Colditz (66 page)

Sample Letter

Oflag IVC

Germany

Sept. 23rd 1941

Dear Aunt Sally,

I hope you are keeping well. Please write to me soon. Are
the
Smiths keeping
fully
active?
Offer
regards to
Uncle
Tom.
Really
he should
talk
to
Henry
! Sometime in
the
spring
June
will be seen as
the mature
and
lovely
girl
everyone
has expected.
I
wish
Peter
was more
zealous
and
interested
in the
girl
. He
and
she are
the
most
suited
couple in
Petworth
that
I
know of.

Try
to
find
some clever
ingenious
way
round
their problem
easily
. Push
and
he'll be
driven
eventually
over
the top
like
John
and
Mary. He
really
must
open
his eyes.
Cliff
and
Kathleen
should really
enjoy
their
times
in Brighton
and
Hove,
and
their little
Albert
loves
it
there too.
Remember
we
came
last year?
Richard
was
away
and I
found
a
toad
sitting on
the
garden
seat
. Just one
single
toad
but
he proved difficult to catch. Eventually I caught him and put him back in the pond out of the very hot sun. Memories! I look forward to more long hot summers like that one when this war is finally over.

Love

Archie

To be decoded using Frequency 23—see date

Spelling on or off—“the” or “and”

End of code sequence—“but”

between the Author and Professor R. V. Jones, Author of
Most Secret War

London SW1

10 October 1983

Dear Professor

I wonder if you remember me and an exchange of letters which we had a few years ago, when your great book
Most Secret War
came out.

I related to you a story about how, in Colditz Castle as early as the winter of 1940/41, I read a little book about Rocket developments centred on the island of Rugen…. Now I come to the other end of the story! I am writing the complete history of Colditz for Macmillan and while doing research for this in the British Museum Library—I thought to look up Rocketry, and lo and behold I found a copy of “the little book” I read in Colditz!

I have had the important section of it photostated and I enclose a set of copies. The book was published by Pitman in 1935. It contains the names of all the great Rocketry scientists from Oberth downwards and also pinpoints the Island of Rugen (Peenemunde) as a Research base and with links in the OKW.

You mention on
page 69
of your book: “… Peenemunde—the first mention we had ever had of this establishment.” I surmise this is about November 1939.

Would you be so kind as to write me, perhaps, a few lines of comment on the above which I might publish, of course with your approval, in my forthcoming book?

With my kind regards,

Yours sincerely,

Pat Reid

• • • • •

Professor R. V. Jones       25 October 1983

Dear Pat

… I know exactly how you must have felt in running that exasperatingly elusive book to earth after forty years.

I for one did not know of its existence and such knowledge could have helped to put us more on our toes in 1943. Only after we had done all the intelligence the hard way, in the autumn of 1944 did we discover Willi Ley's
Rockets and Space Travel
which he had published in the 30s, and in which he described the early German rocket programme and the
Verein für Raumschiffahrt
.

One still puzzling aspect of Philp's account is the
Sunday Referee
story of the man-carrying rocket ascent on Rugen in October/November 1933. I know of three German accounts of that period: Willi Ley's (and I enclose a short excerpt from the 1951 edition of his book), Dornberger's, and the
Birth of the Missile
by Klee and Merck, one of whom kept the Peenemunde archives. None of these mentions the Fischers or any trial in Rugen in 1933, which is very surprising. Indeed, according to Ley there was to have been a man-carrying demonstration at Magdeburg in 1933 but it turned out to be much too ambitious. The only details on which Ley and the
Sunday Referee
agree are (1) 1933 and (2) the length of the rocket (25 feet, Ley, and 24 feet,
Sunday Referee
). I think that Ley is likely to be much the more reliable. It looks as though the
Sunday Referee
had picked up some garbled version of the Magdeburg story, but some of the details are convincingly circumstantial and the mention of Rugen is curious. Incidentally I enclose part of Ley's bibliography which refers to Philp's book, but describes it as “unreliable in detail!”

But even though it may have been unreliable in detail, Philp's book (and Ley's, for that matter) could have been valuable in alerting Allied Intelligence to what was going on in Germany, including such features as liquid oxygen, gyroscopic stabilization and radio control. Philp's
pages 78
–
80
(1st entry) and 95–97 (2nd entry) are astonishingly prescient. As he said, “It is almost beyond belief that in England until quite recently very little was officially known about rockets in 1935” and he would have been still more surprised to find how much longer
official ignorance was to continue. It is a most telling example of the danger of official insensitivity to new ideas.

How fascinating it is that you had read Philp's book in Colditz, and had remembered it in Berne. I know how maddening it must have been—you begin to wonder whether memory is playing false and whether you had imagined it or dreamed it instead. And then, after 40 years, your memory is vindicated.

With kind regards,

Yours sincerely,

R. V.

PS Perhaps, in fairness to officialdom, it ought to be mentioned that it did not in fact prove sensible, so far as World War II was concerned, to concentrate effort on the development of large rockets, as the Germans did to their disadvantage.

The conclusion of this episode remains an intriguing “if” story:

All the time, throughout those painful years of the war, this “little book” containing its valuable information must have reposed untouched on its shelf in the British Museum Library. How might the knowledge it contained have saved lives and influenced the course of events “if” it had been found.

in the Western Theaters of the Second World War

T
HE “INTERNATIONAL CONVENTION
Relative to the Treatment of Prisoners of War” was signed by most nations' plenipotentiaries, including Germany's and Japan's, but excluding Russia's, on 27 July 1929. Sir Horace Rumbold signed for the United Kingdom. It was a development arising out of the Hague Convention of 18 October 1907, concerning the Laws and Customs of War. The United Kingdom and the Commonwealth ratified it on 23 June 1931. Neither Russia nor Japan ratified it. Germany ratified on 21 February 1934. Significantly, Hitler came to power as German Chancellor on 19 August of that year. This presumably accounts for the Nazi claim that they were not bound by it.