Hitler's Rockets: The Story of the V-2s (15 page)

The group was highly impressive. Beside that already unwavering opponent of the rocket, Dr Crow, it included a highly distinguished engineer, Sir Frank Smith, and two former Cambridge academics, both Fellows of the Royal Society, Professor Geoffrey Taylor and Professor Ralph (later Sir Ralph) Fowler, both authorities on the application of mathematics to ballistics and engineering. No doubt under pressure from Cherwell they now agreed, as Cherwell reported to Churchill’s meeting that evening, that ‘there were many formidable difficulties in the way of accepting the object photographed at Peenemünde as the long-range rocket, and that no adequate solution of these difficulties had yet been put forward’. At the same meeting, for good measure, Cherwell mustered a whole series of reasons to ‘prove’ to his non-scientific colleagues that the rocket was a technical impossibility. He doubted if ‘the ratio of two-thirds fuel to one-third weight in metal’, necessary if the rocket was to reach London, ‘was practicable since it was far in excess of anything our experts had been able to achieve’. Even if some breakthrough in fuel had been made, he questioned whether ‘the metal of which the combustion chamber was made could withstand the very high temperatures which would be necessary’. It would be impossible for such a rocket to lift off under its own power, but a projector would ‘be very difficult to aim’ and would have to weigh 700 tons ‘in order to stand the force of recoil’. If launched, the rocket could not be kept on course, since ‘no gyroscopic method of control was likely to be effective’, while if kept on course it could do no damage, since ‘it would be extremely difficult to fit a warhead to the hemispherical nose’. ‘In view of the difficulties . . .’, the minutes recorded, ‘he did not agree that the object photographed at Peenemünde was, in fact, a long-range rocket.’

Perhaps Cherwell had overstated his case. At all events the most prominent scientist present, the scientific adviser to the Army Council, Professor C. D. (later Sir Charles) Ellis, who had been first consulted as far back as April, now said flatly that ‘he believed in the possibility of the rocket’, while Isaac Lubbock bravely pointed out that ‘his calculations’ about the possible form a liquid-fuelled rocket might take ‘did not substantiate any of the criticisms made by Lord Cherwell’. The Prime Minister refused to come down firmly on one side or the other, but summed up that ‘unless it could be shown scientifically that a rocket was impossible we could hardly ignore the existence of unexplained facts’. He proposed to set up a special Committee of Inquiry to settle the matter once for all, starting work the following day, and invited Lord Cherwell to chair it, but the latter, affronted at having his opinions rejected, walked out, pleading a previous engagement for the time proposed. The job was then passed to Sir Stafford Cripps, who was asked to begin work at 9.30 the following morning.

On 1 November Cripps submitted his interim findings. The rocket was, he advised, ‘theoretically possible’, and the stillunexplained earthwork at Peenemünde might be the ‘giant mortar’ for which everyone had been seeking. A little later the Ministry of Supply produced some highly imaginative drawings suggesting what it might look like – they envisaged an 80 foot object not unlike a giant milk bottle, poised on a giant seesaw or trundled into position on a trolley to be raised to an acute angle for firing – and searching for these totally fictitious structures now added an extra burden to the work of the interpreters at Medmenham. On the same day as Cripps’s first report Cherwell reaffirmed in a private memo to Churchill his belief ‘that we shall not suffer from rocket bombardment, certainly not on the scale suggested’, adding a barbed postscript: ‘As I am often believed to be responsible for giving you scientific advice, it would perhaps be well to mention the fact that I am sceptical about this particular matter.’

Churchill’s response to the two contradictory memos of 1 November was to ask Cripps, on the following day, to

hold a short inquiry, of not more than two sittings, into the evidence, as apart from the scientific aspects, of the long-range rocket. At the same time it would be well to assemble what arguments there are for and against:

1. the pilotless airplane, and
   
2. the glider bomb operated by a directing aircraft from a distance.
   

These two latter requirements were, inevitably, to divert the investigation from giving a clear answer to the single question concerning the rocket. Equally unfortunately, but also perhaps inevitably, he decided to invite Lord Cherwell to form, with himself and Duncan Sandys, a three-man tribunal, before which witnesses could be cross-examined, the tribunal being assisted by a scientist and an engineer hitherto unconnected with the inquiry. This quasi-judicial procedure did not appeal to that least judicial of men, Lord Cherwell, and he now set out to prejudice what might have been called the court of appeal, the Prime Minister, by writing privately to him before the Cripps inquiry had even met. ‘It appears’, wrote Cherwell, ‘that the Ministry of Aircraft Production’ –
i.e.
Cripps’s own department – ’is now planning measures even more far-reaching than were envisaged in 1939 in order to meet a danger whose existence is not certain.’ He also tried to throw doubt on the credentials of the man he considered the chief ‘prosecution’ witness for the rocket. If Cripps, commented Cherwell, preferred ‘to accept the assurance of Mr Lubbock – who has not hitherto been conspicuously successful in rocket design . . . against the view of Dr Crow, who has made successful rockets . . . there is nothing more to be said.’

The ‘trial’ of the evidence for the rocket’s existence began on 8 November 1943 in a room in the Cabinet Offices, with one witness after another, including a three-man contingent from Medmenham, traversing the now familiar ground. The ‘case’ had hardly opened when it took an unexpected turn. Wing Commander Kendall revealed the discovery of a whole new series of concrete ramps in the Pas-de-Calais, all pointing towards London, and Cripps immediately adjourned the proceedings to allow more photographs to be studied. The following day was, as it happened, that of the Lord Mayor’s Luncheon (to which the traditional annual pre-war banquet had now shrunk), and Churchill took the opportunity in his speech at the Mansion House to remind the nation of the secret-weapon danger:

We cannot . . . exclude the possibility of new forms of attack upon this island. We have been vigilantly watching for many months past every sign of preparation for such attacks. Whatever happens they will not be of a nature to affect the final course of the war.

The following day the Cripps inquiry heard that more possible launching sites had been discovered, and these dominated its further discussions and its second report, submitted on 17 November: ‘There is no doubt that the Germans are doing their utmost to perfect some long-range weapon . . . though there is no evidence of its materialization before the New Year at the earliest.’ As for its nature, the ‘court’ put the ‘Rocket A-4’ fourth and last in its ‘order of probability’, after ‘glider bombs, pilotless aircraft’ and ‘long-range rocket, smaller than A-4’. Even this heavily qualified acceptance of the rocket, however, infuriated Lord Cherwell. ‘What can you expect from a lawyer who eats nothing but nuts?’ he grumbled to his staff, an odd comment from a man who, in the absence of his favourite Port Salut cheese, lived largely on stewed apple and rice.

With the Cripps report the rocket inquiry was shunted into a siding. On 18 November, with his own agreement, since his ministry had its hands full with pre-D-Day problems, Duncan Sandys’s special inquiry came to an end, though it was agreed he would attend whenever secret weapons were on the Chiefs of Staff’s agenda. The Joint Intelligence Committee, reporting to the Cabinet’s Defence Committee, would continue to keep an eye on the whole secret-weapons field, but this was only one of its responsibilities and Dr Jones doubted if this would be adequate. ‘My section’, he had written to the committee’s chairman on 15 November, when he learned what was proposed, ‘will continue its work, regardless of any parallel committees which may arise, and will be mindful only of the safety of the country.’ In fact his section too, before long, was to have an even more urgent responsibility than hunting down the rocket – that of deceiving the German radar stations in the area where Operation Overlord was soon to fall. The Defence Committee, the senior policy-making body below the War Cabinet, formally endorsed, on 18 November, Cripps’s conclusion that ‘no serious attack by rocket . . . was likely at any rate before the New Year’, and also agreed ‘that there was a reasonable prospect of our receiving at least a month’s notice before any heavy attack could develop’.

On 27 November 1943 the former secret-weapon codename, ‘Bodyline’, most commonly applied to the rocket, was replaced by ‘Crossbow’, which was used principally about the flying bomb. On 2 December the flying bomb’s triumph over the rocket, at least in London, became complete with the discovery of a pilotless aircraft on a ramp at Peenemünde identical with those discovered in France, and seeming to point to an imminent attack of this kind. On 28 December Herbert Morrison’s Civil Defence Committee, taking another look at the formerly dreaded rocket, decided that ‘on the new appreciation the weight of attack is very much less’ than that previously contemplated and Morrison himself, previously the chief alarmist in the government, argued ‘that it is undesirable to make plans for any more extensive evacuation of priority classes than is absolutely necessary’. By the end of the year the rocket was definitely in eclipse. ‘It is now thought’, the committee learned on New Year’s Eve, ‘that the form of attack likely to be used first by the enemy would be pilotless aircraft, although the possibility of long-distance rockets being utilized, probably at a rather late stage, would certainly not be ignored.’

Once convinced that the rocket existed, Herbert Morrison had all along taken the danger from it more seriously than his colleagues and at the first meeting of the Civil Defence Committee in the new year, on 18 January 1944, he raised the question of a public warning system – essential, he thought, both to reduce casualties and to maintain morale. He was a good deal more confident than the Air Ministry experts that radar would detect each missile as it was fired, or at least before it arrived, but recognized, in the draft public announcement he had prepared, that the interval between warning and impact would be desperately short:

There will be no time for preparations. People who can reach their shelters in less than a minute should go to them immediately. Failing such protection – in a corridor or stairway away from windows, under a strong table or bed or stairs. People caught in the street should, if there is not a shelter handy, run into the nearest building or lie down flat in the gutter or beside a low wall. Get under the best cover immediately.

Owing to the nature of the attack no ‘Raiders passed’ signal will be possible. Each . . . warning should be regarded as lasting for five minutes and after this time has elapsed work may again be resumed.

Until Air Defence of Great Britain (formerly, and later, known as Fighter Command) was able, via a special electrical system, to give a simultaneous alarm in the endangered areas, it was proposed that ‘four rounds will be fired in quick succession from light anti-aircraft guns from a selected number of battery sites’, but this crude and temporary system would be replaced as soon as possible by ‘a number of maroons fired simultaneously’; sounding the sirens would take too long. Morrison also proposed that, just before the attack was expected to start, people should be warned of the necessity of keeping the Germans guessing where their missiles had landed:

The public are warned not to communicate, by word of mouth or otherwise, any information as to whether [rocket] shells have fallen, where they have fallen, or the extent of the damage done by them. The enemy will be anxious to obtain such information as a guide to the range and accuracy of his weapon and even quite general statements, if they fall into his hands, may assist him.

All this seemed sensible enough, but the Civil Defence Committee were dubious. Even a preliminary announcement at this stage was ruled out, on the grounds it might cause needless alarm, and there were doubts about the value of a short-term warning. A headlong rush to take cover might, it was feared, cause a disastrous crush in the narrow tube-station entrances, production would be interrupted, and some timorous workers, once underground, might ‘remain there indefinitely or even fail to come to work at all’. For the moment the preparations stayed secret.

Meanwhile the Chiefs of Staff were trying to decide whether the ‘ski sites’ discovered in northern France – so called after the shape of their most prominent building – which were rightly associated with the flying bomb, or the ‘large sites’ detected earlier, assumed, in most cases correctly, to be connected with the rocket, presented the more urgent problem. At a meeting on 25 January 1944 a sharp differences of opinion emerged. The Chief of the Air Staff, Sir Charles Portal, ‘considered that SIRACOURT and WATTEN should be attacked on the highest priority, the necessary effort being at the expense of attacks on “ski” sites, and that SOTTEVAST and LOTTINGEM should be raised to the highest priority’ a little later. ‘Sir Alan Brooke’, meanwhile, the minutes recorded, ‘queried the wisdom of diverting effort from the attack on “ski” sites to large sites at this juncture’, while Lord Cherwell, no doubt present because secret weapons were on the agenda, made a typically unhelpful, and grotesquely wrong, contribution. ‘He was not convinced that the large sites were in fact rocket projectors for the attack of targets in this country. Possibly they were some form of anti-invasion defences’ designed to put down a ‘heavy concentration of gas on the beaches’. It was also decided to look into the possibility ‘of capturing for cross-examination purposes technical personnel concerned with the construction of large sites’, to try to establish just what the Germans were up to, and of ‘staging commando raids against “CROSSBOW” sites’. These last ideas never in fact came to anything, but bombing was something the Allies
could
accomplish, and between the start of the major ‘Crossbow’ bombing effort, on 5 December 1943, and 12 June 1944 more than 8000 tons of bombs were to be directed against all four ‘large sites’ so far mentioned, plus another three examined later.