Hitler's Rockets: The Story of the V-2s (16 page)

On 10 February 1944 the Ministry of Home Security sent a ‘Most Secret’ letter to the Regional Commissioners of the six Civil Defence regions most likely to be affected – they included the cities of Southampton, Portsmouth, Bristol and Plymouth – setting out the arrangements for reporting suspected ‘Crossbow’ incidents, now subdivided into those caused by ‘Diver’, the new code-word for pilotless aircraft, and those attributed to ‘Big Ben’ (officially one word, but usually typed as two), the cover-name for the rocket. The need for continuing secrecy was stressed, with even wardens and police officers being kept in the dark, so that ‘reliance must be placed on [Civil Defence] Controllers and Chief Constables picking out and investigating any report which suggests the possibility of CROSSBOW attack’.

Two weeks later, on 22 February 1944, perhaps in deference to the Home Secretary’s wish to alert the public to the coming danger, Churchill specifically referred to both secret weapons in the middle of a long review of the war situation in the House of Commons:

There is no doubt that the Germans are preparing on the French shore new means of attack on this country, either by pilotless aircraft, or possibly rockets, or both, on a considerable scale. We have long been watching this with the utmost vigilance. We are striking at all evidences of these preparations, on occasions when the weather is suitable and to the maximum extent possible without detracting from the strategic offensive against Germany.

Following this speech Morrison’s civil servants diligently redrafted the announcement to be issued at the appropriate moment and the Civil Defence Committee spent a happy session on 27 April 1944 in that most agreeable of occupations, rewriting someone else’s draft, making such amendments as substituting ‘excessive alarm’ for ‘panic’. There was some opposition, too, to the whole idea of a widespread warning, on the grounds this might ‘involve the stoppage of work throughout, say, the whole London area for five minutes every time a single rocket was fired’. It would, it was thought, be helpful to consult trade unions and employers on the subject, though how this was to be done without breaching the security that enshrouded all rocket preparations was not explained. That no warning might be possible does not seem to have occurred to anyone, and the substance of Morrison’s announcement was left intact, promising the citizens of London – slightly different arrangements were proposed for Portsmouth, Southampton and Bristol – a display at once noisy and colourful:

When it is known that a rocket is on its way the special warning for London will be a number of maroons fired simultaneously and their short, sharp explosions will be accompanied by whistles and red flares which will shoot up to about one thousand feet. The flares will burn for about eight seconds and will be visible by day or night. A single short wail like the first wail of the Alert will at the same time be executed on the air-raid sirens. . . . There is no occasion for panic or alarm. People in the areas affected have already stood up to far worse bombardment than anything the enemy can achieve by his new weapon; its employment is in the nature of a ‘last throw’ and steps are being taken with all possible speed to eliminate it or reduce it to negligible proportions.

The warning system planned by the government might have been even more impressive than the authorities envisaged if the reminiscences of an airman placed in charge of one improvised maroon on a site in the Fulham Road are typical:

This appliance consisted of something like mortar barrels, a supply of canisters containing firework mixtures similar to Roman Candles and firework rockets combined – one made the flare, the other made the bang. It was to be fired by a car battery and wires leading to the barrels. I give thanks that we never had to fire these things. . . . It would, to my mind, have been . . . disastrous to us standing around such a contraption.

For his men, too, the non-arrival of the rocket at this period provided an unexpected bonus:

My crew at that time consisted of three North Country lads who asked if I would let them have leave to go along the road to watch Fulham Football Club. I gave them a certain spot to stand so that I could get them recalled should an ‘operation’ occur, [but] we never had cause to ‘operate’.

In reply to a suggestion by the Prime Minister that we had to some extent been caught napping, Sir Charles Portal said that . . . the evidence had been most closely watched.

Minutes of the ‘Crossbow’ Committee, 18 July 1944

With the arrival of the flying-bomb in mid-June and the rapid escalation of the first few uncertain shots into a continuous major bombardment, it finally became clear that when they boasted about their secret weapons the Germans had not been bluffing. For the moment the Civil Defence Committee was preoccupied with the effects of this new attack, which included the possibility of a disastrous hit on ‘one of the Charing Cross tunnels’ of the London Underground beneath the Thames, which could result in a destructive tide of water flooding through 57 miles of lowlying tunnel at a speed of 15 m.p.h., which, Herbert Morrison warned in a note to the Prime Minister on 23 June, might ‘put the tubes out of action for months’. A rocket was even more likely to pierce a vulnerable tunnel, and this was to be a recurring fear in the coming months. The vast exodus from London, estimated at one and a half million people, which followed the arrival of the flying bombs made planning for what might happen if ‘Big Ben’ followed ‘Diver’ a little easier. But to Morrison the outlook still seemed dark, and on 27 June 1944 he spelt out his fears in a long memorandum on ‘The Flying-Bomb and the Rocket’:

I am apprehensive of what might happen if the strain continues, and, in addition to flying-bombs, long-range rockets are used against the metropolis. . . . I have a high degree of faith in the Londoners and . . . will do everything to hold up their courage and spirit, but there is a limit and the limit will come. . . . Some installations which . . . seem to be destined for firing the weapon are nearing completion and may be operational in a matter of a fortnight or so. No very accurate estimate of the scale of attack is available but a theoretical calculation on admittedly scanty information gives a maximum of some 700 tons every 24 hours. . . . In the heaviest attack London ever experienced (May 1941) about 450 tons of HE only were dropped in a night and the Civil Defence personnel . . . much more numerous than they are now, were severely strained and could not have held the position much longer. . . . German propaganda . . . has in this context promised ‘a further turn of the screw’. We must neglect no possible method of preventing it.

Morrison’s suggestions ranged from ‘commando raids’ on suspected launching sites to threats of reprisals against selected German towns ‘or the use of gas’, but when the Cabinet discussed the paper that day practical objections were put forward to all of them, although there was one ray of hope. The army was already succeeding where, at least in the case of the flying bomb, the RAF had failed, for of seven ‘large sites’ believed to be intended for launching rockets two had already been captured and a third had been abandoned. The remaining four, though frequently bombed, might, it was thought, still be used. Typically, Cherwell seized the opportunity to try once again to discredit the rocket’s existence. The ‘large sites’, he suggested, might be designed for ‘a larger type of pilotless aircraft’, but, also typically, he left himself a loophole. ‘The Paymaster-General’, the minutes recorded, ‘said that the production of a rocket on the scale suspected would be extremely uneconomical. It did not follow, however, that the enemy would not adopt this form of attack.’ On 30 June Cherwell sent Churchill a long and detailed paper to prove – contrary to the true facts – that he had been right in every particular in his predictions about the flying bomb and therefore, by implication, that he was right about the rocket. A long and time-wasting inquest followed, tactfully ended by Ian Jacob in a note to the Prime Minister on 14 July:

Lord Cherwell consistently challenged the possibility of such a weapon, whereas the Chiefs of Staff and the Joint Intelligence Committee equally consistently held that the rocket should be taken seriously. . . . It is a bit early yet to say who was wrong.

During the opening months of 1944 the most urgent preoccupation of all the military departments had been Operation Overlord and most secret-weapon intelligence had concerned the flying-bomb. The radar watch that Dr Jones had set up on signal activity around Peenemünde had yielded evidence of only ‘an occasional attempt to plot the track of a rocket’, but the fortunate move of the main A-4 testing centre to Blizna now began to produce a steadily increasing flow of information. The Polish Home Army, though it operated in secret and underground, was well organized, with its own intelligence departments and scientific advisers. Its attention was directed to Blizna after it was learned that a carload of German secret-weapon specialists killed in a road accident in Warsaw came from that area, and by January 1944 rockets, their warheads filled with sand so that large fragments of the missile often survived the impact, were coming down over much of the countryside to the north, north-east and west of the little village, and some as far north as the River Bug. As members of the Forestry Commission, still able to move fairly freely, reported, these mysterious objects demolished buildings and uprooted trees, as well as causing craters 20 metres wide, and the Polish historian previously quoted has described the clandestine war which now developed in this sparsely populated corner of eastern Europe.

Motorized patrols stationed in the countryside . . . would rush to the scene of the explosion, seal it off and gather up all the fragments and parts of the mechanism. . . . Patrols of the Home Army did the same and almost every day a race took place between the Germans, acting openly, with every technical facility at their disposal, and the underground army, which had to operate in secret but was on its own territory and received willing assistance from the local population. In the fight to get there first, shots were exchanged several times.

Ultra intercepts, emanating from Bletchley, also drew attention to Blizna, for one signal revealed that the Germans were seeking details of a crater near Sidlice, 160 miles north-west of it, too far to have been made by a flying-bomb. A subsequent reconnaissance on 5 May, however, merely confused the issue, for the photographs revealed a flying-bomb launching ramp, not a Peenemünde-style ‘earthwork’ and, with D-Day approaching, there was no immediate response to Dr Jones’s request for further flights.

Realizing the importance of their discoveries, the Poles conceived two somewhat desperate plans: to seize the Blizna base by force and hold it long enough for the accompanying scientists to learn its secrets; and to hijack a train near Blizna, transfer the rocket on board to a lorry and remove it to a secret hideout in the Lower Carpathian mountains, where it could be examined at leisure. Fortunately neither operation proved necessary, for at dawn on Saturday, 20 May 1944, a rocket landed, almost undamaged, in swampy ground on the bank of the River Bug, near the village of Klimczyce, close to the town of Sarnaki, eighty miles east of Warsaw. The Poles managed to get there first and pushed their treasure deeper into the bog, till it was totally covered. A few days later three pairs of horses, aided by ‘troops’ of the 22nd Regiment of the Polish Home Army, dragged it from the mud and transported it by cart to a local barn where it was dismembered by the flickering light of candles and hurricane lamps, under the direction of an engineer who had been in Auschwitz, like the head of the Research Committee of the Home Army, and, most exceptionally, been released. For ten days he commuted between his home in Warsaw and the village of Holowcyze-Kolonia, where the rocket was hidden, until, by ill-chance, he was arrested by the Gestapo for a totally different offence, though he survived this experience too. Meanwhile a professor specializing in radio research, and another who was an authority on propellants, had studied material brought to them by couriers and made two important discoveries – both promptly relayed to London – that at some stage the rocket was radio-controlled and that it contained concentrated hydrogen peroxide, a well-known source of oxygen.

While work was continuing on the rocket held by the Poles and plans were being worked out to transport the essential parts of it to London, the first A-4 fragments had already reached London from a totally different source. Just after 4 p.m. on Tuesday, 13 June 1944, exactly twelve hours after the first flying bomb had landed in Kent, an A-4 fired from Peenemünde to test the Wasserfall anti-aircraft missile installed in it went spectacularly astray and blew up over open countryside at Knivingaryd, near Kalmar,
⁹
on the Baltic coast of Sweden, about 200 miles south-west of Stockholm and about 190 north-east of Peenemünde. A man directly below was blown from his horse and the main part of the rocket carved out a 13-foot-wide crater in a cornfield. The first reports, relayed to London via the Air Attaché in Stockholm and based partly on the Swedish press of 15 June, confused the rocket with the flying-bomb, of which a specimen had also recently gone astray, but those in the know soon realized the truth. ‘The projectile exploded in mid-air and released a bomb weighing about 500 kg, which caused a tremendous crater in the soft ground,’ ran the first account. ‘A local farmer who managed to recover fragments . . . before the military arrived on the scene stated that they contained Swedish ballbearings . . . while part of the radio mechanism was made in Italy.’ Further details followed two days later, including a reference to ‘two electric motors driven by accumulators’.

The Kalmar rocket caused tremendous embarrassment all round except to its real beneficiaries, the British. Owing to some understandable confusion, because it was a Wasserfall missile that was being tested not an A-4, Peenemünde at first denied responsibility for the incident and when the truth came out Dornberger was ‘summoned to the Führer’s headquarters to receive a reprimand, with the consoling comment that Hitler was in a towering rage’. By the time Dornberger got to Rastenburg Hitler, in his unpredictable way, had changed his mind. ‘It was’, he told General Jodl, who passed the comment on to Dornberger before sending him away again, ‘quite a good thing for the Swedes to realize that we could bombard their country from Germany; they would be more inclined to be cooperative in negotiations.’

But international times had changed. ‘There is no reason’, suggested
Afton Tidningen (Evening News)
, ‘why Sweden should oblige the Germans’, and, alarmed by the public revelation that the rocket included Swedish-made components, the Swedes cordoned off the crater and refused to let any Germans past to recover the fragments. According to one account a German detachment tried to get to the crater by posing as undertakers’ men, complete with hearse, while the mishap was variously ascribed to the controlling engineer being so astonished by his first sight of an A-4 taking off that he had jerked the main lever in the wrong direction, and to his not knowing what to do when he lost visual contact with the missile in cloud.

The end of the affair was even more colourful. Precisely what bargain the Swedish government struck remains uncertain : according to one report it secured two squadrons of brand-new tanks in exchange for two tons of miscellaneous wiring and scrap metal from the shattered rocket. At all events, the Air Attaché in Stockholm managed to dispatch photographs of some of the components to London and, pending the arrival of the two plane-loads of parts, in mid – and late July, two Air Technical Intelligence Officers were flown to Sweden to provide an interim report. This proved in some respects misleading, for it seemed at first that the costly and complex electronic control equipment would be uneconomic unless it was part of a delivery system with at least a 4½ ton warhead. The discovery of radio equipment, in fact linked to the Wasserfall rocket being carried as a ‘passenger’, suggested that the A-4 would be radio-controlled, while the presence of hydrogen peroxide seemed to bear out the reports from Poland that this would be the missile’s fuel. However, at least the rocket’s dimensions now seemed settled, for a message from Poland, on 27 June, which put them at 40 feet (12.2 metres) by 6 feet (2.7 metres) agreed with those of the ‘objects’ detected at Peenemünde and with calculations based on the pieces retrieved from Kalmar. The return of the officers sent to Sweden yielded an important piece of new evidence – that one of the pumps used to feed the combustion chamber was lubricated by the liquid it was circulating, which pointed unmistakably to liquid air or liquid oxygen as the rocket’s fuel.

Further study of the photographs from Peenemünde and Blizna now at last began to throw light on the continuing mystery of how the rocket was launched. The presence in the latter of a rocket lying horizontally on a trailer and the absence of any tower-type construction, such as had previously been seen at Blizna, led Dr Jones to scrutinize the surrounding area closely, revealing ‘a square about 35 feet wide’ linked to the rocket workshop by a gentle curved road. This he correctedly identified as the rocket’s launching pad, from which it would take off unaided. The supposed ‘projector’ was merely the frame – in fact, though this was not yet known, part of the
Meillerwagen
– which surrounded the missile while it was prepared for firing. The 40-foot-high columns observed on earlier pictures of Peenemünde were now explained: they were rockets waiting to be fired.

As so often, one discovery was rapidly followed by another, for, as the Allied forces broke out in Normandy, both prisoners and intended launching sites fell into their hands. One soldier admitted that his unit had been responsible for selecting and building small sites for storing and launching rockets and one – of the ‘sunken road’ type – soon afterwards fell into British hands at the Chateau du Molay, west of Bayeux. In contrast to the ‘large sites’ to which so much attention had been directed, the whole platform, including hard standing for the launch vehicles, measured only 69 feet (21 m) by 33 feet (10 m) and a sketch, prepared on the spot by a team sent for the purpose, cleared up another long-standing puzzle. A strange pattern ‘laid out on the sands at Peenemünde’ now appeared to have been built ‘to see whether the proposed curves in the loop roads’ serving the launching platform ‘could be negotiated by whatever transporters were to carry the rockets’.