Frank Inglis had taken over and, although he was a very decent officer, he was out of his depth when it came to technical matters. I could perhaps have bypassed him and gone to Portal, but the latter’s position was already difficult in that he, as one of the Chiefs of Staff, had some responsibility for Sandys having been called in. So instead I went to Lindemann, if only to show him that his faith in us had been justified. I did not know it but on 11th June he had already minuted Churchill:
Jones, who you may remember is in charge of Scientific Intelligence’ has been following these questions closely, and I do not think there is any risk of our being caught napping.
So I went across to the Cabinet Offices and saw Lindemann before he left for the weekend at Oxford, to discuss how to proceed. We could there and then have called for a showdown to decide whether there was any further case for the abnormal Intelligence arrangements that had been called into being by the rocket scare. Very generously, I thought, Lindemann said that I should send a note to Sandys telling him that there was a rocket visible on the photograph, to give him a chance to react before I told anyone else. It was now late on Friday afternoon and in the morning (19th June) I sent the following note to Sandys:
Lord Cherwell has asked me to draw your attention to the fact—should you not have already noticed it—that a rocket seems to be visible on sortie N/853 of Peenemünde; it is about 35 ft. long.
This gave Sandys a chance to discuss the situation with me; and we could perhaps have come to a reasonable arrangement where he would be responsible for countermeasures and co-ordinating them with Intelligence, whilst I provided him with the Intelligence. Instead, there was no acknowledgement of my note: two or three days later there appeared an addendum from Sandys’ interpreter to his previous report, saying that an object was visible on the photograph, without any mention that anyone but himself had found it. This experience certainly confirmed my impression that my help was being avoided, and that Sandys wished to have others think that his arrangements were working well.
Lindemann was no more pleased than I was, and he again spoke to Churchill. He told me that he had told Churchill that he did not know whether I was going to agree with him about the rocket or not, but that my record was such that Churchill must hear me. To his credit, he already knew that I did not agree with him, and the gesture must have cost him much. It was this pressure from Lindemann, almost certainly, that was the cause of Churchill calling me to his side after the Window meeting of 23rd June (p. 298) and asking me whether Mr. Sandys had been in touch with me. So with his instruction to hold myself in readiness for the following week, I sat up that same night until 2.30 a.m. writing a report to summarize what I could now see of the rocket picture.
The report discussed and rejected the idea that the rocket story could be a hoax, and I appended my drawing of the rocket (Figure 18) as being about 35–38 feet long and 6 feet in diameter. It concluded that the scale of firing at Peenemünde was small, in that on no photograph had we seen more than one rocket whereas if there were, say, twenty available for test at any one time we should probably have caught more than one in the open at the same time.
Fig. 18. Rough outline of rocket (not to scale) drawn from the aerial photograph of Peenemünde at Plate 19a, June 1943. The warhead was probably not fitted, decreasing the overall length by seven to nine feet. The drawing shows as much as could be extracted from the photograph and represents the limit of British knowledge at the time
As for the imminence of attack, this did not seem to me serious—in contrast with some other assessments—but there was always the chance that Hitler would press his technicians into firing a few against London if he was stung by our bombing attacks on German towns. For countermeasures almost the only thing we could do would be to bomb the development and production facilities, and in recommending an attack on Peenemünde I gave a written undertaking: ‘Peenemünde would demand considerable priority over all other places, despite our curiosity to watch the development of the trials. Intelligence would be prepared to take the risk of the work being re-started elsewhere.’
I also noted that the long shot that I had planned in April showed some promise, for the 14th Company of the Air Signals Experimental Regiment had in fact moved a Würzburg to Peenemünde, and a radar detachment to the Island of Rügen, just north of Peenemünde. It might simply be a strengthening of the air defences, but dared we hope that we were ‘on to something’?
In the report I made a mistake which I record as a salutary lesson for future Intelligence officers. When I measured the size of the rocket, I made a guess at its weight as ‘perhaps 20 to 40 tons’, and this is what I originally wrote in the report. On the afternoon of 26th June, however, Duncan Sandys at last asked me to see him, and the question of the weight came up. I repeated my guess of 20 to 40 tons, but he told me that our experts said that it must be at least 80 tons. When I expressed surprise, he suggested that I should speak on the telephone to one of them, Dr. W. R. (now Sir William) Cook, and so we put a call through. Cook told me that to make a rocket you could not do better than a 50/50 fuel/carcase weight ratio, since the carcase has to be of steel thick enough to stand the pressure of the cordite or other propellant burning in the jet. This gives a mean density for the rocket of about four times that of water, and so the total weight for a rocket of the size that we had seen would be 80 tons. I tried to shake Cook without success, and so I grudgingly altered the stencil of my report from
‘perhaps 20 to 40 tons’ to ‘perhaps 40 to 80 tons’. As it turned out my original estimate was much nearer the true weight than we were going to get for another year; and it shows the dangers of letting one single item of information that has come in at the last moment upset a judgement made on the basis of all the previous evidence. Actually, of course, where our experts were wrong was in assuming that the Germans were trying to make an enormously enlarged version of a schoolboy rocket.
By the time I finished my report on 26th June, a further sortie had been flown over Peenemünde on 23rd June with Flight Sergeant E. P. H. Peek as pilot, and this showed a rocket (Plate 19(b)) so clearly that nobody could argue about it—nobody, that is, except Lindemann. The photographs were available for the meeting with Churchill who, true to his word, had called it for 10 p.m. on 29th June; but instead of this being a ‘staff conference’ it was a full meeting of the War Cabinet Defence Committee (Operations).
Duncan Sandys gave an account of his conclusions, including the estimate by the Ministry of Home Security that a single rocket would cause ‘up to four thousand casualties killed and injured’; but apart from this, and a tendency to assess the threat as more imminent than I would myself, there was not much that I would have questioned. He was concerned that the rocket might be used before the Royal Air Force could make a heavy attack on Peenemünde, the earliest date for which, in view of the short nights, was mid-August.
Churchill then invited Lindemann to give his views. The Prof was obviously not at ease, perhaps because he knew that I was going to differ from him, but he proceeded in his best manner to fight a rearguard action. Trying to have it both ways, he said that he proposed to act as advocatus diaboli against the case for the rocket as put by Mr. Sandys. He made various technical points: he did not believe that a single rocket would cause four thousand casualties, and he doubted whether the Germans had a sufficiently powerful propellant. As for the objects that we had photographed at Peenemünde they were either torpedoes or wooden dummies, deliberately painted white to show up easily on our photographs.1 It was now that he touched his best form: the whole rocket story was a great hoax to distract our attention from some other weapon which would be much more vulnerable to countermeasures than the rocket if we were to detect its development in time, for example a pilotless aircraft. So if all our attention was focused on the rocket and on trying to think how we could counter it, we might miss the real weapon, the pilot-less aircraft. As was to transpire, this was a magnificent try, but it was not really valid—the chances were that if we were alarmed by the rocket story and were chasing it alone, we should in the course of the chase come across clues that would put us on to the trail of the other weapon, pilot-less aircraft or whatever it might be.