Hitler’s secret weapon

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Shortly before dawn on June 13, 1944, the crew of a Royal Navy motorboat patrolling the English Channel saw “a bright horizontal moving flame” in the sky above the coast of France. Moments later, two observers on the Kent coast — in civilian life, a greengrocer and a builder — heard a deafening “swishing sound … like a Model T Ford going up a hill”. Seven minutes later, there was a violent explosion in a field by the A2 between Rochester and Dartford. Nobody, thankfully, was hurt. But this was not the only bomb crossing the Channel. At almost the same time, another bomb woke Miss Atkinson at Mizbrook’s Farm in Sussex, while a third blew up two rows of greenhouses near Sevenoaks. The Nazi flying bombs had arrived.

For years, people had been swapping rumours about Hitler’s secret weapons. As Christy Campbell shows in his detailed and well-researched book, British intelligence had been keeping tabs on the Nazi missile programme for a long time, even though nobody was entirely sure whether it was real. Churchill’s chief scientific adviser, Frederick Lindemann, even believed the “flying bomb” stories were merely a cover for some other, more terrifying weapon. But Churchill thought there must be something to it, and asked his son-in-law, the 35-year-old Tory MP Duncan Sandys, to co-ordinate all “rocket intelligence”. He was right to worry. At Peenemünde, on Germany’s Baltic coast, the Nazis had established a secret rocket research centre. Indeed, Hitler himself thought the weapons would win him the war. “I want annihilation, total annihilation!” he told his rocket chief, a “strange, fanatical light” burning in his eyes.

In fact, as Campbell shows, the Nazi rocket programme came far too late. By the time the first V1 “doodlebugs” fell on London, killing six people in the first night, the Allies were already fighting their way through France. Even so, the V1s were still terrifying: at their peak, about 100 a day fell on London and southern England. By the autumn of 1944, most of the launch sites had been overrun and at a comically ill-fated press conference, Sandys declared that “except possibly for a few last shots, the Battle of London is over”. The very next day, however, the first V2, the world’s first long-range ballistic missile, smashed into Staveley Road, a residential street in Chiswick, damaging more than 500 houses, leaving a 30ft wide crater and killing three people. The Battle of London, it turned out, was still on.

Although Campbell’s book concentrates above all on the race to acquire intelligence about the rockets, he has some fascinating material on London’s response to this onslaught. According to George Orwell, the consensus was that the V2 rockets were somehow unfair because they made so little noise. “It wouldn’t be so bad if you got a bit of warning,” people remarked. The editor of Woman’s Own, meanwhile, reported that most people, hearing the explosions, “just kept on talking and had tea”.

It would have been nice to learn even more about ordinary Londoners’ reaction; instead, Campbell gets bogged down in a sub-Ben Macintyre spy story. But the truth is the V1 and V2 rockets were a sideshow. Having already endured the Blitz, Londoners could easily take a lesser bombardment, not least since victory was so clearly in sight.

Amazingly, the Germans spent more on the rocket programme than the Americans did on the Manhattan Project, while more people died making them (12,000 slave labourers) than were actually killed by the weapons themselves. For the same investment, Hitler could have built 25,000 fighter planes. His secret weapon, it turned out, was little more than a gigantic red herring.

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