REVENGE

HITLER'S V-WEAPON TURNED ON BRITAIN

From 1942 onwards, Hitler frequently told those who dared to express doubt in the eventual German victory that the war would be decided by Germany's secret weapons, against which there would be no defence. In fact, among his Staff, the constant assertions about secret weapons that never seemed to materialise became something of a joke. Yet, in strictest secrecy, research was well advanced, and the German Minister for Armaments, Albert Speer, recalled after the war in his book Inside the Third Reich that the first experimental firing of a V2 rocket had taken place on June 13th 1942 - and had almost killed him and the armaments chiefs of all three armed forces in one fell swoop when it went out of control and crashed back to earth half a mile from where they stood. On October 14th 1942, Speer told Hitler that the second test firing had gone perfectly, and on December 22nd 1942, Hitler signed an order for their mass production.

Rumours and fragments of information about German research into new and terrible means of creating death and destruction were, by the beginning of 1943, reaching Allied intelligence through Resistance and espionage sources so frequently that it was clear that something was afoot. In the spring of 1943, the Polish Home Army obtained information about a secret establishment at Peenemunde, on an island named Usedom at the mouth of the River Oder. A Polish engineer studied the evidence and decided that it could mean only that Germany was experimenting with rockets and techniques of jet propulsion. The Poles, at enormous risk to themselves, sent the information through to London. At about the same time, British Intelligence received from occupied Denmark a photograph taken by a Danish officer of a small pilotless monoplane with what seemed to be a jet engine mounted above the fuselage - the shape that was to become known to millions of long-suffering British and Belgian civilians as the flying bomb, nicknamed by Londoners the doodlebug, and correctly designated the VI.

The VI that had crashed without exploding on the island of Bornholm had been photographed, and the picture provided British Intelligence with confirmation that the Poles were on to something. A hazardous reconnaissance sortie photographed the Peenemunde site from the air, and the results made it clear that action was needed. On 17th July 1943, 600 bombers launched a major raid on Peenemunde, doing damage that postwar evidence confirmed had set back German rocket development substantially. Later that summer, an experimental launching ramp for the VI was built in Poland near Blizna, and test launchings of the VI went ahead in profusion. The ever-vigilant Polish Resistance rapidly discovered the site, and by studying it and the missile launchings guessed that the device could have a range of some 200 miles. The Home Army collected fragments of flying bombs that had exploded, and were able to determine where they had been built - information which was passed to London and became the basis for targetting raids of the mounting Allied bomber offensive. But the Poles' greatest coup came when an unexploded VI settled in the mud of the River Bug.

At enormous risk, the intrepid Poles removed its wings (which had been showing above the water) so that the Germans could not find their lost secret weapon. At a suitable moment, Polish engineers recovered most of the bomb (although sadly not the warhead) and smuggled it in small pieces to Warsaw, from where the results of detailed examination were sent to the Polish government in exile in London. This excited the British and American scientists enough for them to decide to collect the prize from occupied Poland. In an extraordinarily risky and yet sucessful operation, a Douglas DC3 "Dakota" was flown from Italy and landed in a muddy Polish field. Several days later, the crew and the Polish resistance men together managed to ungum the Dakota from the mud, and Germany's secret weapon was flown to England.

As a result of this acquisition, the Allied scientists and defence chiefs knew with considerable accuracy, by the time the Flying Bombs came to be used in earnest, what the weapon could do and how it worked. They knew its range. But they did not know Hitler's plans, or when the weapon would be ready.

The Battle of London

A combination of Allied raids on the 96 original VI launching ramps and the natural delays that all new technologies are heir to had made Hitler's new revenge weapons late. Not until a week after the D-Day invasion in Normandy were the first VI Flying Bombs launched against London. On June 13th 1944, three VI weapons reached Britain's capital. One landed in the East London area of Bethnal Green, killing six and injuring nine people. The other two, by sheer good fortune, caused no casualties. But this was no more than a foretaste. Two days later, on June 15th, the Germans began their second great campaign to smash London and the Londoners' morale - christened some weeks later "The Battle of London". No less than 244 VI Flying Bombs were launched in that one twenty-four hour period, of which 144 crossed the English coast and 72 exploded in Greater London.

The Commander of 12 Group RAF, Air Marshal Roderic Hill, now faced a major task, quite unlike any that Fighter Command RAF had faced previously. He put into action Operation Overlord/Diver, an extensively planned defence exercise designed to combat pilotless bombs with RAF fighter aircraft in close co-operation with Anti-Aircraft Command and Balloon Command. Eight day-fighter squadrons - flying Spitfires, Tempests and Typhoons - and four Mosquito night fighter squadrons were allotted to the task of destroying the Flying Bombs. To them, in August 1944, would be added the first of the Gloster Meteor I jet fighters, the Allies' first operational jet aircraft.

On Sunday June 18th, a VI scored a direct hit on the Guards Chapel at Wellington Barracks, close to Buckingham Palace, Westminster Abbey and the Houses of Parliament. Nearly two hundred Guardsmen and many civilians were killed or wounded. As the weeks of June wore on, every part of London was hit, but the areas South of the Thames and in direct line between the German launch ramps in the Pas de Calais and Tower Bridge, upon which all the bombs were theoretically aimed, took the brunt of the attack. The aiming of the VI was inherently crude, and a fifteen mile radius of error was normal, with undershooting of the target more common than overshooting. Thus the suburban boroughs within 10 miles or so of the river to the South were badly hit.

Worst hit of all was Croydon, some twelve miles from central London, where the author lived as a child at the time. Some idea of the concentration of the attack can be gained from the map of the Croydon area - 141 fell on the borough, destroying totally 1,400 houses, and damaging 54,000 more (75 per cent of all the houses in the borough). Most explosions killed or maimed a considerable number of civilians; in Croydon, 211 people were killed, 697 were seriously injured and 1,277 slightly injured by VI attacks.

London's anti-aircraft defences fought back strongly, but shooting a bomb down over London merely served to fulfil German intentions, so other means were sought. It was soon found that the VI, with a speed of slightly more than 400mph, outpaced all available fighter aircraft except the newly introduced Hawker Tempest V, which, with its 2,180hp Napier Sabre engine had a maximum speed in level flight of 436mph. Roderic Hill's 12 Group, which attempted initially to attack the VI Bombs with Spitfires and Typhoons as well as the Tempest, found that attempting to shoot down the VI was both unreliable and hazardous - at 400 yds the VI, with a wingspan of only 17.5 feet, presented too small a target; at 200 yds the attacking aircraft was likely to be destroyed along with its target as the 1,870 lb of high explosive in the VI blew up. Nonetheless, many were detonated in the air by cannon fire. However, the RAF pilots devised a precision flying technique by which the airflow over the upper surface of a Tempest's wing, positioned only inches below the wing of the Flying Bomb, disturbed the aerodynamic performance of the VI's wings sufficiently to tip the bomb over and send it crashing into the sea. In one way or the other, RAF fighters, mainly Tempests, accounted for more than a third of the VIs that were destroyed before they reached London and its suburbs.

But before that technique could be developed, urgent means had to be found to reduce the number of VIs reaching their London targets. Allied bombers were remorselessly bombing the underground storage caverns in Northern France in which the bombs were kept until launching, and were achieving significant reductions in the number launched. Nonetheless, large numbers were still crossing the Channel. By June 21st, all the central London anti-aircraft defences had been moved to the North Downs, some twenty miles South of the capital. Barrage balloons floated over the Southern edges of London, and succeeded in trapping 232 VIs during the course of the Battle. By July 6th, Winston Churchill was reporting to Parliament that 2,754 bombs had so far been launched against London, that `a very large proportion of these have either failed to cross the Channel or have been shot down and destroyed by various methods' and that 2,752 fatal casualties had been sustained.

In mid-July, it was clear that something more was needed. Duncan Sandys, Winston Churchill's son-in-law, had been given the task of co-ordinating defences against the V-bomb attack, and his "Crossbow" committee recommended the bold step of moving the anti-aircraft defences to the coast, where the newly available American proximity-fused shells could safely be used against Flying Bombs approaching from the sea. These shells exploded only if close to their target, so fell back to earth unexploded if badly aimed. As a result, they could not safely be used over land. In only four days, four hundred heavy anti-aircraft guns and six hundred Bofors guns were moved and re-sited. Three thousand miles of telephone cable were laid, and 23,000 personnel were relocated.

By the end of August only one VI in seven was getting through to London, and on August 28th ninety of ninety-four bombs crossing the Channel were destroyed. Of those, the coastal guns shot down sixty-five. In the first week of September, the rapid advance of the Allied armies Eastwards through France reached the launch sites, and the V1 attack came virtually to an end, although isolated long-range versions of the weapon continued to be launched from Holland almost until the end of the war, the last arriving over London in March 1945. A total of 6,184 civilians had been killed, 17,981 had been seriously injured, and countless people had sustained minor injuries without hospital treatment. The total number of Flying Bombs launched against the southern part of England is not clear - in his The Second World War , Winston Churchill quoted a grand total of 8,564 Flying Bombs launched, of which 1,006 crashed soon after launching and never crossed the Channel. Other writers since have quoted varying figures, their information differing according to its source. The highest figure the author has seen is one of 10,492 launched against England, with 3,000 not getting across the Channel - which, in terms of Flying Bombs arriving in England, more or less agrees with Churchill's figure.

The V2 Rockets

While wrestling with the problems of the V1 attack, the British scientists and defence planners were also faced with a potentially more serious threat from the V2 rocket, the brainchild of Wernher von Braun, later to achieve further fame at NASA. By late July 1944, as a result of a remarkable error on June 13th, gleefully reported by Winston Churchill in his The Second World War , the Allied scientists had sufficient fragments of a V2 that had exploded in neutral Sweden after a test flight to know most of its specification and performance. What they had learned was not encouraging. The V2 weighed about 12 tons, carried a ton of high explosive - slightly more than the V1 - and had a range of approximately 200 miles. This distance it traversed in a huge parabola at speeds of up to 4,000 mph, completing its journey from launch to detonation in only three to four minutes, and giving the recipients of its destruction no warning whatever.

By May 1944 (postwar captured records showed), the Germans were manufacturing 300 of these formidable weapons per month, and had a stockpile of some 1,800. Between September 1944 and March 1945, they were building an average of 618 per month. Massive German resistance to Allied attempts to capture the V2 launch sites around The Hague in Holland lasted until March 1945, and until then rocket attacks were a regular feature of life not only in London but also in Antwerp, attacked once it had been taken by the Allies because of its crucial importance as a source of supply to the advancing Allied armies.

The first two V2 rockets to land in London arrived within sixteen seconds of each other, the first in Chiswick, to the West of London, the second in Epping, just north of the capital. A total of 1,359 rockets were fired against London during the ensuing autumn and winter, of which 1,190 actually succeeded in leaving the launch pad. More than half of those fell short of England's capital, but the five hundred that did get to London killed 2,724 people and injured 6,476 more.

By comparison, Antwerp received 8,696 V1 Flying Bombs and 1,610 V2 rockets, of which 5,960 of the combined total fell within eight miles of the city centre. Another 3,141 flying bombs were launched against Liege, and a further 151 V2 rockets against Brussels. The attacks on Antwerp alone killed 3,470 Belgian civilians and 682 Allied servicemen.

An Even Bigger Bang

But for the successful Allied Commando raids earlier in the war on the German heavy water plant in Norway, Germany would probably have succeeded in having available a nuclear bomb before the date of the actual end of the war. Since this weapon would have become available in the very last stages of the conflict, when Hitler's decisions were irrational and unbalanced, the effects of his having had the nuclear bomb available are almost unimaginable.

Nearer to actual realisation was his V3 revenge weapon, which was horrific on paper, but which simply failed to work in practice. A fifty-barrelled long-range gun installation was buried in a fortified emplacement near the village of Mimoyecques in the Pas de Calais. Each of the smooth-bored barrels was about four hundred feet long, and had successive small explosive charges in side-tubes at frequent intervals along the barrel. These charges were fired in rapid succession as a shell of approximately six inches diameter with fins at the back end passed up the barrel. The idea was that the fins would stabilise the shell, and that the range would be sufficient for the device to hit London continuously at a rate of one shell every few minutes. In the event, the shells from the weapon simply toppled in the air, and turned end over end, thereby losing speed and range. London, when it heard about that particular failure, was suitably grateful.

In truth, Hitler's revenge weapons were less than successful and, although they killed many people, they did little to alter the course of the war against Germany and used huge resources that could have turned out thousands of tanks and fighters which would have directly contributed to Germany's success against the Allies. The Normandy invasion might not have succeeded at all if the Luftwaffe had been as strong in 1944 as it had been in 1941. In his lust for revenge, and in his misdirection of resources to unattainable objectives, Hitler made yet another of his personal contributions to the loss of a war that Germany might just have won.