A World at Arms (110 page)

Far larger numbers had been killed both accidentally and intentionally by the Japanese, who had built up a large poison gas program beginning in the last months of World War I.
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They repeatedly used gas for experiments and in the war against China. Perhaps because this employment was almost all carried out before Japan attacked the United States, Britain, and the Netherlands, the Western Powers chose not to retaliate in kind. This subject still awaits further investigation. The employment by the Japanese of a German-invented gas grenade in the Imphal campaign in the summer of 1944 was seen as an isolated, and quite possibly unauthorized, incident.
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Improper safeguards and processes left hundreds of former workers in the Japanese gas factory at Okunoshima in damaged health.

If a considerable amount of information about chemical warfare projects remains obscure, in part because records are still closed, this is even more the case for biological warfare. Even the World War I attempts by the Germans to spread the cattle and horse disease anthrax in the United States and Canada have been covered by a veil of obfuscation.
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Some work on biological warfare agents was done in the inter-war years in several countries and continued into the war years.
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There was a program during World War II for the development of biological weapons in Great Britain, which had been inaugurated by Neville Chamberlain in response to German threats of secret weapons
and was pushed forward with Churchill’s full support. With some material assistance from the United States, this project was able to produce a small amount of anthrax (under the code–name N) in 1943 and large amounts in 1944. The whole project was designed for deterrence and, if necessary, retaliation should the Germans resort to biological warfare. No quantities sufficient for use appear to have been made available during the war.
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There was substantial American research on bacteriological warfare agents, again for any necessary retaliation. Soviet work in this field, whatever it may have been, awaits exploration.

By far the most extensive work in the field of biological warfare appears to have been done by the Japanese.
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Established already in 1932 in Manchuria, the Japanese center for research and experimentation was employing thousands of workers in a massive installation operating under a 1936 formal Imperial order by the late 1930s. Huge quantities of poisonous bacteria were produced and tried out on human guinea pigs in tests which began in 1932, killed thousands, and were filmed for demonstrations to Japanese army officers. Delivering the biological warfare materials proved a major problem when the Japanese tried them out in their war with China and this use occasionally back-fired.

During the Pacific War, the experimentation was extended to American and British prisoners of war. Allied intelligence came to know about the Japanese program at least in outline from 1942 onward, although the British, unlike the Americans, discounted the evidence that was coming in. For obvious reasons, the Americans were especially concerned about the possible use of the Japanese balloon campaign as a carrier of bacteriological materials. The biological warfare agents were, however, not used against the Western Powers; in August 1945, the Japanese blew up the facilities, murdered the surviving prisoners, and tried hard to cover up the whole episode.
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A field of weaponry in which the Germans took the lead was that of rocketry and related technologies designed to deliver explosives over great distances if without much accuracy. Though held back during the 1930S and in the early stages of World War II by lack of investment first and low priority later, the theoretical advances made by engineers and enthusiastic amateurs would provide the basis for the: prototypes of both the post-war long-range ballistic missiles and cruise missiles.
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The development of these new types of weapons was aided by the patronage
of the two Commanders-in-Chief of the pre-war German army, Generals von Fritsch and von Brauchitsch, but held back at first by the low priority assigned them in a war economy of limited resources. The original concept, the development of a liquid–fuelrocket which could be aimed with reasonable accuracy at a distant target, produced technological and design innovations but little in the way of impressive successes. The German anticipation that the war against the Western Powers would be hard but short also kept down resource allocation to weapons not expected to be available in the immediate future.

This constriction changed, though slowly, with two closely related developments. One was the obvious fact that the war was not ending as quickly as Hitler had anticipated, and the other was that a key role in this continuance of the war was obviously played by England which, with its huge capital city of London, offered the largest possible target for any devices which could cover a great distance. It was in this context that Hitler made a series of decisions which either confirmed projects already under way or pushed new ones forward to develop into functioning systems and then to employ, hopefully on a massive scale, four weapons which shared the same basic characteristics.

The four would all be fired or launched at London; they were all at least theoretically capable of covering the distance from German-occupied Europe to the British capital; they did not need to be particularly accurate, given the size of the target city and the aim of striking at British morale; and it was anticipated that all would be fired from fixed launching sites, an assumption which involved additional massive investment of resources, but which in practice turned out to be unnecessary for several of the weapons. The vast allocation of scarce skilled manpower, raw materials, forced labor, and scientific attention to these projects in the years 1942 to 1945 testifies to the importance attached to them by Hitler as well as others in the German hierarchy who urged their development and use. It also demonstrates the real attitude which the German government had toward England at a time when in the imagination of some post-war writers Hitler had only kindly thoughts about the English.

The four systems can most readily be described in the numbered sequence later ascribed to them, V-1 to V-4, although V-2 was actually the earliest one worked on. V-1 was an air force project rushed to completion to compete with the army’s rocket, the A-4 which became the V-2. The idea of the V-1 was relatively simple: since the piloted bombers of the Luftwaffe were unable to penetrate the airspace over England effectively, a pilotless small plane powered by a pulse–jet engine would be launched by catapult from a. ramp, steered at least minimally
by a gyroscope, and land with its explosive contents in London when its fuel had been used up.

The massive effort which the German air force put into this project enabled it to overcome both the army’s headstart with rockets and the technical problems caused by hasty development. Although set back by Allied bombing, which is discussed subsequently, the first V-1s were launched at London in the night of June 12–13,1944, a week after the invasion of Normandy, months after the date originally hoped for–but almost three months before the German army’s rocket.

The V-1 carried just under a ton of explosive, flew at a speed of about 375 mph, and caused massive damage primarily by the blast effect of an explosion which, because of the slanting trajectory of the descending missile, was closer to the surface than that of a traditional bomb. This ancestor of the cruise missile could also be launched from an airplane, and of the total of about 22,400 fired, some 1600 were sent on their way in this fashion.
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The repeated set-backs caused by technical troubles in development and by Allied air raids had delayed employment of the V-1 until after the Normandy landing. Beginning in mid-June 1944, the pilotless planes were sent to targets in England, primarily London, from German-occupied Europe in volleys and occasionally singly. Well over a third either did not work properly or were shot down, the latter either by fighter planes with higher speed or by anti-aircraft fire using proximity fuses, with both methods increasing their effectiveness over time. As the launching sites were overrun by Allied armies, more and more of the V-1s, eventually more than half of the total, were fired at targets in Belgium, primarily Antwerp. Though causing casualties and property damage and having an effect on the morale of people weary after five years of war, the V-1 was not the war winning weapon the German air force had hoped for. That was certainly also true of the ones with smaller warheads (to obtain longer range) fired at London from Germany in 1945.

The V-2 was a liquid fuel rocket, developed using the ideas of German inventors and the American Robert H. Goddard primarily in the1930s, with the original intention of using it to deliver poison gas. The series began with a unit called A-1; it was the A-4 which came to be the production model. Carrying an explosive warhead of about a ton, the rocket was guided gyroscopically and by fins; its flight could also be minimally corrected by radio. In practice, the rocket had the great disadvantage of a very high rate of defective flights with many being rejected even before use, a fifth to a quarter coming down right after being fired, and over half of those making the full trip coming apart in their descent. The
other side of this was first, that there was no way to shoot down a rocket which flew at over two thousand miles an hour; and second, even if it came apart just before impact, the warhead still landed and usually exploded.
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As the Allied ground forces advanced, the V-2, like the V-1, was increasingly fired at targets in Belgium, with Antwerp, because of its great harbor, again the main target for half the 3200 V-2S launched. Over 15,000 people were killed and more than three times that many wounded.

Since neither the V-1 nor the V-2 could be aimed at targets other than very large cities, the only possible way for them to have had a major effect would have been a truly massive employment, which was far beyond German capabilities. In the case of the old smooth–bore musket in the eighteenth century, huge volleys fired in steady succession by rows of infantry alternately loading and firing had made up for that weapon’s well–known lack of accuracy. For a country without the capacity to make up for the deficiencies of the V-1 and V-2, the enormous allocation of resources to these weapons may well have been unwise. As a German scholar has aptly noted, their employment came too soon rather than too late.
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The V-3, code-named “Hochdruckpumpe (HOP)” (High pressure pump), was a novel form of artillery in which a shell fired through a barrel about 150 yards long received additional push from explosions as it passed powder charges along the way, thus hopefully acquiring enough velocity to reach London from a firing position being excavated near Calais. The tests and development of this contraption–evidently inspired by the memory of German long-range artillery bombardment of Paris in World War I-were pushed at Hitler’s insistence; he clearly preferred it to both the rocket and the cruise missile. The plan to shell London failed completely. It turned out that the shell could not be driven the needed distance. Not a single one of the fifty barrels to be aimed at the British capital had been completed and repaired after Allied bombing when the firing site was overrun. As a substitute, two guns with barrels a mere 50 yards long were aimed at Luxembourg in support of the German Ardennes offensive of December 1944 and fired 183 rounds carrying about twenty pounds of explosive each, a performance out of all proportion to the effort invested.
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The fourth weapon designed with the objective of terrorizing London was a four–stage rocket propelled by powder, rather than liquid fuel, code-named “Rheinbote” (Messenger from the Rhine), and developed under army auspices. Initiated before the V-3, this ballistic missile was to carry a warhead of about one hundred pounds a distance of 100 miles, just enough to reach London. Lagging behind the other projects, this
multi-stage rocket was almost cancelled in April 1944. Continued work produced a small number; these were also fired in December 1944 and January 1945 at Antwerp, a key port and the goal of the German winter offensive. It turned out that while the city was about 100 miles away, the rocket overshot its aim by about 35 miles, so that not one of the fifty launched hit Antwerp. This was the precursor of the multi–stage solidfuel ballistic missile of a later age; but its development and production during World War II was another waste of resources which merely serves to underline Hitler’s determination to terrorize the British out of the war. A trial firing of the four–stage rocket had landed on a German farm; the explosion damaged the structures, killed all the chickens and a dog and injured two COWS.
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The enthusiasm for attacks on large cities was not confined to Europe. The pre-war German development of a “New York” bomber, begun in 1937, had not produced a working airplane.
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During the war, beginning in 1940, the Germans worked on a two-stage rocket version of the A-4, designated the A-9, which was to reach New York from Europe in 35 minutes. A different version was to be launched from a submarine in the Atlantic.
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Work was also being carried forward on two jet–propelled bombers, the six–engine Junkers 287 and the Junkers 338 which were to operate over the United States from bases in Western Europe.
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The issue of jet planes is discussed later in this chapter, that the Germans were working on inter-continental types was not clearly understood by the Allies until 1945.

They had, however, learned a considerable amount about the V-1, 2, and 3, before these appeared in combat. The Oslo report had provided some solid indications and had, in particular, called attention to the major German experiment and testing facility at Peenemünde on the Baltic. The British, however, disregarded this warning as they did further information provided them by the same source in August 1941.
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In subsequent years more and more was learned from prisoner interrogations, air photo reconnaissance, and the interception of Japanese reports, the latter being provided by the Germans with details about V-1 but not V-2.
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The British effort to piece together the details of what was coming and, drawn from that, what preparations to make, was hindered by the confusion resulting, as is now clear, from the fact that the Germans were working simultaneously on four very different systems; and by the insistence of Lord Cherwell, Churchill’s scientific advisor, that the whole project was a bluff.
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As evidence of German work accumulated, however, the British became convinced that there was a real danger and bombed the Peenemünde station on August 1718, 1943. This raid, and damage due to other portions of the strategic
bombing offensive against aircraft production facilities, set back both the V-1 and the V-2 projects for months and forced dispersal of the projects, some of them going literally underground, a process which entailed further substantial delay.
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