Hitler's Rockets: The Story of the V-2s (8 page)

Even that scientific perfectionist, von Braun, and the usually pessimistic Dornberger, were reasonably content with the way things were going. They had flown back from the triumphant meeting with Hitler at Rastenburg in a mood of elation. Dornberger, as they crossed the coast over Zinnowitz and began the descent over Swinemünde Bay, was ‘delighted . . . with the view of Peenemunde from the air and the vast extent and magnificence of the Army and Air Force establishments hidden in its forest solitudes’. On the ground he took an equal satisfaction in the dedication and brilliance of the men around him, not merely the senior scientists like von Braun – though ‘it was a never ending joy . . . to take part in the development of this great rocket expert . . . from his youth up’ – but of more junior employees, like the cameraman whom he watched climbing up on a safety wall to film the explosion of a rocket which had come down only forty yeards away. (‘I was’, wrote Dornberger, ‘filled with an immense pride. Only in this fashion, only with men like that, could we finish the job that lay before us.’)

By mid-August everything seemed set fair for the rocket’s future. Far away in France the construction of the great launching bunkers had already begun. The vehicles required for the mobile launching units to be based within it were on order, the troops who would man them were being selected, and, thanks to Saur and Degenkolb and the Führer’s blessing, a large-scale production programme was under way. Even the Gestapo was proving cooperative; the exiled Colonel Zanssen had been cleared and would be returning to Peenemunde shortly. When his work allowed, Dornberger enjoyed wandering about the empire he had created on this peninsula hitherto given over only to woods and sand-dunes, and this was how he soothed his nerves, around 4 o‘clock on the afternoon of Thursday, 17 August 1943, after a rare argument with his senior staff; they had threatened to resign
en masse
and return to academic life because they were finding the pressure from Degenkolb intolerable. He had managed to calm them down and attributed the tension in the air to the weather. ‘For days the sun had been blazing down on the arid, sandy soil of the island of Usedom. We were longing for a cooling thunderstorm.’ In any case there was consolation in his office, with its ‘gaily printed curtains . . . handsome gleaming quantities of flowers, rugs and pictures’ – the Germans did their scientists better than the Ministry of Works treated their British counterparts – and even more in the sight of the ‘big assembly hall of the pre-production works’, recently finished after a year’s delay, where soon A-4s, hitherto built only in single units for test purposes, would begin to be assembled in their hundreds ‘to cover a third of the Degenkolb Schedule’:

I passed through a small door in the roughly boarded main entrance over 60 feet high into the hall, which rose to a height of 100 feet. The white roughcast walls gave the room, with its five divisions, its central aisle 200 feet wide and its four side aisles separated by pillars, an almost solemn appearance at this evening hour. I crossed the double rail-track leading into the hall and went up the ramp to the assembly hall proper, 80 feet high.

The view seen from here of the depth of the central aisle, over 600 feet long, hemmed in on each side by 16 strong, square and gleaming concrete pillars, foreshortened from this point, and the rear wall fading into blue mists, once again held me spellbound. I lingered a long time. Potent joy swept over me. This hall must be thronged with happy, contented workers. I must hear in it the roaring, pounding, whirling, whistling, humming, ringing, infinitely varied sounds of work in progress. I was more than ever certain that we should pull it off!

The prospect of these bombs with some 7-10 tons of high explosive falling at intervals in populated areas . . . is not at all a pleasant one.

Sir Stafford Cripps, Minister of Aircraft Production, to the Prime Minister, 16 June 1943

The paper the British War Office circulated on ‘German Long-Range Rocket Development’ on 12 April 1943, the first formal warning of the impending threat, was in some respects surprisingly accurate. Although it referred to a missile 95 feet long, its estimates of the rocket’s all-up weight, 9½ tons, and its warhead, 1 ton, were remarkably close to the mark. Unfortunately, however, and getting the whole investigation off on the wrong foot, the document predicted that the rocket’s fuel would be cordite, the standard even-burning propellant used in ordinary cartridges, and that it would be fired from huge projectors, a hundred yards long. Because the British had so far failed to develop a self-contained, liquid-fuelled projectile, the Germans, it was assumed, must have failed, too.

On 15 April the Vice-Chiefs of Staff not merely endorsed the proposal, originating within the Cabinet Secretariat, for a single individual to direct the search for evidence of the rocket’s existence, and its likely nature, but actually submitted ‘for your consideration the name of Mr Duncan Sandys’. No doubt soundings about its acceptability had been taken beforehand and the nomination was rapidly accepted.

Still only thirty-five, and a man of dynamic energy likely to keep his subordinates on their toes, Duncan Sandys, though relatively junior for such a responsible assignment, was on the face of it a sound but imaginative choice. After a conventional background, at Eton, at Oxford and in the diplomatic service, he had entered the House of Commons as MP for Norwood in 1935, had served with an anti-aircraft battery in Norway and later, as a lieutenant-colonel, had commanded the first British rocket regiment, before being invalided out of the army after a car accident and becoming Parliamentary Secretary to the Ministry of Supply, responsible for its weapon research and development work. As the husband of Churchill’s daughter Diana he was often in Downing Street and close to the Prime Minister, while, as a politician, he was supposedly free of bias towards any of the services. Lord Cherwell, however, who had not, surprisingly, been consulted on Sandys’s appointment, was unenthusiastic about it. The Air Ministry Intelligence Branch was also disappointed. ‘It did not seem to occur to the Chiefs of Staff’, reflected R. V. Jones, when his old professor broke to him the news of Sandys’s selection, ‘that they already had a Scientific Intelligence component inside their organization.’ To his assistant, Charles Frank, he commented ‘that Sandys had been appointed to do a job that we already had in hand and for which our qualifications were much better’. Jones resolved that ‘we would continue to keep an eye on everything so as to be able to step in if there were signs of a breakdown’, but it was not a happy beginning.

As soon as he learned, on 20 April 1943, of Duncan Sandys’s appointment, Lord Cherwell did his best to prejudge the results of the forthcoming investigation. On the following day he invited Dr A. D. Crow, then in charge of British rocket development and one of Sandys’s own advisers at the Ministry of Supply, to his flat to hear his own views, which on the following day he set out in a minute to the Prime Minister. Cherwell had already made up his mind that a large solid-fuel rocket, fired from a projector, was unlikely:

Though this possibility cannot be ruled out . . . I have the impression that the technical difficulties would be extreme. . . . The firing point must obviously be in the neighbourhood of Calais. If the launching rails were above ground, they would be easily observed and not very difficult to destroy by bombing. If below ground, there would be terrible problems in bringing forward and handling these ten-ton projectiles especially as all the loading gear would have to be carefully insulated from the rocket . . . before the four tons of cordite [required to launch it] were touched off. The rocket would emerge at comparatively slow speed, so that accuracy would be severely impaired by wind. . . . Without hearing all the evidence my opinion is not worth very much, but, as at present advised, I should be inclined to bet against such rockets being used.

The search for the nonexistent rocket projector was to bedevil the rocket investigation for many months to come. On 19 April the first Air Ministry directive to the RAF team at Medmenham had urged them to look out for signs of a ‘rocket launched from a tube’. As one historian has put it, ‘basically the British were talking about an outsize firework rocket’, of the kind familiar from peacetime Bonfire Nights, and were accordingly seeking something like a giant milk bottle from which it might be fired. Since no such apparatus existed none was discovered, but the first full-scale photographic cover of Peenemünde, commissioned on 22 April 1943, did produce some interesting results. A twin-seater Mosquito had been used, enabling the observer to concentrate on the photography while the pilot kept the machine straight and level, and the excellent pictures that resulted were soon under the stereoscopes of the industrial section of the RAF unit at Medmenham. They soon decided that
something
strange was going on, with two large factories to the south-east of the site, an ‘elliptical earthwork’, noted before but still unidentified, at the northern end, further earthworks to the south-west and, strangest of all, ‘on photograph 5010, an object about 25 feet long . . . projecting in a north-westerly direction from the seaward end of the building. When photograph 5011 was taken four seconds later this object had disappeared and a small puff of white smoke or steam was issuing from the seaward end of the building.’ On 24 April two acknowledged experts on rockets and explosives respectively came down to Medmenham to study enlargements of all the recent pictures of Peenemünde, but could offer no explanation of the earthworks on the tip of Usedom. In the existing state of knowledge, they could hardly be blamed for not realizing that these were in fact protective walls built round the A-4 launching pads or that the ‘smoke or steam’ came from liquid oxygen in contact with the air. On 14 May another Mosquito sortie came back with, had it been recognized as such, even more remarkable evidence. Flight-Lieutenant Kenny, the ‘third phase’ officer directly concerned, discovered on a truck near the still unexplained earthworks a ‘cylindrical object 38 feet by 8 feet’, and, taking another look at the pictures taken on 22 April, discovered on them two small blurred white shapes, one of them on a wagon. They were also merely recorded as ‘objects’.

That Friday night of 14 May Dr Jones happened to be staying at RAF Benson, where the Mosquito pilots of the Photographic Reconnaissance Unit were based, and was able to explain to them – many already being personal acquaintances – precisely why Peenemünde was so vital, and even the most rewarding angles from which to direct their cameras. It was a fortunate visit, for it led to the officers concerned turning a blind eye when in due course instructions were given ‘that all photographs of Peenemünde were to go only to Sandys’.

Three days later Duncan Sandys submitted his first report to the Chiefs of Staff. It was a frank and sensible document:

I do not . . . consider that the evidence available is sufficiently complete or reliable to enable a firm and final opinion to be reached. Of the various reports received there is not one which can by itself be regarded as wholly reliable or conclusive. They contain, moreover, many points of conflict and divergence in matters of detail. . . . In view of the urgency of the matter and of the seriousness of this new menace . . . I have reached the following provisional conclusions:

1. It would appear that the Germans have for some time past been trying to develop a heavy rocket capable of bombarding an area . . . from very long range. . . .
   
2. The development of such a rocket, though extremely difficult, is technically quite possible. . . .
   
3. The economic effort involved in the production and projection of such rockets, though very considerable, is not prohibitive when compared with the cost of dropping an equal weight of explosive from aircraft, allowing for the heavy losses which the German air force must now expect.
   
4. Very little information is available about the progress of the development of the long-range rocket. However, such scant evidence as exists suggests that it may be far advanced.
   
5. From scientific calculations and from the results of special prisoner of war interrogations it would seem likely that the weapon in question is a multi-staged, rocket-propelled projectile with the following very approximate characteristics:
   

   Length:
   20 ft
   Diameter:
   10 ft
   Total weight
   : 70 tons
   Weight of HE head
   : up to 10 tons
   Max. velocity
   : 6000 ft per second
   Height at zenith
   : up to 40 miles
   Propellant
   : new fuel with at least twice the calorific content
   of cordite.
   Range
   : 100-150 miles.
   

Duncan Sandys went on to warn that ‘heavy attacks of this kind upon London, particularly if gas were employed, would undoubtedly have a very serious effect upon the machinery of government, upon production and upon civilian morale’ and that ‘it is possible that Portsmouth, Southampton and the larger towns along the south-east coast might also be attacked’. He was not optimistic about counter-measures once the rocket was launched, unless it turned out to be radio-controlled, or of detecting it in flight, and recommended a pre-emptive strike as more likely to be effective. ‘The experimental establishments and factories which appear most likely to be connected with the development and production of this weapon . . . together with any suspicious works in the coastal region of north-west France, should’, he suggested, ‘be subjected to effective bombing attack.’

This report was the first of a long series on similar lines, as Sandys garnered more information and was able to update his conclusions. The pressure on all the departments concerned to produce new facts led to credence being given to some informants whom at other times might have been disregarded. The most famous was a former German army officer, ‘Captain C.’, later known as Mr Peter Herbert, after he had been given his liberty in return for changing sides and joining the Ministry of Supply. He claimed to have seen ‘projectiles . . . weighing one hundred tons and over’, and another, weighing 60 tons, actually fired from a ramp inside a launching pit, which had travelled 150 miles over the Baltic. Suspiciously, however, when asked the colour of the missiles’ exhaust flame in flight he could only reply that he was colour-blind. Lord Cherwell, making no effort to separate the wheat from the chaff, although most intelligence reports contained both, dismissed Mr Herbert’s testimony out of hand. R. V. Jones, with more experience in this field, thought he did have some genuine knowledge to contribute. The claim by a German general to have seen an alcohol-fuelled rocket (probably in fact a Wasserfall) fired from the Greifswalder Oie was also dismissed out of hand; ironically, had he mentioned a solid propellant he might have been believed. A third informant, from a Luftwaffe experimental unit, testified that his CO, while visiting Berchtesgaden, had been assured by Hitler personally that rockets would be fired against England ‘this summer’, but the idea of the Fuhrer indulging in careless talk was too much for the sceptical British. Less defensibly, the British authorities also disregarded the implications of events in the United States, from which two of the Ministry of Supply’s own rocket experts had now returned, having witnessed in May a demonstration of a rocket engine using liquid oxygen and petrol.

On 4 June 1943 the first report reached London from a foreign worker, in fact a scientist from Luxembourg, whom the Germans had conscripted to work for them inside Peenemunde. This was, though no one could have known it at the time, the first detailed and accurate piece of intelligence to arrive, for it referred to a rocket 10 metres long with a range of 150-250 kilometres, and included a sketch showing the location of Test Stand VII. It also – a vital clue – referred to ‘bottles containing gas’ being used to provide fuel. Lord Cherwell had probably not seen this latest message when, on 11 June 1943, he wrote a further memo to the Prime Minister casting doubt on the reality of the threat from the rocket, which he still assumed to be a 70 ton monster burning solid fuel:

There seems little doubt that the Germans have been working on long-range rockets, but what evidence there is also indicates that there have been serious difficulties. This is scarcely surprising. To construct jets which would stand for some 10 seconds the passage at about 1½ miles a second of the hot gases produced by burning 20 tons of cordite might well keep an engineering team busy for years. . . . To handle 70-ton projectiles and shift them from the railway to the launching rails, to insulate this gear from the terrific blast, etc., is no mean technical problem. If the projector is to be inconspicuous all this must be underground. . . . I cannot conceive that the Germans would carry out such elaborate installations in the neighbourhood of Calais without being observed and having their work nipped in the bud.

Cherwell, however, who hated being shown to be wrong, was careful to hedge his bets.

Jones, who you may remember is in charge of scientific Air Intelligence, has been following these questions closely, and I do not think there is any great risk of our being caught napping.

And, having argued that there was no danger from the rocket, Cherwell, somewhat illogically, endorsed Duncan Sandys’s proposal for counter-measures against it: