A World at Arms (111 page)

The interception and decoding of German reports on test flights of the V-1 in late November 1943 gave a clear picture of the characteristics of that weapon, quickly confirmed by photo reconnaissance, and enabled the British to begin the planning of counter-measures.
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Having been shocked by the unexpected appearance of the excellent German FW-190 fighter plane, the British watched the developing threat of new weapons with some apprehension, an attitude reinforced by the appearance of radio guided rocket missiles and radio controlled bombs in the Mediterranean in August and September, 1943. When first the V-1s and then the V-2s began to land in England, Churchill was sufficiently alarmed to order consideration of the use of poison gas on the Germans in retaliation but was dissuaded by his military advisors and the strong opposition of President Roosevelt.
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The other measures already mentioned were increasingly effective against the V-1; V-3 and V-4 were never used against England, and there was no direct defense against V-2.

To defend themselves against the new weapons designed to wreck London and British morale, the Allies used two methods, one direct and the other essentially indirect. The direct process was a massive series of air attacks on the launching sites the Germans were building in France. Though damaging to the Germans, these proved futile, primarily because other launching procedures were developed and used without any effective interference. The indirect approach was the impact of the Allied strategic bombing offensive reviewed later in this chapter. It was not only that time and again Allied air raids, and not only the one on Peenemünde, had a drastic impact on German plants involved in the production of V weapons.
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Even more important was the American success in the air war in early 1944 which pushed aside the German air force, made possible the wrecking of Germany’s synthetic oil industry, and thereby made German pilot training for old and new types of planes hopelessly inadequate. This not only reduced the activity of German planes which were supposed to launch many of the V-1s,
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it also helped win the race for time between the Germans who hoped for additional years of war to perfect their new weapons, and the Allies who wanted a quick and victorious end to hostilities.

The Western Allies were developing new weapons of their own but concentrated most of their industrial and technological capacity on the large-scale production and marginal but steady improvement of the basic
weapons systems at hand or developed in the early stages of the war. The Americans worked on a variety of missiles of which the partially guided bomb called “Azon” was the only one extensively used in combat, primarily in the destruction of bridges in Burma.
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The British were manufacturing ever larger conventional bombs for their strategic bombing offensive. But the basic emphasis of Britain and the United States was, as will be shown presently, on an entirely different type of new weapon. In the field of rocketry, most of their resources went into such tactical uses of rockets as assisting the take–off of planes which were heavily loaded or on carriers, short–range rockets as a form of mass artillery fire to assist amphibious landings, and rocket missiles launched from under the wings of airplanes against tanks, trucks, and other visible targets.

The Soviet Union had long done some experimenting with rocketry, but its main use of rockets in the war was, like that of its Western Allies, in the tactical sphere. The katyusha, a rocket battery fired electrically either from the ground or from a truckbed, proved of real importance on the Eastern Front. Referred to as the “Stalin-Orgel” or Stalin organ by the Germans, its large-scale employment practically through the whole fighting on the Eastern Front made it one of the major effective innovations of the war.

The development of jet planes has been referred to both in connection with the V-1 which was powered by a pulse-jet, and the German plans for an inter-continental jet plane for bombing the United States. This was a field in which the Germans had begun some work before the war with the world’s first pure jet, a Heinkel 178, being flown in August 1939. Other experimental models were developed, but the two which became operational were the Messerschmitt 262 and the Arado 234. The former was a two-engine jet fighter which first flew in July 1943. The dispersion of the German aircraft industry decided on as a response to the Allied strategic bombing offensive delayed the operational deployment of the Me-262 until the late spring of 1944; by that time the American victory over the German air force meant that the jets sent into combat were unable to cope with the vast numbers of Allied planes even if they were not destroyed on the ground. The whole Me-262 program proved largely useless as the fuel supplies were destroyed and the pilots could not be properly trained. There is considerable argument over Hitler’s decision to have the Me-262 adapted for bomber employment, but it is not evident
that this made much difference at a time when the Germans had irrevocably lost control of the air.
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The Arado 234 was a two-jet-engine light bomber, also used for reconnaissance, which came into service in 1944. The forced evacuation of the factory, again due to Allied bombing, delayed any substantial production until the fall of 1944. Employed for reconnaissance flights over England at a time when its high speed of up to 500 mph made it the only plane the Germans could still send on such missions, this model showed what could be done with jet planes some day.
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Ironically production of the Arado 234 was stopped early in 1945 when only 200 had been delivered. Its production had been delayed by evacuation forced by the bombing of the Western Allies; it was terminated by the Red Army’s overrunning the new factory which had been shifted to the supposedly safer eastern area.

The British had begun the development of their own jets in the early war years but had not pushed the program very hard. The earliest operational model, the “Meteor” fighter, was in action a few days after the first German ones, but it played no significant role in the war. Ironically its most useful role was in the shooting down of V-1s.
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Certainly one scientific development which affected World War II in a major way was that of radar. The concept of locating and tracking or determining the contours of something by bouncing radio waves off it originated before the war, with scientists in both England and Germany making some advances–the latter probably more than the former. It was, however, the growing fear of German air raids which induced the British to establish a special committee under Sir Henry Tizard to develop and install a radar system consisting of a chain of stations which, using a device developed by Robert Watson-Watt, provided by 1940 a critical factor in the proper employment of Royal Air Force fighters to ward off German assaults. It was this initial success of enormous importance, recognized as such by all in the know, which spurred the British on to further advances in this field. In the following years, they developed increasingly effective radar devices to locate ships as well as planes, a process which showed its utility in the location and sinking of German submarines in the Atlantic and the battleship
Scharnhorst
off the Norwegian coast.
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In the air war, the British also developed a series of electronic devices to assist their bombers in finding targets in Germany and in “seeing” through cloud cover at the target areas below. None of these devices proved perfect, but they did enable the strategic bombing offensive at least to find the cities which were supposed to be bombed.
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The Germans had an initial advantage on the offensive rather than the defensive side of radio warfare. They used two crossing radio beams to indicate targets to their bomber force over England. It was in the recognition of this system and its effective neutralization by “bending” the beams that R.V. Jones came to play a key role in British electronic warfare and that Churchill came to have a high respect for ultra, the information from German enigma messages, which had made the unravelling of this puzzle possible.
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In the years 1943–45 the Germans devoted ever greater efforts to a variety of radar systems for locating Allied bombers and steering their fighters, and also for detecting the radar emissions of others. In this process they made a series of major advances but on the whole remained behind the Allies. The Americans increasingly worked out their own radar systems, while the Japanese were not able to catch up with their enemies in the Pacific.

Certainly the role of radar in the war was very great, not only in the Battle of Britain and the air war over Germany but in the war at sea. The electronic advances of the Allies, especially the introduction of Huff/Duff described in
Chapter 7
, were essential to their victory in the Battle of the Atlantic. Here was also one wartime area of rapid scientific change which would affect not only the nature of future warfare but in addition had major civilian application. The flight of civil aviation and the sailing of ocean–going ships today would be practically inconceivable without the electronic locator devices which were originally developed for military purposes.

If radar and related electronic devices provided major boons to post-war travel as well as dramatic changes in the nature of warfare, another scientific development of the war years was to leave a very mixed and dubious legacy: the appearance of atomic weapons. In the first decades of the twentieth century, physicists and chemists had begun to unravel the inside of the atom, once thought to be a stable unit in the construction of matter in the universe, and had discovered instead that it was made up of a variety of electrons, neutrons, and other particles. In the process of radioactivity some of these particles broke apart, and it was discovered that this breaking process could be artificially stimulated by bombarding atoms in devices which were the fore–runners of accelerators and cyclotrons. In 1938, the German chemist Otto Hahn discovered that when uranium was bombarded by neutrons, instead of absorbing them, it split into two different elements each about half the atomic weight of uranium and in the process both creating energy and releasing neutrons which might in turn split other
uranium atoms as they were hit, thus potentially creating a chain reaction in which enormous quantities of power would be released in a massive explosion of unprecedented dimensions. If the process were unchecked, it offered the potential of incredible destructiveness; if it were controlled and slowed, it equally promised almost unlimited power which could be used in the form of electricity.

Otto Hahn and another German scientist, the physicist Werner Heisenberg, continued work on this process, trying to determine which material best lent itself to the fission process in a manner that made that process self-sustaining, how much of this material would be needed to make a bomb, and how the process of fission could be slowed down in the manufacturing process to keep it from destroying itself. The answer to the first of these three puzzles had been discovered just before the beginning of World War II by the Danish scientist Niels Bohr; the Germans were never to find the correct answers to the other two. The most suitable material was an isotope, or variant, of uranium 236 known because of its atomic structure as uranium 235. Because there were only minute quantities of U-235 in uranium as found in nature, there was the problem of how to separate it from the rest, a question that made it all the more important to determine how much of this extremely rare material would have to be assembled to make a single explosive device. The Germans miscalculated by a great margin, and the resulting belief that huge quantities would be needed put a damper on all subsequent German efforts to create an atomic bomb.
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Since the Germans expected to win the war quickly, the idea of a weapon which could only be made ready in several years of arduous effort had little appeal.

This disregard of the potential of atomic weapons was reinforced by two further grave miscalculations. The first of these involved the material needed to slow down the fission process. The Germans correctly recognized that an isotope of water, usually referred to as heavy water, was excellent for this purpose and were happy over their good fortune in capturing the only large factory in the world capable of manufacturing substantial quantities of it when they occupied Norway in April 1940. The “Norsk Hydro” plant became the focus not only of German researchers but also of British and Norwegian saboteurs and bombers. A series of commando raids and air raids in February, July, and November 1943 effectively disrupted the main German source of heavy water at a time when huge American facilities were already being erected.
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Not only had the German scientists in their fixation on heavy water missed the potential major role of graphite in slowing the fission process, but they had dramatically underrated the ability of the Western Allies.

When the last German chargé and his military attaché in the United States returned to Germany in 1942, they were received by Hitler in late May and treated to a lengthy monolog on the lack of any real war industry in the United States and the absence of engineers and weapons specialists.
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Such views were not confined to Hitler by any means; they were widely shared among German scientists and intellectuals in general. When in August of 1945 German scientists heard of the dropping of an atomic bomb, they at first refused to believe that the Americans and British could possibly have succeeded where they had failed.

In view of these psychological circumstances as well as the pressing demands of other projects, and the belief that the secret V weapons could be deployed much more promptly, the Germans continued research on the possibility of making atomic weapons but on a small scale. By the summer of 1942 the critical resource allocation decisions had been made; there would be no German atomic bomb.
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In the summer of 1943 the British were convinced of this, and by the summer of 1944 the Americans had come to the same conclusion, a view reinforced by the special “Alsos” mission, whose task it was to check on German atomic bomb progress.
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