The move to Poland
As the Germans sought to recover what they could from
Peenemünde, the top-secret development work on the V-2 was immediately
transferred to the SS training base near Blizna, deep inside Poland, where it
would be undetected by the British and less easily reached by air. Meanwhile, a
launch site at Watten, near the coast of northern France, had already been
selected as a V-2 base. Work had started in April 1943 and was duly reported to
the British by agents of the French resistance. Dörnberger had long recognized
that a V-2 could be launched from a small site – it would be a case of ‘shoot
and run’. But after the raid on Peenemünde, Hitler decided that further major new
launch and storage sites were the prime requirement. At d’Helfaut Wizernes, a
site inland from Calais in northern France, they constructed a huge reinforced
concrete dome, La Coupole, within a limestone quarry. The idea was to store the
rockets within reinforced bomb-proof concrete chambers and bring them out for
firing in quick succession. In May 1943 reconnaissance photographs disclosed
details of the work, and by the end of the month bombing raids had been sent to
the site. The timing of the bombing was set to coincide with freshly laid
cement, so that the ruins would harden into a chaotic jumble that would be
difficult for the Germans to repair. Repeated bombing by the Allies led to the
idea being abandoned. The V-2 bombardment was then carried out from small
scattered sites, as Dörnberger had always envisaged. The vast German bunkers
were never fully operational, and they stand to this day as a World War II
museum.
After the raid on Peenemünde, the main manufacture of the
V-2 rockets was transferred to the Mittelwerk in Kohnstein. The rockets were
manufactured by prisoners from Mittelbau-Dora, a concentration camp where an
estimated 20,000 people died during World War II. A total of 9,000 of these
were reported to have died from exhaustion, 350 were executed – including 200
accused of sabotage – and most of the rest were eventually shot, died from
disease, or starved. By the war’s end, they had constructed a total of 5,200
V-2 rockets. On 29 August 1944 Hitler ordered V-2 attacks to commence with immediate
effect. The offensive started on 8 September 1944 when a rocket was aimed at
Paris. It exploded in the city, causing damage at the Porte d’Italie. Another
rocket was launched the same day from The Hague, Netherlands, and hit London at
6.43pm. It exploded in Staveley Road, Chiswick, killing Sapper Bernard Browning
who was on leave from the Royal Engineers. A resident, 63-year-old Mrs Ada
Harrison, and three-year-old Rosemary Clarke also perished in the blast.
Intermittent launches against London increased in frequency, though the Germans
did not officially announce the bombardment until 8 November 1944. Until then,
every time a V-2 exploded in Britain the authorities insisted it was a gas main
that had burst; but with the German announcement the truth had to emerge. Two
days later, Churchill confessed to the House of Commons that England had been
under rocket attack ‘for the last few weeks’.
Over several months more than 3,000 V-2s were fired by the
Germans. Around 1,610 of them hit Antwerp; 1,358 landed on London, and
additional rockets were fired into Liege, Hasselt, Tournai, Mons, Diest, Lille,
Paris, Tourcoing, Remagen, Maastricht, Arras and Cambrai on continental Europe.
In Britain, Norwich and Ipswich also suffered occasional V-2 attacks. The accuracy
of the rockets increased steadily, and some of them impacted within a few yards
of the intended target. The fatalities were sometimes alarming. On 25 November
1944 a V-2 impacted at a Woolworths store in New Cross, London, where it killed
160 civilians and seriously injured 108 more. Another attack on a cinema in
Antwerp killed 567 people. This was the worst loss of life in a single V-2
attack.
The V-2 falls into Allied hands
The Allies were receiving regular intelligence reports about
the rockets, but knew little of the precise design details until a V-2 was
retrieved from Sweden and examined in detail. On 13 June 1944, a V-2 on a test
flight from Peenemünde exploded several thousand feet above the Swedish town of
Bäckebo. The wreckage was collected by the Swedes and offered to the British
for reconstruction. Officially neutral, Sweden was also secretly supplying the
German weapons factories with up to 10,000,000 tons of iron ore per year. To
maintain their ostensibly neutral stance, the Swedes asked for some British
Supermarine Spitfire fighter aircraft in exchange. In August 1944
reconstruction of the rocket was begun, and the resulting insight into the
construction of the missile was highly revealing to the Allies. As it happens,
this particular rocket was fitted with a guidance system that was never
installed on the rockets raining down on Britain, and so the British were more
impressed with the technology than they might otherwise have been. Yet the fact
remained: although the design of the V-2 was now thoroughly understood, it was
abundantly clear there was no defence against them. These weapons arrived at
supersonic speeds, so there could be no advance warning and it seemed as though
there was nothing that could be done to resist the onslaught.
Or was there? The resourceful officers at British
Intelligence had a simple response. Because the area of damage was small, they
began releasing fictitious reports that the rockets were over-shooting their
targets by between 10 and 20 miles (16 to 32km). As soon as these covert
messages were intercepted by the Germans, the launch teams recalibrated the
launch trajectory to make good the discrepancy … and from then on, the rockets
fell some 20 miles short of their target, most of them landing in Kent instead
of central London. The final two rockets exploded on 27 March 1945 and one of
these was the last to kill a British civilian. She was Mrs Ivy Millichamp, aged
34, who was blown apart by the V-2 at her home in Kynaston Road, Orpington in
the county of Kent, just 20 miles from the centre of London.
As the V-2 was proving the reliability of the ballistic
missile, larger rockets were soon on the drawing-board. The A-9 was envisaged
as a rocket with a range of up to 500 miles (800km) and an A-10 was planned to
act as a first-stage booster that could extend the range to reach the United
States. The original development work had been undertaken in 1940, with a first
flight date set for 1946, but the project – as so often happened – was
summarily stopped. When the so-called Projekt Amerika re-emerged in 1944, work
was resumed, and the A-11 was planned as a huge first stage that would carry
the A-9 and A-10. The plans (which were released in 1946 by the United States
Army) were for a rocket that could even place a payload of some 660lb (300kg)
into orbit. The proposed A-12 fourth stage would have a launch weight of 3,500
tons and could place 10 tons into orbit. In the event, all these plans were to
fall into Allied hands as the European war drew to a close. During the spring of
1945 the Allies advanced from the west, and the Russians closed in from the
east. When news reached Peenemünde that the Soviet Army was only about 100
miles (160km) away, Von Braun assembled the planning staff and broke the news.
It was time to decide by which army they would be captured. All knew that the
world would regard them as war criminals, and the decisions were not easy.
The dreadful destruction and the mass killings reported
early in the campaign make the V-2 seem like a terrifyingly successful rocket,
but was it really valuable as a weapon of war? Let us look at the figures. It
has been estimated that 2,754 civilians were killed in Britain by the 1,402 V-2
attacks. A further people 6,523 were injured. These simple facts reveal that
the V-2, as a weapon of war, was a costly failure. Each of these incredibly
expensive and complex missiles killed about two people, and injured roughly six
more, indeed it has been calculated that more casualties were caused by the
manufacture of the V-2 than resulted from its use in war. The reality was that
they were inefficient in terms of killing the enemy – but they had proved how
successful they were as rockets. Von Braun had always wanted to build rockets,
and had held in his heart the ultimate ambition of building a space rocket. The
Nazis held onto the propaganda value of their successful launch series, even
though remarkably few people were being killed by the V-2 attacks. The Nazis
had been used by Von Braun to fund his private ambitions; Hitler’s doubts about
the V-2 as an agent of warfare were right after all.
One of the first initiatives after the Allies invaded
Peenemünde was to test the V-2 rockets before any were moved to other
countries. In October 1945, the British Operation Backfire fired several V-2 rockets
from northern Germany. There were many reports of what became known as ‘ghost
rockets’, unaccountable sightings of missile trails in the skies above
Scandinavia. These were from Operation Backfire: not only did the Nazis fire
their monster rockets from Germany, so too did the British.
The Soviet option
It has been widely reported that the Germans unanimously
decided to surrender to the Western Allies. This is not the case. Some of the
scientists were more impressed by the Soviet system than they were by American
capitalism, and Helmut Gröttrup was the most conspicuous of these. Gröttrup was
an electronics engineer who no longer wished to ‘understudy’ Von Braun as he
had done in the development of the V-2 rocket. Gröttrup decided to approach the
Soviets and was offered a senior position in Russian rocket development.
Between 9 September 1945 and 22 October 1946 Gröttrup with his loyal team of
researchers worked for the USSR in the Soviet Occupied Zone of Germany (later
to become the German Democratic Republic). His director of research was Sergei
Korolev, Russia’s leading rocket scientist. In the autumn of 1946, the entire
team was moved to Russia. Gröttrup had cooperated with Russia in bringing 20 of
the V-2 rockets to the newly established rocket research institute at Kapustin
Yar, between Volgograd and the deserts of Astrakhan. The base is known today as
Znamensk and it had opened on 13 May 1946 specifically to offer facilities to
German experts. In charge was General Vasily Voznyuk and on 18 October 1947
they launched the first of the V-2 rockets brought in from Germany.
Gröttrup worked under Korolev to develop the Russian R-1
project; these were in reality V-2 rockets built using Russian manufacturing
and materials with the German designs. The People’s Commissar of Armaments,
Dmitry Ustinov, requested that Gröttrup and his team of technicians design new
missile systems, culminating in the projected R-14 rocket which was similar to
the design of long-range missiles that Von Braun was developing during the war.
The site at Znamensk developed into a top-secret cosmodrome and the small town
itself was expanded to provide a pleasurable and civilized lifestyle for the
families of the research teams working on the rockets. It was no longer
included on Russian maps, and there were strict rules against disclosure of
what was going on.
The value of the German expertise to the Russians proved to
be limited and, in due course, the authorities allowed the research workers to
return to their homes in Germany. The design of rocket motors in Russia by
Aleksei Mikhailovich Isaev was already superior to the German concepts used in
the V-2 rockets, and their lightweight copper motors gave rise to the first
intercontinental ballistic missile, the R-7. It was this design advantage that
gave the Russians technical superiority in rocketry and led to their launching
the world’s first satellite Sputnik 1, and subsequently to the launch of Yuri
Gagarin as the first man into space.
The same technology gave the Russians the capacity to launch
the first lunar probe, and later the spacecraft sent out towards the planets.
Indeed, this design of rocket is still in use today. Once it was recognized
that there was little point in keeping the German rocket specialists in Russia,
on 22 November 1955 Gröttrup was given leave to return to his native Germany.
In cooperation with Jürgen Dethloff he went on to design and patent the chip
card which was to become so important in modern banking systems, and so his
post-war genius is with us today.
Moving to America: Operation Paperclip
Most of Von Braun’s team opted to surrender to the Western
Allies, rather than the Russians. With the position of Germany deteriorating
rapidly, conflicting orders began to arrive. The rocket technicians were
ordered to move en masse to Mittelwerk; then they received orders to join the
Army and stay to fight the invading Allies. Von Braun opted to hide in the
mountains, out of harm’s way and nearer to the advancing American and British
forces. Several thousand employees and their families left their homes,
voyaging south in ships and barges, by rail and road. They had to dodge Allied
bombing raids and deal with Nazi officials at checkpoints. Von Braun was
fearful that the defeated SS might try to destroy the results of their work, so
he had blueprints of all their designs hidden in an abandoned mineshaft in the
Harz mountains where he could later retrieve them.
In March 1945, his driver fell asleep at the wheel and Von
Braun was left with a compound fracture of his left arm. Insisting on being
mobile, he had the fracture roughly set in a cast. It was unsatisfactory, and
so in the following month he had to return to hospital where the bone was
broken again and re-aligned correctly. He was still in plaster as the Allied troops
advanced.
Suddenly the team was ordered to move to Oberammergau in the
Bavarian Alps. They were placed under guard by the SS who had orders to shoot
everyone if they were about to fall into Allied hands. Von Braun got wind of
this, and persuaded the SS officer in charge that keeping them together made
them a sitting target for Allied bombing raids. Since they were important
personnel, Von Braun argued, it would surely be safer to distribute the members
of the team among the nearby villages. In one of these villages, on 2 May 1945,
Von Braun’s brother Magnus – also a rocket engineer – suddenly encountered an
American private of the 44th Infantry Division named Fred Schneiker. Magnus von
Braun rode up on his bicycle, and announced: ‘My name is Magnus von Braun. My
brother invented the V-2. Please, we want to surrender.’ Von Braun was
immediately locked up, and so were thousands of the others, as war criminals.
The factories were quickly overrun and between 22 and 31 May 1945 a total of
341 railway trucks were used to move as many V-2 rockets as possible and the
manufacturing equipment to Antwerp, from where 16 Liberty ships transported
them to the port of New Orleans. From there the rockets and equipment were
transferred to the New Mexican desert under conditions of extreme secrecy.
The German rocket engineers themselves were also taken to
the United States covertly, as part of Operation Paperclip. This secret scheme
was set up by the United States Office of Strategic Services (OSS), which in
turn gave rise to today’s Central Intelligence Agency (CIA). It had been
assumed that the personnel involved in creating the weapons of mass destruction
would be put on trial for war crimes, but during the closing stages of the war
it was decided instead to see if the United States could secretly harness their
knowledge. Agents within the United States resolved to bring these people to
America and use the benefits of their research, at the same time denying the
benefits to their allies, the Soviet Union and the British.
Although relatively unknown, there was a similar scheme
operating for the British. This was code named Operation Surgeon and it was
intended to bring promising research engineers to Britain and to deny them to
the Soviet Union. The official policy was not to involve suspected war
criminals, but to capture some 1,500 research personnel and to remove them
forcibly. The document setting this out was entitled Employment of German
Scientists and Technicians: Denial Policy, and it survives to this day at the
National Archives, Kew, United Kingdom. It was explicit about the need to
obtain personnel, and said they would be removed ‘whether they liked it or
not’. Many of the individuals on the lists offered their services to other
Commonwealth countries, with some opting to go to South American countries
(including Brazil) and others going to Scandinavia and Switzerland. The scheme
was the first to come into operation, and ran from the time the British forces
overran the German research establishments until all the scientists and
engineers had been accounted for.
Not until September 1945 was Operation Paperclip authorized
by President Harry S. Truman. The President’s orders stated that nobody should
be included who had ‘been a member of the Nazi Party, and more than a nominal
participant in its activities, or an active supporter of Nazi militarism’.
Included under that clause as Nazi sympathizers were many of the senior figures
like Von Braun who was stated, at the time, to be ‘a menace to the security of
the Allied Forces’.
As a result, the aims of Operation Paperclip were clearly
unlawful and what is more OSS agents acted in direct defiance of the
President’s orders. In order to make the most desirable personnel seem
acceptable, the representatives of the OSS constructed false employment and
faked political biographies for the chosen scientists. All references to Nazi
party membership, and any political activity in Nazi Germany, were removed from
the record, and new résumés were concocted by the American secret service. At
the end of each exercise, a German specialist – often with enduring Nazi
sympathies – had been provided with a fictitious political history and an
imaginary personal life. The documents were typed up, carefully countersigned,
and attached to their birth certificates with paperclips – which gave the
operation its name. In the meantime, Von Braun had disappeared. He found
himself secretly jailed at a top-secret military intelligence unit at Fort
Hunt, Virginia, in the United States. It had no name, and was referred to only
by its postal code ‘PO Box 1142’. This was a top-secret confinement facility
undeclared to the Red Cross and was thus in breach of the Geneva Convention.
Another of the senior scientists who was taken to America by
the Allies was Adolf Thiel. Before he had joined Von Braun at the Peenemünde
research laboratories, Thiel had been Associate Professor of Engineering at the
Darmstadt Institute of Technology. After the war, as part of Operation
Paperclip, Thiel was taken with Von Braun to Fort Bliss, Texas, and later to
the White Sands Missile Range in New Mexico and on to Huntsville, Alabama. His
prime responsibility in America was the refinement of the V-2 design into the
Redstone missile, and he later adapted it to become the Thor ballistic missile,
which was the first stage rocket for the Explorer spacecraft. Thiel was made a
Fellow of the American Astronautical Society in 1968 and died in Los Angeles in
2001 aged 86. So he lived into the new millennium, and saw the realization of
the dream of space exploration.
Dörnberger was also brought to America and went on to work
for the United States Air Force developing guided missiles. Later he was a key
figure in developing the X-20 Dyna-Soar which was, in many ways, the ancestor
of the space shuttle; he also worked on the Rascal, an air-to-surface nuclear
missile used by the Strategic Air Command. He later retired to Germany and died
in 1980 at home in Baden-Württemberg. On 8 July 1944 he had received a
handwritten note from Hitler: ‘I have had to apologize only to two men in my
whole life,’ the Führer had written. ‘The first was Field Marshal von
Brauchitsch. I did not listen to him when he told me again and again how
important your research was. The second man is yourself. I never believed that
your work would be successful.’
V2 The A4 Rocket from Peenemunde to Redstone
Author: Murray R Barber
Publisher: Crecy Publishing Ltd ISBN: 978 19065 365 24
The German A4 rocket, or V2 – ‘Vergeltungswaffen Zwei’
(Vengeance Weapon 2), was the most sophisticated and advanced weapon developed
in Europe during the Second World War. From September 1944 to March 1945,
German army launch teams fired more than 3,000 V2 rockets at targets in
England, France, Belgium and even within Germany itself. Many V2s were fired
from mobile launch sites and from concealed wooded areas, using fleets of
transporters and trailers with sophisticated ancillary and support vehicles.
Travelling at the edge of space, the V2 rockets fell without warning at
supersonic speeds, turning buildings and streets into cratered rubble, and
terrorizing the civilians targeted by these attacks.
Drawing on a wide range of archive sources, rare personal
accounts and interviews conducted with personnel associated with the A4/V2
program, rocketry expert Murray R. Barber traces the origins of the V2 and
presents a detailed view of the research conducted at the secret, experimental
rocket-testing facility at Kummersdorf West and the vast, infamous base at
Peenemunde. This important new work reveals the transformation of the rocket
into a weapon of war and describes the A4 in detail as well as the intense and
often difficult intelligence effort by the Allies to discover more about this
highly secret and unprecedented weapon, and to destroy it.
The author also describes the field-testing of the A4
rocket, its reliability problems and the remedies and compromises employed to
deal with them. He reveals the activities of the SS and their machinations to
gain control of the rocket program from the Wehrmacht, as well as the
subsequent operational deployment of the V2 in Operation Penguin, the
‘vengeance’ offensive against the British Isles.
Illustrated throughout with rare and many previously unseen
images (including color photographs), technical drawings and maps, this is the
most comprehensive book ever on the V2, and includes important new details of
the post-war development and testing of the rocket and its role in the dawning
of the space age.
Review
There are arguably two major developments that changed the
lives of the population of planet earth during World War II. One was the atom
bomb and the second the intercontinental rocket. It was up to the Germans to
perfect a long-range rocket. Around 3,000 were produced and were used both
against the civilian population of Southern England and the invading forces.
Morals aside, this volume deals mainly with the design, development and
operations of this weapon.
The first chapter deals with the development of German
rocketry as a propulsion system. They were not unique is this field. Rockets
were used worldwide to give extra power to aircraft when needed and batteries
of rockets armed with high explosives were used by both sides in World War II.
What was really wanted was a sophisticated guidance system. That, coupled with
range, made this a formidable weapon. This book will tell you everything you
wanted to know about it.
The text is enormous and the book is packed with excellent
photographs in both black and white and colour. Like the V1 this missile had
one major law, it being a big target for roaming allied aircraft. Like its
predecessor it moved from static launch sites to mobile units, this portability
being needed because not only was it used as a terror weapon, but against the
advancing Allies. They could be positioned in woodland areas and the missile
would be camouflaged and you will find a number of these in the artwork.
As with other conflicts enemies become best friends if they
provide valuable information to the victor. None more so than Wernher von Braun
and his team of scientists who were transported to America to work on long
distant rockets for them. Thus we now have a missile that can reach anywhere in
the world with enough power to destroy it. This book is the twenty ninth in the
classic series and stands alone on this subject.
www. crecy. co. uk
Spezialfahrzeuge Peenemünde 1942-45 V2 rocket book.
This V2 rocket book covers the various vehicles for fire
control, supply, testing, fuel, trailers such as the ‘Meillerwagen’ and
‘Vidalwagen’, trailers for liquids, gantry cranes and rail cars including the
launching railroad wagon. All vehicle types are shown; photographs, detailed
drawings, designs and technical specifications based on historical
documentation, production rate and deployment of the Division z.V. are part of
this documentation. 320 pages, hardcover in landscape format, text in English
and German with over 250 (TBC) rare and unpublished photographs of these unique
vehicles and devices. Additionally, there are copies of rare original documents
and a set of detailed 1/35 scale drawings that will give historical (technical)
researchers and scale modellers a tremendous new source of valuable
information.
