Hitler's Rockets: The Story of the V-2s (18 page)

Identifying the rocket’s fuel was also important, both in indicating its possible performance and as a guide to Allied bombing policy. Information from the Swedish and Polish rockets, along with signals, intercepted by Bletchley, between Peenemünde and Blizna, all referred to each A-4 requiring 4.3 tons of
‘A-Stoƒƒ’,
and to another fuel known as
‘B-Stoff’.
This led Dr Jones to the conclusion that the former was probably liquid oxygen and the latter might well be alcohol. This hypothesis made immediate sense of much that had hitherto been contradictory and on 6 August Dr Jones reviewed all the existing reports on the rocket, eliminating any that did not refer to liquid oxygen or liquid air. Only five survived, three from agents and two from prisoners of war, and, in contrast to the rest, they showed a remarkable amount of agreement. Even more significant, all were to some extent validated by their pointing to a rocket from 9 to 16 metres long and around 1½ metres in diameter which, from the recent, quite independent, discoveries, was now known to be correct. This in turn suggested a fuel weight of about 8 tons, in line with the Ultra evidence, and an all-up weight of up to 10 tons, with a warhead of between 1 and 2 tons, the lower figure appearing in four of the six reports. The latest interrogation report was only two days old, and Dr Jones and his assistant drove out to see the prisoner concerned and decided his information was reliable. It was borne out, too, by another fruit of Bletchley’s eavesdropping, a mention of one-ton ‘elephants’ being shipped between Peenemünde and Blizna. What more likely than that the ‘elephant’ was a rocket’s warhead?

Oddly, having earlier faced up to the appalling prospect of 70 ton rockets carrying a 10 ton load of high explosive, none of the ministers or scientists on the ‘Crossbow’ Committee was now ready to see the threat reduced to more familiar and manageable proportions. A meeting on Thursday, 10 August, with Herbert Morrison in the chair, was unimpressed by the new evidence Dr Jones laid before it and concluded ‘that it was too early to draw a firm conclusion regarding the smaller size of the warhead of the rocket’. Next day Lord Cherwell, now proved right in rejecting the ‘giant rocket’ but concerned that Jones might have ‘cut it down to size’ too drastically, telephoned Dr Jones to advise him to leave himself some ‘loophole of escape’ over the rocket’s weight. ‘They are all waiting for you to make just one mistake and I am afraid that you have made it now!’ he warned his former pupil. But Cherwell himself, who on his way to Oxford for the weekend called at Farnborough, where the captured A-4 trolley was being studied, and the Swedish and Polish rockets were being pieced together, was convinced. On the Monday, 14 August 1944, he wrote to Churchill stating that the one-ton warhead was an established fact, but adding, very typically, that the rocket remained such an uneconomic means of delivering this weight of explosive that ‘Hitler would, I think, be justified in sending to a concentration camp whoever advised him to persist in such a project’.

Dr Jones faced one last hurdle in getting what he was convinced were the true facts accepted, for the engineers rebuilding the Kalmar rocket reported that the design pointed to a warhead of only 1300 to 1500 lb, so he had now ‘to convince the Farnborough experts that their estimate was too low’, owing, it soon appeared, to ‘a segment missing, which . . . would have increased the size of the [nose] cone significantly’. The warhead was now finally put at 2000 lb, or just under a ton (2240 lb) – a remarkably accurate estimate. The true figure, as we now know, was 2200 lb, of which 1650 lb (750 kg) was high explosive, and the rocket’s total weight 12.65 tons (12,900 kg) against Dr Jones’s calculation of ‘about 12 tons’.

On 21 August 1944 the Air Ministry updated its ‘Standing Instructions for Duty Group Captain . . . in the event of Rocket Attack’. The ‘use of a considerable number of alternative firing points of simple design’ was now anticipated, known sites being identified by the singularly inappropriate name ‘Pop Gun’. Although ‘a constant watch for rockets at certain specially equipped radar stations on the south coast’ was now being maintained, ‘the firing of rockets’, it was acknowledged, ‘may not be detected by . . . radar . . . in which case incidents will be reported by the Ministry of Home Security’. The precise wording for this dread message had already been laid down and had a curiously ecclesiastical ring: ‘This is Home Security War Room speaking. Big Ben has been confirmed!’

On 26 August 1944 Dr Jones completed a 30,000-word report setting out in detail the facts about the rocket, and the evidence and reasoning that had established them. The range he now put at ‘200—210’ miles; the German figure was in fact 207. The total stocks he estimated at ‘perhaps 2000’ – the actual figure was 1800 – and monthly production at ‘about 500’; the average for the period the campaign lasted proved to be 618. Of overwhelming interest to the Civil Defence authorities was the ‘intended monthly rate of fire’, which he calculated to be ‘about 800’; the German target was 900. This last figure was based on a series of deductions, a classic example of how intelligence could postulate the unknown from the known. A map showing the location of both genuine and ‘decoy’ sites west of the Seine had been captured, and it seemed likely that the tidy-minded Germans would follow the same ratio of real sites to dummy ones east of it. The same map indicated the storage capacity of the real sites and the likely rate of fire was worked out from flying-bomb experience, where captured sites had shown the German practice was to keep two weeks’ consumption in hand.

A bombardment of 800 tons of high explosive a month, though exceedingly unpleasant, was substantially less than Londoners had managed to endure and the Civil Defence services to cope with during both the blitz and the flying-bomb assault. Why, then, had the Germans gone to so much trouble and expense to produce such a modest return? To the rigidly limited mind of Lord Cherwell the rocket’s uneconomic cost/ destruction ratio had proved an insuperable stumbling block, but Dr Jones, in his report, proved more imaginative:

A rational approach brought us nearest the truth regarding the technique of the Rocket. When, however, we try to understand the policy behind it we are forced to abandon rationality, and instead to enter a fantasy where romance has replaced economy. . . .

Why, then, have they made the Rocket?

The answer is simple: no weapon yet produced has a comparable romantic appeal. Here is a 13 ton missile which traces out a flaming ascent to heights hitherto beyond the reach of man and hurls itself 200 miles across the stratosphere at unparalleled speed to descend – with luck – on a defenceless target. One of the greatest realizations of human power is the ability to destroy at a distance.

Forty copies of the report were circulated, including a highly accurate sectional drawing of the A-4, but were immediately withdrawn, on Duncan Sandys’s insistence, as unfair to some of the experts he had consulted. With its issue, however – for the main facts about the rocket were now established beyond argument – ‘my Intelligence task’, Dr Jones later wrote, ‘was over’. One important gap in the picture remained – where the rockets were being made – for the British knew only that the main factory was located ‘somewhere in central Germany . . . operating in conjunction with a concentration camp “Dora” ’. Its location, at Nordhausen, was only discovered on 31 August, but made little difference, since it was virtually impregnable to air attack.

About the small sites earmarked by the Germans for launching rockets nothing could be done, but with the ‘large sites’ suspected to be connected with the offensive – though some were, we now know, intended for other, though equally dangerous, purposes, such as storing flying bombs or (at Mimoyecques) housing a new type of long-range gun – it was a different story. On 6 July Watten, first devastated a year earlier and now intended to house a liquid oxygen plant, was wrecked again by a 12,000 lb ‘Tallboy’ bomb, able, as ‘Bomber’ Harris testified, to ‘penetrate 12 feet of concrete’ and set off an earth tremor producing earthquake-like effects. A ‘Tallboy’ also literally raised, and then brought down, the roof of another suspect construction, at Siracourt, in fact intended for flying bombs, not A-4s, while the Todt organization’s masterpiece, the ‘roofed-in’ quarry at Wizernes, fulfilled Hitler’s prediction that it would never be finished. ‘Persistent air attack with heavy and super-heavy bombs so battered the rock all round that in the spring of 1944 landslides made further work impossible,’ complained Dornberger. Work was in fact restarted, only to attract more bombs. ‘The construction itself has not been hit by the new six-ton bombs,’ it was reported to him on 28 July, ‘but the whole area around has been so churned up that it is unapproachable.’ The Americans loyally joined in, on 4 August sending four battered Flying Fortresses loaded with 9 tons of high explosive, against Watten, Wizernes, Mimoyecques and Siracourt, the crews baling out while the ‘drones’, as they were known, were directed on to their targets by radio, but the results were disappointing. Two more, sent on a further sortie against Watten two days later, also achieved nothing.

A considerable proportion of the Allies’ bombing effort was now being directed against ‘Crossbow’ targets, including – always more acceptable to the ‘bomber barons’, since this could be fitted into their long-term area offensive – factories believed to be connected with rocket manufacture. The first successful blow of this kind, as mentioned earlier, had come by accident, when an A-4 factory at Friedrichshafen was bombed in the belief that radar parts were being manufactured there; and during the Gomorrah raids on Hamburg in August 1943 a factory making special vehicles for the A-4 launching units was, by lucky chance, also destroyed. Hydrogen peroxide plants were singled out for bombing when this was still believed to be the rocket’s fuel, and the US 8th Air Force bombed two at Ober Raderach and Düsseldorf, between 2 and 9 August 1944, as well as one at Peenemünde itelf. On 24 August American aircraft dropped nearly 300 tons of bombs on a factory near Weimar believed to be making rocket components and in the following week two suspected ‘radio beam’ stations and – now that the rocket’s true fuel was known – five liquid oxygen works were similarly harassed. But most of the effort was still against the ‘large sites’, the air marshals preferring targets near at hand which seemed to be definitely connected with the rocket, rather than more distant factories whose use was uncertain. In the fourth week of August 1764 tons of bombs were directed at rocket-linked targets, but only 266 tons of this total were aimed at ‘industrial and production centres’ believed to be connected with rocket production, plus 223 tons directed at liquid oxygen production, probably the most worthwhile target, and 41 tons designed to knock out the ‘radio beam stations’, wrongly supposed to guide the rocket to its target. The rest, 1234 tons, was devoted to ‘large sites’.

This vast effort reached its peak around the end of August. On 31 August and 1 September Bomber Command dropped nearly 3000 tons of bombs on supposed storage bunkers, bringing to 118,000 tons the total dropped by both Allied air forces on all secret-weapon targets since the first attack on Peenemünde twelve and a half months earlier, of which 20,000 had been directed at places primarily connected with the rocket. More than 82,000 tons had been delivered since mid-June, of which about 8000 had been ‘rocket-orientated’. The price for the whole campaign, most of it incurred between then and the end of August, had been 450 aircraft lost and 2900 aircrew. Most of these were British, but the US 8th Air Force had lost 63 Flying Fortresses or Liberators in more than 16,000 sorties. These were far from negligible figures and put in a different perspective Cherwell’s constant cry that the rocket was uneconomic, for they had been incurred before a single A-4 had been fired in anger and when the total German dead amounted to only a handful of scientists and their families.

The new, and much less frightening, forecasts for the rocket’s destructive power and rate of fire, and the dwindling away of the flying-bomb nuisance to one or two a day, until none at all arrived between 1 and 4 September 1944, led to a marked relaxation of tension in Whitehall, encouraged by the excellent news from across the Channel. In those heady days when the Allied armies were racing across France and Belgium towards the very frontiers of the Reich, and the war seemed likely to end, as had long been hoped and planned, in September, it was hard to believe that a whole new type of bombardment might still begin. Herbert Morrison’s Rocket Consequences Committee, once the chief dispensers of gloom, now led the premature rejoicing, and the committee’s report to the War Cabinet on 5 September 1944 struck a cheerful note:

Since the date of our appointment the position has undergone a fundamental change, as a result partly of the latest intelligence about the rocket and partly of the progress of the Allied armies. . . . The possible average weight of combined rocket and flying-bomb attack . . . is up to 80 tons of HE a day falling in London Region, which should be compared with the average of 48 tons a day experienced during the worst week of flying-bomb attacks. Rocket attack may start at any time from now onwards, but the enemy is unlikely to be able to launch rockets or flying bombs against London on any appreciable scale after the Allied armies have crossed the Franco-Belgian frontier. . . . We have therefore directed that . . . plans . . . to meet the contingency of severe rocket attack should so far as possible be kept on a paper basis.

The committee went on to report encouragingly on all the problems that a few weeks earlier had seemed so formidable, such as creating ‘Citadel’ accommodation for civil servants, providing hospital beds, preventing news of the first rockets’ arrival reaching the Germans and, above all, evacuation, where the problem now was not so much the fear of a panic flight from London as of ‘a drift back . . . as a result of . . . the rapid growth of optimism about the end of the war’. They urged, none the less, that there should be ‘no relaxation of offensive action’ to prevent ‘the initiation by the enemy of rocket attack during the probably short time left to him in which to do so’. The Vice-Chiefs of Staff, however, decided on the following day, in the official historian’s words, ‘that rocket attacks on London need no longer be expected’, endorsing the view expressed four days earlier by the Joint ‘Crossbow’ Priorities Committee, which selected targets for attack, that the rocket menace would disappear once (as was about to happen) ‘the area in northern France and Belgium 200 miles from London was “neutralized” by the presence of our land forces’. It was left to Air Marshal Sir Roderic Hill, alerted by his chief intelligence officer, to point out that western Holland was well within rocket range of the UK and still in Nazi hands. But no suspicious sites had been detected there and his voice went unheeded.