by R. V. Jones
When Lindemann had finished, Churchill told the meeting that there was one man whose views he wanted particularly to hear. This was, ‘Dr. Jones, who had been responsible for piecing together the evidence which had enabled us to detect and defeat the enemy’s beams for controlling their night bombers’. He looked across at me and said, ‘Now I want the truth!’ The meeting was taking place not in the Cabinet Room in 10 Downing Street, but in the Cabinet’s underground headquarters (Plate 4(b)). Churchill was, of course, at the head of the table and flanked by Mr. Attlee and Mr. Anthony Eden. The other Ministers present were Oliver Lyttelton, Herbert Morrison, and Stafford Cripps. The three Chiefs of Staff and General Ismay were of course there; and Sir Findlater Stewart, Sir Robert Watson-Watt, W. R. J. Cook, and Kenneth Post (Sandys’ assistant) were also present, in addition to Duncan Sandys and myself. Appropriately enough, Lindemann sat on one side of the table and Sandys on the other; and, as in 1940, I sat in No Man’s Land which this time was at the foot, opposite Churchill.
I told him that although I did not think that there was a likelihood of a heavy attack for some months, I felt that the evidence for believing in the rocket’s existence was stronger than that which I had presented to him about the beams in 1940. At this point Churchill called out ‘Stop!’ then turning to Lindemann he said, ‘Hear that. That’s a weighty point against you! Remember, it was you who introduced him to me!’ He similarly interrupted my comments on two or three other occasions, for example when I discussed the theories that it might be a torpedo, which was one of Lindemann’s alternatives, or a hoax. As for the torpedo idea, there was no aircraft in Germany that would carry a torpedo 38 feet long and 6 feet in diameter, or could lift 10 or 20 tons. As for a hoax, what would be the result, if it were successful? Almost certainly, we would attack Peenemünde, and there was enough evidence to show that Peenemünde was a major experimental establishment. It was as though we, in trying to mislead the Germans, had set out some dummy weapon at Farnborough for them to photograph. They would then attack Farnborough, and despite all the hard things we might have said in the past about Farnborough, we should think it a very silly hoax that resulted in its destruction. Moreover, in chasing a hoax-rocket, we should almost certainly come across traces of the weapon from which it was intended to distract us. As each of these points sank in, Churchill interrupted me, and asked Lindemann for a reply, repeating every time, ‘Remember, it was you who introduced him to me!’ All the Prof could muster was a rueful half-smile. At one stage Churchill actually said, ‘I want no more of your advocatus diaboli!’ stressing the Latin with his well-known dislike of that language.
In one sense it was as exhilarating as the beams meeting of 1940, but it was painful because I had effectively to refute my old Professor, but for whom I might well not have been called in. Had it been Tizard, as it was in 1940, it might have been the end of him, but fortunately Churchill’s confidence in Lindemann was far too firm to be shaken. The personalities of various others of those around the table began to emerge. Herbert Morrison for some reason or other wanted to know whether the evidence from German personnel had come from officers or other ranks. Stafford Cripps seemed to be activated more than anyone else: he wanted Peenemünde attacked at once. Anthony Eden thought that the arguments were nicely balanced. Alan Brooke was in retrospect disappointing, in view of his high reputation. When I saw his notes of the meeting afterwards, they seemed distinctly superficial; and during the course of the meeting he described the German long-range gun used against Paris as ‘Big Bertha’ which any soldier should have known was not the long-range gun but a large calibre howitzer named after Bertha Krupp.
It was agreed that Peenemünde should be attacked by Bomber Command on the heaviest possible scale on the first occasion when conditions were suitable. Owing to Lindemann’s having mentioned the possibility of pilotless aircraft, it was agreed that this should be investigated, too, and that I should be closely associated with Sandys in that enquiry.
There was another six or seven weeks before the raid could take place and, although we continued to watch the rocket evidence as keenly as ever, there was the whole of the Window operation to follow. The use of Window, in fact, made it possible to arrange a feint on Berlin, in the hope of distracting the nightfighters there while the main force attacked Peenemünde. At last, the nights were just long enough, and the attack took place on 17th/18th August 1943. I was not consulted about the aiming points in the raid, nor would I have expected this to be necessary; but, in retrospect, I wish that I had been. Bomber Command had originally intended to make its main attack on the development works and installation at Peenemünde, but Sandys convinced the Command that it was even more important to attack the housing estate which contained the homes of the scientists and engineers associated with the rocket project. I would probably not have agreed with this emphasis, because much of their essential work had probably been done, and the main object should be to smash up the research and manufacturing facilities. But with the emphasis on the housing estate, and with the unfortunate miscarriage of two important pathfinding ‘markers’ a substantial proportion of our bombs fell to the south of the establishment itself, and particularly on the camp which housed the foreign labourers, including those who had risked so much to get information through to us. We never had another report from them, and some six hundred of them were killed as compared with 130 or so German scientists, engineers and other staff. To add to the debit side of the raid, there was the fact that we lost 41 aircraft out of 600.
The effects of the raid in delaying the rocket programme have been variously estimated from four weeks to six months. We killed some key German personnel, such as Dr. Thiel, who was responsible for rocket jet design, and we burnt up many of the production drawings. We also did enough damage to the station itself to make the Germans decide that they ought to remove both development and production facilities to other places. Taken altogether, I think that the raid must have gained us at least two months, and these would have been very significant because the rocket could then have been used almost simultaneously with the flying bomb in 1944, and from a shorter range since the Germans still held northern France and Belgium and we should have had to face two threats at the same time.
Also on the credit side was the demonstration, despite our losses, that Window had given us a new factor in raid planning. For the eight Window-dropping Mosquitoes that had attacked Berlin had succeeded in attracting some two hundred nightfighters, and had got them up early. There were so many fighters over Berlin that some attacked others by mistake, and the German flak defences opened fire on their own fighters. With fuel running low, and in the absence of clear orders in the general confusion, many decided to land at the airfield at Brandenburg, where there was so much confusion that thirty aircraft were written off in collisions on the ground. By the time that the German defences realized that Peenemünde was the main target, relatively few nightfighters had the fuel left to get there; but these arrived in time to catch the last wave of bombers, and in the moonlight and at the low height of 7,000 feet from which the attack was made, they did great damage, shooting down 29 aircraft out of 200. This reinforced the lesson we had repeatedly preached about the need for short sharp raids with great care being paid to concentration on the way home.
Apart from Thiel, most of the leading German personalities survived the raid. Werner von Braun, the outstanding spirit in the whole rocket project, courageously rescued many of his documents from the flames. Dr. Steinhoff, Head of the Telemetry Department, and of whom we had already heard as visiting Bornholm as part of the rocket programme, escaped in his air-raid shelter, and so did the chief engineer, Walter Riedel, who moved with his family out of their cellar shortly before a bomb hit their house. The one completely unexpected casualty was the Chief of the German Air Staff, Jeschonnek. He had already had a bad day and had been harangued by Hitler because the American Eighth Air Force had succeeded in doing great damage to the ballbearing factories at Schweinfurt and th
e Messerschmitt works at Regensburg, even though Jeschonnek’s fighters had shot down sixty bombers. Now Peenemünde had been attacked and shortly after midnight Jeschonnek had been called on the telephone by an infuriated Goering, because of the battle between the anti-aircraft guns and the nightfighters over Berlin. It was too much for Jeschonnek; by nine o’clock on the morning of the following day he had not emerged from his room. He was found by his secretary shot dead by his own revolver.
One of those who went to Peenemünde to inspect the damage was Colonel Leo Zanssen from the Army Weapons Office in Berlin. When I heard his name I wondered whether this was the engineer ‘Szenassi’ mentioned in the original rocket telegram from Stockholm. It reminded me of the episode in Erskine Childers The Riddle of the Sands, where the hero standing near a railway booking office just succeeded in hearing the sibilants in the station named by someone further up the queue, and correctly deduced the name of the station for which the latter had asked for a ticket as Essens.
To make one further Intelligence comment on the raid, I noted that in the information on which this major action had been conceived and carried out, there had been almost no contribution from Enigma. I always looked at such actions from this standpoint because, vital though Enigma was, it could at any time have been cut off, and if we had become too dependent on it, we should have been at an enormous disadvantage. The one point where it had entered in this instance was in providing me with a copy of an instruction originating from somewhere in the German Air Ministry, instructing personnel at research and experimental stations on new arrangements for drawing, I think, petrol coupons. The originating officer had addressed it to establishments in what seemed to be an order of precedence, starting with Rechlin, the nearest equivalent in Germany to our Royal Aircraft Establishment at Farnborough. Peenemünde was second on the list, ahead of several other establishments whose importance was already known to us. It was most unlikely that such a seemingly trivial clue, which the Germans had no idea would come into our hands, would have been part of a great hoax, and I was therefore able to cite this as independent evidence of the importance the Germans attached to Peenemünde.
One final item of Intelligence luck came chronologically at this stage, although we did not know it until after the war. Besides Peenemünde, one of the other assembly factories for the rockets was to have been the Zeppelin works at Friedrichshafen. The extremely light carcase of the rocket was, like the Giant Würzburg, based on Zeppelin-type construction, although our experts at the time were thinking of a substantial steel body. The raid of 22nd June 1943 that I had instigated to damage Giant Würzburg production also therefore damaged the assembly factory for V-2 rockets—so badly in fact, that the works at Friedrichshafen, which would have assembled 300 rockets a month, were abandoned. This was a valuable additional blow to the raid on Peenemünde itself.
CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE
FZG 76
AFTER THE flurry of Window and the Peenemünde Raid, we took the fortnight’s holiday in Gloucestershire which Helen Smith, Hugh Smith’s wife, had offered Vera and me. I discovered I could hit running hares with a pistol, and shot three in four days. I might have had more hares, but after only a week I was interrupted by a telephone call from Charles Frank saying that there was to be another Prime Ministerial meeting about the rocket threat on 31st August, and my presence had been requested. I therefore had to interrupt the holiday and go up to London by a morning train which arrived about lunchtime. This gave most of the afternoon for Charles to brief me on the events of the past week, before the Prime Minister’s meeting started at, I think, 5 p.m. A number of interesting things had happened. First, on 22nd August an object had crashed in a turnip field on the Island of Bornholm in the Baltic, roughly half-way between Germany and Sweden. It was a small pilotless aircraft bearing the number ‘V83’, and it was promptly photographed by the Danish Naval Officer-in-Charge on Bornholm, Lieutenant Commander Hasager Christiansen. He also made a sketch, and noted that the warhead was a dummy made of concrete. He sent copies of his photographs and sketch to Commodore Paul Mørch, Chief of the Danish Naval Intelligence Service, who forwarded them to us. Several different routes must have been used, because I received three independent sets of copies, and it seemed that someone was determined that the information should reach us. Commodore Mørch thinks that besides the copies that he sent, others reached us by different routes from the photographic shop on Bornholm that processed Christiansen’s film. Unfortunately one set of copies was intercepted by the Germans, who were able to identify the policeman standing in one of the photographs (Plate 20(a)) and hence discover who had taken them. Christiansen was arrested by the Germans on 5th September and tortured; but he held out and was transferred to hospital on 8th October. There he was rescued on 22nd October and smuggled to Sweden, where he underwent two major operations to alleviate the effects of torture. He reported for duty again in March 1944, and was awarded the Distinguished Service Cross.
At first, we were not sure what he had found. From his sketch it was about 4 metres long, and it might have been a rather larger version of the HS 293 glider bomb that KG100 was now using against our warships in the Mediterranean. Indeed, it turned out that this particular bomb had been released from a Heinkel III, but it was in fact a research model (the ‘V’ probably stood for ‘Versuchs’ i.e. research) of the flying bomb about which we were going to hear so much in the next few months.
Fig. 19. Sketch made by Hasager Christiansen of an experimental V-1 that fell on Bornholm, 22 August 1943. See also Plate 20
The next report that had come in during my week’s absence had originated on 12th August from the same disgruntled officer in the Army Weapons Office who had told us some weeks earlier of the plan for winged rockets. His new report was much more specific, and said that a pilotless aircraft officially known as Phi 7 was being tested at Peenemünde, but he knew nothing about it as it was not an Army project. In addition there was a rocket projectile known as A4. 20th October had been fixed as Zero Day for rocket attacks on London to begin.
The third report had come in from a French agent via the famous ‘Alliance’ network headed by Marie-Madeleine Fourcade, who had forwarded it to my colleague Kenneth Cohen in London. It was so remarkable that I reproduce it in full, as has also Marie-Madeleine in her book Noah’s Ark (London, Allen & Unwin, 1973).
Information communicated by a captain on the active list attached to the Experimental Centre in question.
On the island of Usedon (north of Stettin) are concentrated laboratories and scientific research services to improve existing weapons and perfect new ones. The island is very closely guarded. To gain access, besides a military identity card, requires three special passes:
Sondergenehmigung on watermarked paper
Zusatz an orange card
Vorlaüfigergenehmigung on white paper
The administrative services are at Peenemünde and at Zempin. Research is concentrated on:
(a) bombs and shells guided independently of the laws of ballistics.
(b) a stratospheric shell.
(c) the use of bacteria as a weapon.
Kampfgruppe KG 100 is now experimenting with bombs guided from the aircraft by the bomb aimer. These bombs could be guided from such a distance that the plane could remain out of range of AA fire. Accuracy is perfect if the plane does not have to defend itself against fighters (which is not the case in Sicily).
It appears that the final stage has been reached in developing a stratospheric bomb of an entirely new type. This bomb is reported to be 10 cubic metres in volume and filled with explosive. It would be launched almost vertically to reach the stratosphere as quickly as possible. The source speaks of 50 mph vertically, initial velocity being maintained by successive explosions. The bomb is provided with Raketten (vanes?) and guided to specific targets. The bomb is said to be fuelled with 800 litres of petrol, necessary even in the experimental stage, in which the shell is not filled with explosive, to enable it to carry. The hor
izontal range is slightly over 300 miles. Trials are said to have been made, without explosive charge, from Usedon towards the Baltic and to have reached as far as Königsberg. The noise is said to be as deafening as a Flying Fortress. The trials are understood to have given immediate excellent results as regards accuracy and it was to the success of these trials that Hitler was referring when he spoke of ‘new weapons that will change the face of the war when the Germans use them’.
Difficulties have developed quite recently, only half the bombs hitting the selected targets accurately. This recent fault is expected to be remedied towards the end of the month. The trials have been made by Lehr-und-Erprobungskommando Wachtel.
