Grey Wolf: The Escape of Adolf Hitler (16 page)

Unless and until we had positive knowledge
to the contrary, we had to assume that the most competent German scientists and engineers were working on an atomic program with the full support of their government and with the full capacity of German industry at their disposal. Any other assumption would have been unsound and dangerous.

Lt. Col. John Lansdale Jr., head of security for the Manhattan Project, appointed Col. Boris T. Pash to form an intelligence-gathering unit that was designated Alsos—the Greek word for “grove” and thus a play on words of Gen. Groves’s name. Born to a Russian émigré family and a fluent Russian speaker with a visceral loathing for the Soviet Union, Pash worked for the U.S. Army’s G-2 intelligence division. Samuel A. Goudsmit, a Dutch-born Jewish physicist at the University of Michigan, was chosen as the scientific director of the
Alsos Mission
, and the team was in place in London by the time of the Allied landings in Normandy in June 1944.

ALTHOUGH CDR. FLEMING’S 30
Assault Unit (30 AU)—had worked alongside other British and American special units during the Sicilian and Italian campaigns, the groups had never had a truly harmonious relationship, and before the invasion of France all parties reassessed the roles of their respective units. Significant changes in operating methods were implemented, but, above all, cooperation rather than competition was now the watchword. The priority was the identification of potential targets in northwest Europe, itemized in “black books” carried by 30 AU. The most pressing problem in the early summer of 1944 was to discover the launch ramps for V-1 flying bombs—the real inspiration for the rumors about German “wonder weapons.” These sites were now proliferating in northern France despite a concerted Allied bombing and interdiction campaign to destroy them.

The individual training of 30 AU personnel was intense, embracing many skills, including languages, parachuting, demolitions, photography, street fighting, and even lock-picking and safecracking, courtesy of special courses at Scotland Yard. By now, 30 AU was privy to all the plans for Operation Overlord and the invasion of France. Prior to D-Day, all the 30 AU field troops were issued with a “get-out-of-jail-free” card signed “By command of the Supreme Allied Commander Europe, General Eisenhower”—the overall commander for the invasion of Normandy—and bearing in bold block capitals the order that “The
bearer of this card
will not be interfered with in the performance of his duty by the Military Police or by other military organization.”

After the disappointing performance of the ad hoc S-Force units in North Africa and Italy, a new organization was created with the task of securing specific
targets of military or scientific importance
and safeguarding documents, equipment, and any other objects of strategic value before the enemy destroyed them—or, more commonly, before they were looted by liberated foreign slave workers or even by Allied troops. For this purpose, specialized Consolidated Advance Field Teams (CAFT) were formed from experts in particular areas of science and technology, to form part of a new Target Force or T-Force organization. Each of the American, British, and Canadian armies committed to the liberation of northwest Europe would have its own T-Force. Their organization incorporated a truck-mounted infantry unit to capture and secure the chosen targets, while the CAFT investigation teams or “assessors” searched each location for items of scientific interest or technological value.

While military and scientific technology was the primary objective of the T-Forces, the Supreme Headquarters Allied Expeditionary Forces (SHAEF) also established teams to search for Nazi gold and other valuables. Known as “
Gold Rush
” or “Klondike” teams, these came under the control of the formidable Col. Bernard Bernstein, the financial adviser to Gen. Eisenhower for civil affairs and military government. There was hardly a high-ranking officer from Eisenhower downward who did not defer to Col. Bernstein when it came to Nazi loot and his scrupulous procedures for dealing with its correct disposal. All these measures were part of the meticulous planning for the invasion of Hitler’s Fortress Europe in the summer of 1944.

Chapter 8

T
HE
H
UNTING
T
RAIL TO
P
ARIS

AMONG THE FIRST GROUPS TO LAND on the coast of Normandy on June 6, 1944, D-Day, were elements of both 30 Assault Unit and the British Second Army’s T-Force.

On June 10,
Woolforce
—named after the commanding officer of
30 AU
, Lt. Col. A. R. Woolley, Royal Marines—landed in the American sector on Utah Beach at Varreville and moved inland toward St. Mère Église, where the troops encamped in a field without digging protective trenches. An enemy aircraft flew over and dropped two devices that exploded overhead, dispensing submunitions that made

a
peculiar fluttering noise in the air
.… For a while nothing else happened; then the whole field was lit by sharp flashes and explosions, like heavy machine cannons firing sporadically around us. The explosions did not last more than half a minute. In that time, the Unit lost 30 percent of its strength in killed and wounded. The aerial weapon was a large canister that burst in mid-air to release a quantity of “butterfly bombs” that then fluttered down to land all over the field before exploding in a vicious shower of splinters.

These casualties were caused by the SD2
Sprengbombe Dickwandig
—the first cluster bomb munition ever to be deployed on the battlefield and typical of the advanced German weapons technology that 30 AU was established to uncover.

Besides pursuing their customary task of searching out naval intelligence in the ports of Le Havre and Cherbourg, one of the primary missions of 30 AU was to capture a V-1 launch pad. Intelligence reports indicated that the rumored
Vergeltungswaffe
1 (
V-1 Vengeance Weapon
) was almost ready for deployment—the first of several advanced weapons systems that Hitler believed could still win the war for Germany. Sketches and information had reached the British authorities in November 1943 from the OSS via the MI6 staff at the embassy in Bern, thanks to the courageous efforts of a French Resistance fighter, Michel Hollard. They showed the construction of a concrete launch pad in northern France, with a “ski-ramp” for an unidentified weapon. By December 1943, aerial reconnaissance had identified 103 “ski-ramps,” all of them pointing ominously toward London. These were the first visible portent of Hitler’s
Unternehmen Eisbär
—Operation Polar Bear.

A concerted bombing campaign against all targets believed to be associated with the V-weapons program had begun with Operation Hydra in August 1943—raids on the V-weapon design center at Peenemünde on the Baltic Sea—followed that November by
Operation Crossbow
against the heavily protected V-2 bunkers at Watten and the V-3 “supergun” site at Mimoyecques, both in France. After November 15, 1943, all bombing sorties against the V-weapons program came under Operation Crossbow. Despite a massive effort, the ski-ramps proved difficult to hit, let alone destroy. By the summer of 1944, the whole northern tip of the Cherbourg (Cotentin) Peninsula was thick with launching sites, many of them pointing toward the invasion ports of Plymouth, Portsmouth, and Southampton. Fortunately, Operation Crossbow was sufficiently successful to disrupt Polar Bear and postpone its scheduled start date of March 1, 1944, when it could have seriously disrupted preparations for the Normandy landings.

In the early morning of June 13, 1944, Team 4 of 30 AU, led by Lt. Cdr. Patrick Dalzel-Job, Royal Navy, crept out through the American front lines to find a V-1 launch site that had been identified by the French Resistance some
fifteen miles beyond the American beachhead
. As the patrol moved out into the French countryside, the very first V-1 flying bomb landed on Bethnal Green, East London, at 4:18 a.m. Once the ski-ramp was secured, technical experts were able to inspect the site and captured examples of the flying bombs, so that new countermeasures could be implemented. These included the activation of the Diver air-defense plan for southern England, combining interception by
high-speed fighters
and antiaircraft guns aided by new American radar technology. By July 1944, almost half of all flying bombs that passed over the Diver defenses were being destroyed. By the end of August, that figure rose to 83 percent with the first Gloster Meteor jet fighters of No. 616 Squadron RAF coming into action against the
V-1s
.

Another target for 30 AU was the crucial German radar installation around Douvres-la-Délivrande to the south of Caen. The Germans defended the facility with fierce determination for more than ten days, even receiving a nighttime parachute drop of ammunition and supplies by the Luftwaffe. It was finally captured, at the cost of heavy casualties, on June 17, after a combined assault by 41 Royal Marine Commando, divisional artillery, and tanks. 30 AU was quickly on the scene and recovered not only much useful intelligence on the capabilities of the radar system itself, but also a map showing the location of all radar stations across Europe and their exact specifications. A subsequent intelligence report stated that this was “assessed in the Admiralty as the
greatest single technical capture of the war
.”

On the day before, June 16, Hitler’s Operation Polar Bear had begun in earnest, with 244 flying bombs launched from across northern France. Of these, 45 crashed on takeoff, 144 reached England, and 73 actually fell on London. The British population had stoically borne the Blitz of 1940–41 and nuisance raids up to 1943, but this attack was different. Quickly nicknamed the “buzz bomb” or “doodlebug,” the V-1 carried a warhead of 1,870 pounds of amatol, which caused massive blast damage. This was compounded by the traumatic psychological effect when the loud spluttering noise of its pulse-jet engine suddenly cut out over the target: there was then just twelve seconds of silence before the bomb crashed to earth, and that sudden silence meant that someone, somewhere in London, was going to die. After five years of deprivation and rationing, the morale of Londoners suffered severely under this new threat. Many left the city, while the government organized the evacuation of 360,000 women and children as well as the elderly and infirm. It was the dawn of a new era in warfare—the birth of the cruise missile—and the Germans were once more at the forefront of weapons technology.

Over the coming months, 30 AU spent much of their time in pursuit of the V-1 and V-2, often working in concert with local Resistance fighters who provided much valuable intelligence. Before the last V-1 launch site within range of London was overrun in October 1944, 2,515 flying bombs—or only one-quarter of those launched—had actually hit the target area, causing 22,892 casualties, including 6,184 deaths. Each one was a personal tragedy. However, at just 1.39 deaths per bomb launched, the V-1 bomb was hardly going to tilt the balance of the war back in Germany’s favor, given the inexorable buildup of Allied forces on both the Western and Eastern Fronts.

The Western Allies now enjoyed a superiority of 20 to 1 in tanks and 25 to 1 in aircraft; their air forces possessed 5,250 bombers, capable of delivering some
20,000 tons of bombs
in a single lift. Germany was fighting on three fronts, while its cities and industries were being
pulverized from the air
. Between June and October 1944, the Royal Air Force and the U.S. Army Air Forces would drop half a million tons of bombs on Germany—more than the entire amount during the war up to that time.

AFTER THE MILITARY DISASTERS OF 1943
, Hitler had assumed the mantle of supreme war leader and was increasingly contemptuous of his Oberkommando der Wehrmacht (Supreme Command of the Armed Forces or OKW). His immediate military staff was by now reduced to compliant sycophants, headed by Field Marshal Wilhelm Keitel, commander in chief of OKW, and Gen. Alfred Jodl, chief of the operations staff. The Führer became increasingly dismissive and intolerant of any questioning of his military decisions—decisions that were ultimately disastrous for the Wehrmacht due to Hitler’s impatience with the necessary staff work, his poor grasp of the realities on the ground, and his obsession with holding territory at all costs regardless of tactical considerations.