Hitler's Terror Weapons (17 page)

The well-known
New York Times
correspondent W. L. Laurence, a Pulitzer Prize-winner in 1937 and 1946, who had associated with physicists long before the Manhattan Project, was allowed to fly in one of the three B-29 aircraft which took part in the atomic bombing of Nagasaki. His eyewitness report was published on the same day, 9 August 1945. His article was an absolute sensation, but Zinsser's account is more complete, particularly in two material respects.

Zinsser
: “… when I noticed a strong bright illumination of the whole atmosphere lasting for about two seconds.”

Laurence
: “… all of us became aware of a giant flash that broke through the dark barrier of our arc-welder's lenses and flooded our cabin with an intense light.”

Zinsser
: “… and the colour of the cloud changed frequently … it became dotted after a short period of darkness with all sorts of light spots, which were, in contrast to normal explosions, of pale blue colour.”

Laurence
: “... we removed our glasses after the first flash but the light still lingered on, a bluish-green light that illuminated the entire sky all around.”

Zinnser
: “The combustion was lightly felt from my observation plane in the form of pulling and pushing.”

Laurence
: “A tremendous blast wave struck our ship and made it tremble from nose to tail.”

Zinsser
: “The clearly visible pressure wave escaped the approaching and following cloud formed by the explosion.”

Laurence
: “Observers in the tail of our ship saw a giant ball of fire rise.”

Zinsser
: “Personal observations of the colours of the explosion cloud found an almost blue-violet shade.”

Laurence
: “By the time our ship had made another turn in the direction of the atomic explosion, the pillar of purple fire had reached the level of our altitude.”

Zinsser
: “During this manifestation reddish-coloured rims were to be seen, changing to a dirty-like shade in very rapid succession.”

Laurence
:
Failed to mention this red coloration which is caused by nitric oxide.

Zinsser
: “A cloud shaped like a mushroom with turbulent, billowing sections stood (at about 7000 metres altitude) over the spot where the explosion took place.”

Laurence
: “It [the mushroom cloud] retained that shape when we last gazed at it from a distance of about 200 miles.”

Zinsser
: “About an hour later, I started with an He 111: shortly after the start I passed through the almost complete overcast … strong electrical disturbances and the impossibility to continue radio communications as by lightning turned up …”

Laurence
:
Did not mention this typical phenomenon of an atomic test.

Radio and Radar Interference is an unwanted side-effect of atomic explosions and never occurs during normal explosions. Very few specialists were aware of this phenomenon in August 1945; only radio operators and pilots of aircraft near an atomic test would have observed it. It is the result of the radioactivity of the fission fragments, and the cloud containing the weapon debris will be in an ionized state for a considerable period. An explosion can also cause temporary regional changes in the ionosphere. The operation of long-range radio communication or radar observation in channels affected by such perturbations could be degraded or blocked.
¹⁰⁵

The only possible explanation for the foregoing is that Zinsser, whoever he was, saw the test of a 1-kiloton lead-jacketed German atom bomb and so, if there ever was such a thing, Hitler's scientists won the race to the atom bomb.

CHAPTER 10

The Sands of Time Run Out

“
T
he Germans were preparing rocket surprises for England in particular, which would have, it is believed, changed the course of the war if the invasion had been postponed for so short a time as half a year,” Lt-Gen Donald Leander Putt, Deputy Commanding General, US Army Air Force Intelligence, told the Society of Aeronautical Engineers in a speech in 1946. Since he was speaking here of rockets, Lt-Gen Putt was implying that forcing the Germans back to their own frontier by December 1944 was critical to the Allies not losing the war. In December 1944 the Germans launched a military operation, the purpose of which no historian has explained satisfactorily: the Ardennes offensive, which began on the 16th of that month. Hitler's motorized forces were to bear down on Antwerp with the intention of recapturing the port. For the purpose he had released huge quantities of fuel and ammunition and transferred the bulk of his panzers from the East. Two full divisions – one SS and one Wehrmacht – were deployed. Secrecy was absolute. Hitler's Luftwaffe ADC von Below remarked in his 1982 memoirs that even he could not understand why Hitler wanted to go to Antwerp – “a place that led nowhere”. And at the same time orders were placed with naval shipyards at Stettin and Elbing in the Baltic for twenty-four 500-ton submersible barges able to transport and launch V-2 rockets. Antwerp was a sea port. Antwerp was 200 miles from London. The maximum range of a V-2 was 200 miles. Launched from a submersible barge, a V-2 could hit London from the River Scheldt on which Antwerp stood. Here we begin to see the logic. But the V-2 campaign had been a failure. Hitler knew that. There had to be something extra to make all this worthwhile.

In an aside to accredited journalists Kurowski and Romersa it is alleged that Lt-Gen Putt had added, “The Germans had V-2s with atomic explosive warheads”. Hitler told Otto Skorzeny
¹⁰⁶
that the whole point was to introduce “a new and really revolutionary weapon which would take them utterly by surprise” – the same expression as used by US Lt-Gen Putt in his speech. If the
Uraniumbombe
was ready, and he now had the deadly warhead mass-produced to fit into his V-2s, then the picture makes some kind of sense at last. In this new campaign every V-2 arriving from the heavens on London at Mach 3.5 would crush into a critical mass on impact a sphere in its nose or waist filled with half a tonne or so of plutonium-enriched uranium powder. The assembling of the material, though instantaneous, lacked symmetry, and so a full chain reaction would not develop, but there would certainly be a “fizzle” equivalent to up to 50 tons of TNT, meltdown and fallout. And every V-2 would bring the same punishment until Britain pulled out of the war and all troops of the western Alliance departed from the European mainland. It was a bold plan.

Once it was obvious that the Ardennes offensive had failed, Hitler admitted defeat to his Luftwaffe ADC
¹⁰⁷
in terms similar to, “I know the war is lost. The enemy superiority is too great.”

Horten Ho XVIII bomber

Before the war the first Chief of the Luftwaffe General Staff, Wever, had demanded a fast, four-engined bomber. The initial designs, the Ju 89 and Do 19, had flown but were either scrapped or relegated to other duties, and Goering had abandoned the four-engined series subsequently in favour of the Ju 88. This was due partly to the raw materials situation but also to the fact that double the number of two-engined machines could be manufactured, which looked good in the production figures. Goering was therefore the party responsible for the decision not to have a long-range bomber fleet, and in the upshot it was probably fatal for Hitler.

At the end of 1944 the development of new types of bomb for use against the United States from Germany and possibly from bases in Japan kick-started a bomber-building programme into life.

An aircraft specifically built as an atomic-type bomb carrier
¹⁰⁸
was the Horten XVIII, although its designers were not made aware of that fact until after the war, its purpose being camouflaged by the Luftwaffe as the maritime anti-convoy role. The RLM requirement drawn up in mid-1944 stipulated a radius of action of 9000 kms, enabling the aircraft to make the round trip from Germany to New York without refuelling, carrying an outward bomb load of 4 tonnes. This payload would be about right for a German ‘atomic-type' bomb with a 500-kilo core, most of the rest being casing and the conventional explosive needed to implode the device. At a conference of top aircraft manufacturers in the autumn of 1944, Messerschmitt, Focke-Wulf, Blohm & Voss, Junkers, Arado and Heinkel were invited to tender designs, but when submitted none were able to meet the radius of action, particularly after the figure of 9000 kms had been increased to 11000 kms.

Reimar and Walter Horten were not in the mainstream of aircraft manufacture. Before the war their specialist field had been unpowered gliders of very high aspect wing ratio. Their design with a glide ratio of 45:1 was greater than an albatross, and this best performance by a flying wing stood until at least the early 1970s. When war came the brothers' interest widened and designs for powered versions of the flying wing began to flow from the drawing board. The Hortens were told of the disappointing progress made by the major manufacturers and in November 1944 the Luftwaffe asked them to submit a design for a long-range bomber. They worked on the project full-out through the Christmas period and came up with ten variations for a ‘flying wing' bomber, basically a wooden boomerang driven by a permutation of from four to eight turbo-jets.

The final version tagged Ho XVIIIA had six Junkers Jumo 004B turbo-jets at the rear of the fuselage fed by air intakes in the wing's leading edge. A rocket-boosted skate would be jettisoned at take-off and landing effected on a skid. Construction was predominantly wood held together with a carbon-based glue. This gave the aircraft a low radar profile.

According to Speer, Hitler was very taken with the whole project, but when between 20 and 23 February 1945 Goering chaired a further design conference at Dessau, the lobbyists got their way and a few days later Goering told the Horten brothers to work in collaboration with Junkers engineers. As these had quietly co-opted some Messerschmitt people to their team, the project was now run by committee.

The Messerschmitt-Junkers idea was to fit a huge vertical fin and rudder aft and relocate the engines below the wing. These changes increased drag and thus reduced the range but again they got their way, and the final design had two large vertical fins with a cockpit at the leading edge. The six Jumo jets were to be slung in two nacelles one to each side of the central fuselage. Between these was the bomb bay which also housed a tricycle landing gear.

This variation did not find favour with the Horten brothers and they designed their own improvement, Ho XVIIIB, a flying wing with a crew of three seated in a plexiglass blister in the nose, propulsion being provided by four Heinkel Hirth SO11 turbo-jets each developing 1200 kgs thrust and housed below the wing in gondolas insisted upon by the development authority for safety reasons. This arrangement resulted in a weight saving of about a tonne enabling the replacement of the skid by a fixed 8-wheel undercarriage streamlined in flight by doors to reduce drag. The aircraft would have a speed of about 850 kms/hr, an operational ceiling of 16 kms and could remain aloft for 27 hours. Although armament was considered unnecessary by the Luftwaffe, the Hortens suggested two Mk 108 3-cm cannon directly below the cockpit. A special carbon-based paint and a honeycomb dielectric material pasted over the outer skin were used to suppress the reflection of radar beams.

On 23 March 1945 the design was approved by Goering and the Hortens were told to approach Saur, Speer's deputy, to find a suitably protected production facility. Kahla in the Harz mountains was considered suitable. It had two recently completed hangars with concrete roofs 5.6 metres thick which were virtually bomb-proof. Two airstrips were available for test flights, and a workforce of 2000 persons was on hand.

The first prototype was expected to fly in the summer of 1945 and work was started on 1 April.

German Intelligence of the Manhattan Project

During the war Germany had been relatively well informed on the progress of the Manhattan Project. Most of the signals transmitted to Moscow by Klaus Fuchs' spy ring were decrypted by the SS-RSHA
¹⁰⁹
, as were those of a Canadian communist ring in Ottawa, and passed to SS atomic research groups. The information was withheld from other sections of the German project for security reasons.

The Spanish spy Alazar de Velasco
¹¹⁰
reported to both Germany and Japan on the American work from 1943 until mid-1944, operating from Mexico. Velasco mentioned the difficulties the Americans were having in developing an implosion fuse for their plutonium bomb design, which had already been solved by the Germans.

On 30 November 1944
U-1230
put Erich Gimpel ashore on an American beach. On Christmas Day, a week before his capture by the FBI, Gimpel discovered from his contact that the American A-bomb would be ready by the summer of 1945. Apparently they had only two or three bombs. Gimpel transmitted this information to Berlin.

In the autumn of 1944, when he found Hitler planning the Ardennes offensive with freshly formed panzer and fighter units, his Luftwaffe ADC von Below asked him why he did not concentrate all his forces against the Russians and received the answer that he could attack them later, provided that the Americans were not in Berlin. First of all he must have space on his western border. Von Below remarked that everybody thought it preferable to allow the Americans to take the Reich so that the Russians could be held off as far as possible from the eastern frontier. Hitler did not share this view because he feared the power of the American Jews more than the Bolshevists.

It seems certain that a Doomsday Bomb test was carried out at Ohrdruf in the Harz on the night of 4 March 1945. Witness Frau Cläre Werner related
¹¹¹
: “At that time I knew Hans Ritterman, who was Plenipotentiary for Reichspost and OKW Special Projects. He worked in the Arnstadt Building Department and was involved in secret Reichspost work in Thuringia. He was a good friend of the family and often came for coffee on Sundays. On 4 March 1945 Hans visited and said we should go to the tower and watch in the direction of Roehrensee village. He didn't know what the new thing would go like. About nine-thirty that evening behind Roehrensee it suddenly lit up just like hundreds of bolts of lightning. The explosion glowed red inside and yellow outside and you could read a newspaper by it. It lasted only a short time, fell dark again and then came a hurricane, after which it went quiet. Next day, like many residents of Roehrensee, Holzhausen, Muehlberg, Wechmar and Bittstedt, I had nose-bleeds, headache and pressure on my ear-drums. That afternoon about two o'clock, between 100 and 150 SS came to the mountain and asked where the bodies were and where they had to take them. They had been misdirected and a motor cyclist put them right. I watched them making for the Ohrdruf Army Training Ground.”