by R. V. Jones
The Germans were much puzzled. Plate 25a shows a long-exposure photograph that they took at night from the French coast of the track traced out by the exhaust flame of a flying bomb as it flew across the Straits of Dover. The track is recorded as a continuous line, and the anti-aircraft shell bursts as simple points of light. In contrast with the wide scatter of normal anti-aircraft fire with time fuses, all the bursts were very near the track of the bomb because of the action of the proximity fuse. Before long, one burst was near enough to explode the bomb; and in the first few weeks of proximity fuse operation, the average number of rounds to destroy a bomb was 77.
With these technical and tactical advances, the bombardment was brought down to a fraction of its original strength. On one of the last days, 28th August, for example, of the 97 bombs which approached England, 13 were destroyed by fighters out to sea, the guns then shot down 65, with another 10 brought down by fighters over land, leaving 9 to continue towards London. Two collided with balloons, three fell outside London, leaving only four to reach it. Understandably, with the advance of our armies in France, the impression began to grow that the flying bomb had been mastered. It was true that from July onwards to September some 400 bombs were launched not from ramps but from Heinkel IIIs, but their effect was comparatively insignificant. What was to worry us much more were developments in the long-range rocket, which the next chapter will describe.
But before we leave the flying bomb, we should remark its technical excellence as a weapon. Its simple construction (Plate 25b) made it cheap to produce, and it was designed to exploit the extraordinarily favourable situation in which the Germans found themselves, able to shoot at such a great target as London from an entire 90° arc running from east to south. The bomb was hard to shoot down, and if we had not had so much prior warning our defences would have fared poorly. As it was, an analysis of the economics of the campaign showed a large balance in the German favour: the cost of our countermeasures, especially in bombing the sites, exceeded the estimated cost of the campaign to the Germans. But the fact was that we started from a potentially disastrous position geographically, with London a great ‘hostage unto fortune’ at the focus and mercy of the great French coastal arc; and the balance on which judgement must be passed is not between British and German expenditure but between our expenditure on countermeasures and the damage that would have ensued in lives, material and morale if those countermeasures had not been undertaken.
CHAPTER FORTY-FIVE
V-2
EVER SINCE the attack of 17th/18th August 1943 on Peenemünde, the long-range rocket seemed to have been eclipsed by the flying bomb. Our ringside seat at the Baltic trials had shown us that, although there was an occasional attempt to plot the track of a rocket, they were almost entirely concerned with flying bombs. Now the bomb had arrived first, as we had forecast in September 1943, and the question was: What had happened to the rocket? In recommending the attack on Peenemünde I had offered: ‘Intelligence would be prepared to take the risk of the work being re-started elsewhere’. Actually the raid did not drive all the experimental work from Peenemünde; but some of it moved eastwards along the Baltic coast to Brüster Ort, and what appeared to be an out-station of Peenemünde was set up at an S.S. camp known as ‘Heidelager’ at Blizna near Debice, some 170 miles south of Warsaw. We first got on to its track via some Ultra traffic, and it seemed to be primarily concerned with flying bomb trials over land.
Since we already knew so much about the flying bomb, studies of the activity in Poland could add little to our knowledge in this respect; but there were features about the messages that could not be explained by assuming that the flying bomb alone was involved. As for what the other activity or activities might be, these could have been anything from glider bombs to air-to-air missiles if the work were associated with the Luftwaffe alone, as the flying bomb itself was. But since the bomb was now co-ordinated with other retaliation weapons by the LXV Army Corps under General Heinemann, the rocket might be in course of trial in Poland, too. In March 1944 the Polish Intelligence Service reported that trials were being conducted at Blizna of a missile with a range of 10 kilometres which made a large crater, and that railway tank cars thought to contain liquid air were entering the establishment. Finally, there was one item from the Ultra traffic which could not be accounted for either by the flying bomb or a short-range missile, because one of the staff at Blizna was interested in a crater near Sidlice, some 160 miles away to the north-east, which was beyond the range of the flying bomb. This single fact made us think that we were once again on the trail of the rocket.
I therefore requested photographic reconnaissance of the Blizna area, and a sortie was flown on 5th May, 1944. The photographs went to Medmenham, where a flying bomb ramp was immediately recognized, but there was none of the other installations which we had previously seen at Peenemünde and which were thought to be associated with the rocket. Since the photographic cover of the area was far from complete, it seemed that there must be another compound in which the rocket activity was taking place, and I therefore requested further cover of the whole area. When Matthew Pryor voiced his concern that the Air Staff was taking no interest in the rocket, I was able to show him that all this work was indeed in hand—and, what was more, on the same day that the first flying bomb fell inEngland, a large rocket from Peenemünde fell in Sweden.
We subsequently learned the story of this stray rocket, and it turned out to be an experimental hybrid consisting of a genuine A4 rocket (of the type later to be known to us as ‘V-2’) fitted with an extremely elaborate radio guidance system primarily designed for a smaller rocket known as ‘Wasserfall’ which was being developed for anti-aircraft purposes. General Dornberger in his book V-2 states that shortly after the rocket was launched the control officer had tried to change its direction by eye ‘and lost contact with it when it unexpectedly moved sideways into low cloud’. It then flew on an unintended northerly course to Sweden. But as we heard the story, the control officer had been selected for this particular trial on the basis of his expertise as a controller of guided bombs, and had never seen a rocket take-off before. He was said to have been so awestruck by the sight that he unwittingly left his hand on the controls so that the rocket swerved to the left too and by the time he pulled himself together it was too late to gain control.
It took a few days before news of the incident reached London; the report from our Air Attaché in Stockholm was accompanied by some rather badly focused photographs of the remains of the crashed missile taken by the Swedish General Staff. Despite their lack of definition they showed components that were obviously not associated with the flying bomb, and we therefore wondered whether, just as with the bomb on Bornholm ten months before, a sample of the Germans’ latest V-weapon had gone so far astray that we might hope to learn more about it. I therefore arranged for two Air Technical Intelligence Officers (Squadron Leaders Burder and Wilkinson) to go to Sweden with a request to the Swedish General Staff that they might be allowed to inspect the debris. Their first report back to Air Ministry expressed surprise at the amount of electronic control equipment incorporated in the rocket, and gave their opinion that such expensive complexity would only be justified if the warhead were to weigh at least ten thousand pounds. So here seemed a piece of evidence for a warhead as large as our experts feared; and although I myself would have restricted the circulation of the message as a perfectly legitimate speculation from one Intelligence Officer to another, it unfortunately was widely circulated, and thus added to the general alarm.
Further confirmation of a large warhead seemed to come from the aerial photograph of Blizna, which showed a large crater a few kilometres from the S.S. camp; and Charles Ellis, the Scientific Adviser to the War Office, told us that his explosives experts had estimated that it would have needed about five tons of explosive to make such a crater. Much additional evidence was now being provided by the Poles: they had set up an organization for beating the Germans to the scenes of crashe
d missiles, and they had analysed the liquid recovered from one incident, and found it to be highly concentrated hydrogen peroxide. By 27th June they had reported that the missile was about 40 feet long and 6 feet in diameter, agreeing with the dimensions that we had measured on the Peenemünde photographs. They also found pieces of radio equipment, including a transmitter on a wavelength of about 7 metres and a receiver for about 14 metres; these were investigated by Professor Janusz Groszkowski, later the President of the Polish Academy of Science. Shortly afterwards the Poles reported on the construction of the main jet, and, from the dimensions they gave, this was identical with the rocket unit that had fallen in Sweden. During July the Poles also offered to send us what they had collected, if we could arrange for an aircraft to pick it up, and this operation was put in hand.
In the meantime, new evidence was coming to light as our Forces advanced in Normandy. Somewhat to my surprise (because it had seemed a less likely area) we began to find traces of an organization for storing and launching rockets from south of Caen and a prisoner told us that he had been on the Staff of an Oberstleutnant Beger, who had his headquarters at Isigny, and whose task was to select and construct sites for the storing and firing of rockets. One of the sites was found near the Château du Molay, west of Bayeux, and it was surveyed for me by David Nutting and Arthen Jones, whose sketch showed that it was simply a tree-flanked stretch of road into which concrete platforms had been set, and on either side of which parallel loop roads had been made among the trees. As soon as I saw the sketch I was reminded of a pattern that I had seen some months before outlined on the foreshore at Peenemünde, which had hitherto made no sense. I could now see an explanation: the pattern of the roads at the Château du Molay had been laid out on the sands at Peenemünde to see whether the proposed curves in the loop roads could be negotiated by whatever transporters were to carry the rockets. Moreover, a week or two later we captured many of Beger’s papers, which gave us most of the firing sites and storage sites in Normandy.
Fig. 29. Plan of a V-2 launching site near the Château du Molay, Normandy. Note the similarity of the road layout to the pattern previously observed on the foreshore at Peenemünde (Plate 27a)
Evidence was now accumulating so fast and so convincingly that it was clear that Cherwell would look very silly if he continued to deny the existence of the rocket. Apart from the fact that I did not want to destroy my old professor there was also the point that he might try to argue to the end, and that Churchill would be torn between the facts and a loyalty to his most trusted friend. I therefore went to see Cherwell and told him what a pile of evidence I had, and that if he continued to deny the existence of the rocket there was nothing I could do but shoot him down. If, however, he now realized his case was hopeless I would bring the new facts out as gently as I could over the next week or so to give him a chance to change his ground. Fortunately he agreed to this second course.
The build-up of information was fascinating; and had we been allowed to pursue it in our own way, it would have been exhilarating. Instead, for most of the time it was more nearly exasperating, because Duncan Sandys had brought back all the experts who had, with all their good intentions, so complicated the situation in the previous year. Almost every new item of undigested information was circulated widely, and all kinds of false trails were thereby opened up. Around 12th or 13th July, Frank Inglis insisted that I should write a report on the state of our knowledge for the Crossbow Committee, but I protested that the time was not yet ripe, for our information was still so incomplete and confused that there were likely to be serious errors in any conclusions that seemed to be suggested at that stage. I used the rather repulsive analogy of lancing an abscess. You have to wait until the abscess is well formed before you can successfully lance it—and so it is with Intelligence. However, Inglis continued to insist and so I wrote a report on 16th July. The bulk of the evidence regarding the warhead pointed to a weight between 3 and 7 tons, the expectations of our own experts being in agreement with the size of the crater seen near Blizna and the comment that Burder and Wilkinson had made on the Swedish rocket. Another seemingly firm conclusion was that the main fuel was hydrogen peroxide, since the Poles had found this liquid, and also there were traces of it in the Swedish remains. As it was to turn out, both this conclusion and that regarding the warhead were wrong.
Within two days I was able to correct the second error and also to express doubts about the warhead being so heavy. Burder and Wilkinson were now back in London, and Charles Frank had talked with them while I was at a meeting to discuss tactics against flying bombs. Charles had seized upon one item which Burder and Wilkinson had told him: this was the unusual nature of one of the pumps feeding liquid into the rocket jet. Instead of its bearings being lubricated in the ordinary way by oil or grease, this pump appeared to have no other lubrication than that provided by the liquid which it was pumping. This immediately reminded Charles and me of our school physics textbooks, where the Claude process of liquefying air was described. In this process the liquid air has to pass through a rotary pump, making it so cold that oil or grease would be frozen solid, and Claude had solved the problem by designing the pump so that the liquid air itself would lubricate the bearings. It therefore seemed highly probable that liquid air or, still more probably liquid oxygen would be one of the liquids being pumped into the rocket jet.
I now had the chance to think rather more easily about the rocket problem, for Vera had taken our two children away to Cornwall. I had usually depended on thinking over the day’s new facts every evening at home, but this had recently become very difficult. A flying bomb in Richmond had blown out the windows of some friends, and they had taken refuge with us. This meant that besides Vera and the two children there was another husband and wife and two children all sleeping in the same room with us, all with our heads under tables, and it was not easy to get enough isolation to sort out the day’s facts.
Before she left for Cornwall, Vera and I had had a disputation while we were doing the evening’s washing-up. Life under the flying bomb was a strain, anyway, and she always held me responsible, as she has always done since, for any calamity that befell the country. In this instance, she was nearer the truth than on some other occasions, but it was hard to be charged with having been asleep while the Germans stole such a march on us as to get the flying bomb into operation. I could not tell her the whole story, but I was not a little annoyed to find that even my own wife was now distrustful. Her arguments were good enough in their way, but there would have been no point in replying to them one by one unless an external referee had been present. I would have fared no better than Alfred did with the cakes.
I could now stay in the office for the evenings and spend some quiet hours after dinner going over all the evidence. Something very odd had been taking place in Poland because Blizna was from time to time dispatching what were called ‘Geräte’ (apparatuses) back to Peenemünde. What could these be? I could understand things being sent from Peenemünde to Blizna for trial, but what would be worth sending back? I began to wonder whether these might be items such as rocket jets that had been tested, but there was no clue in the Ultra messages regarding their nature. Certainly there were plenty of them, to judge by the numbers by which they were identified. The first number that I had was 17,053, about which I had learnt on 17th June, and by early July the highest number I had heard of was 17,667. How could I prove that these were rocket components? If only we had complete photographic cover of the Blizna area we could have found the launching site or test rig, and perhaps found a rocket there; but even though I had requested further cover more than a month before, fresh photographs had not yet been obtained.
As I pondered, I tried to put myself in the position of the Germans working in unfriendly territory, and began to wonder whether—even with the rivalry between the German Army and the Luftwaffe—I would have used two sites, each of which would have to be defended, when there should be enough room in a single site to launch bo
th flying bombs and rockets. I therefore took out again the 5th May photographs of the flying bomb compound, even though I knew that these had been exhaustively searched at Medmenham. Going over them millimetre by millimetre for many minutes, I suddenly realized that a familiar outline had ‘clicked’ into place with the memory of one that I had seen before—on the photograph of Peenemünde on which I had first found the rocket. Yes, there indeed it was: a rocket (Plate 26). Although there was almost no detail, it was no artefact for it appeared on two separate photographs, and it immediately transformed the Intelligence situation. In case I fell victim to a flying bomb during the night I telephoned Charles Frank at his home in Golders Green and told him that if such an event happened he was to secure a copy of photograph No. 3240 by 60 Squadron of 5th May, and to look at the object which he would find 90 millimetres down from the top and 26 millimetres in from the right-hand edge.
I also let Lindemann know that I had found a rocket at Blizna, and informed the Chiefs of Staff. But the account was not yet complete, because there was no sign of any launching apparatus. Our experts had assumed that the rocket would need to be fired from some sort of gun at a speed of about 100 metres per second to make it stable in its initial flight, and there was a large tower erection at Peenemünde which had been assumed to be for this purpose; but there was no such tower at Blizna. So on a subsequent evening I scanned the photographs again, looking for a concrete platform; ultimately in the centre of the compound, and showing only very faintly because that part of the photograph was so light, was a square of about 35 feet side. With this evidence and that from Molay, could it be that the rocket needed no launching equipment more elaborate than a flat pad, and simply stood vertical, nose uppermost? If so this would explain the 40 foot ‘columns’ that we had sometimes seen standing at Peenemünde. The rocket would take off by itself, stabilized by gyroscopes and the deflectable jet-rudders’ that we had found among the components mentioned in the Enigma messages.
