Codebreakers Victory (49 page)

Britain's next step was to remove Niels Bohr from German control. In September 1943, he was aided in escaping from Norway and flown to London. Instead of assisting the Nazis, he became an adviser to the Anglo-American nuclear program.

German atomic scientists still refused to give up. First, they put the Vermork plant back in operation. Then, after it had produced a considerable amount of heavy water, came the word that the whole installation was to be evacuated to Germany. Transfer of the machinery itself did not greatly worry the British experts—they knew that Germany lacked the tremendous amounts of hydroelectric power needed to operate the plant. But the Germans could make good use of the plant's existing stores of heavy water.

Again, Nazi-hating Norwegians aided the British response. Brun's replacement at the plant told the plotters that the heavy-water consignment was to be shipped in railcars to a ferry that would cross a Norwegian lake and then be carried by rail to a waiting German ship. The weak point, the Norwegians figured, was the lake crossing. If they could sink the ferryboat in the deep lake, the heavy water would be irretrievably lost. The saboteurs were aware they would have to contend with special teams of Germans and a squadron of reconnaissance aircraft along the entire route.

Stupidly, the Germans did not guard the ferry beforehand. The Norwegian agents boarded her the night before the shipment was to arrive. In the hold they secured plastique bombs, detonators and a timer. The plan worked perfectly. When the ferry reached the deepest waters of the lake, the charges went off and tore a hole in the bow that sank the boat.

With it sank any German hopes of developing an atomic bomb before war's end.

It was in aerial warfare that Hitler's programs stirred the strongest anxiety among the Allies and came nearest to succeeding. Of concern were the three main areas of development: jet- and rocket-propelled aircraft, V-l pilotless bombing craft and V-2 rocket-powered missiles.

Ironically, it was a British inventor, Frank Whittle, who in 1937 ran the first jet engine and patented its principles. No one in Britain had the foresight to make his discoveries classified information, and engineers around the world seized upon his advance and began independent development of jets. In Britain, Whittle met with the hidebound opposition of aviation authorities. In Germany his ideas found fertile ground.

If the Nazis had concentrated their development on a few promising designs, they might well have made their jet aircraft a devastating reprisal weapon. However, too many competitors—Domier, Focke-Wulf, Heinkel, Junkers and Messerschmitt, among others—vied for the favor of Goring and Hitler. German science and German resources were burdened by demands both to improve conventional aircraft and to develop too many varieties of jets. Great effort was also expended on an aircraft propelled by rocket fuels that was supposed to render all existing aircraft obsolete. Most telling of all was the fact that the Luftwaffe, having to compete for scarce resources with the V-l and V-2 programs, was left virtually leaderless as Göring slipped more and more into self-indulgence and drug addiction.

Ultra decrypts were, of little help in the formative stages of these new planes, but Nazi haters filled the intelligence gap. As the pressures on German aircraft development and production increased, skilled men from occupied countries were recruited for service in factories and research centers. Many of them were only too willing to supply information that kept Britain's Air Ministry abreast of virtually every line of development. Later, BP decrypts began to weigh in, as messages disclosed the transfer of specialists to jet production, the training of jet mechanics and pilots and the schedules for the entry of new planes into service. A Magic decode of a Japanese attaché's Berlin report back to Tokyo in 1943 revealed that the Germans expected to have at least one line of jets in service by 1944, and other reports disclosed that Hitler intended to hurl his new jets against any invasion attempt by the Allies.

Fortunately, the combination of observers' reports from the continent, photoreconnaissance and Ultra decrypts pinpointed the production sites. Allied bombers knew exactly where to go to smash the factories. On just five good-flying-weather days during the operation code-named Big Week, beginning February 20, 1944, U.S. Air Force bombers, protected by their long-range fighters, conducted massive daytime raids on aircraft manufacturing plants. Together with RAF nighttime sorties, the raids destroyed more than seventy-five percent of the targeted buildings and over seven hundred jet aircraft. German plans and schedules were torn apart, the danger of the rocket plane was eased, and on D-Day the German jets proved to be no threat.

The Germans, nevertheless, persisted. Demands on Allied bomber commands occasioned by the invasion and the Normandy battles gave the Nazis' aircraft planners the rest that they needed to disperse production and locate much of it underground. Again a Japanese military attaché betrayed the Germans' expectations of producing a thousand jets a month by January 1945. And again the Allied bombers, able to break off from their ground war support, knew where to strike to delay work on the jets.

As the war approached its end, Hitler hoped to organize a corps of five hundred jets and reserves of fuel for them to be used as a "trump card." There were too many obstacles. The card was never played.

More serious threats were posed by the V-ls and V-2s. Once more a Nazi hater first tipped off the British about these and other German technical developments. Shortly after the war began, a never-identified source in Oslo left with the British embassy there an analysis of Germany's progress in weapons research. This "Oslo Report," passed on to the Air Ministry in London, accurately forecast what the Germans were planning in both pilotless aircraft and rocket missiles. It also disclosed to the British for the first time that the German center for technological experiments was on Peenemünde, an island off the Baltic coast.

The reported plans were so far ahead of British weapons development that at first they were dismissed as airy imaginings. But in early 1943 an Ultra decrypt reported the transfer of a Knickebein team to Peenemiinde. Anti-Nazis' reports quickly confirmed that this was the center of German work on advanced aerial weapons. Ultra removed any confusion about what these weapons were. At one end of the island, development was going forward on what became known as the V-l pilotless aircraft; at the other end a team of rocket scientists under the direction of Wernher von Braun was developing the V-2 rocket. French Resistance observers began reporting on launch sites in northern France that were plainly positioned to aim the V-ls toward London.

When these secret reports identified the work going on at Peenemunde, Churchill personally ordered Bomber Command to attack the island. Carried out on the night of August 16, the raid pulverized Peenemunde and set back this phase of German weapons development by months. Braun's team moved to a new underground center in Bavaria, and a new test site was built in Poland. Allied bombers slowed up the first firings of the new weapons by destroying many of their launch sites in France.

Because of the delays and design problems with the weapons, the Allies had landed in Normandy before the V-l buzz bombs began their guttural flights to Britain. They would pulse-jet ahead until their inner "air logs" had clicked off the requisite number of miles, shut down their fuel supplies and sent them into their deadly dives. For those of us stationed at Hall Place, the odds of survival were suddenly diminished. On the first long June night when V-ls began to arrive in full force, our captain ordered one of our guards to station himself in a cupola atop our roof and try to sound an alarm if the bomb came directly toward the manse. That poor sweating GI counted sixty-seven V-ls buzzing past and over him before dawn.

What we didn't know was that because of Ultra decodes and other intelligence, the British had had six months to get ready for the buzzers. In May 1944, as an example, Tricycle's spymaster sent a warning that this most valued of German agents should move out of London as soon as he could so as to escape Hitler's secret weapons targeted on the city.

We at Hall Place gained a firsthand view of one of the defensive steps taken by the British. On the second morning of the V-ls' arrival we were amazed to look southward and find that, overnight, a whole line of barrage balloons had been raised across the largely unpopulated heathlands, with cables forming a steel fence between them. Even as we watched, a buzz bomb tangled itself on one of the wires and came down in a harmless flash.

When the V-ls first started coming over, the antiaircraft batteries near us fired their shots ridiculously far behind the small, scudding craft. We didn't know that the British and American scientists were cooperating to correct that problem. Masses of antiaircraft guns equipped with American-developed proximity fuses were lined up on the south coasts to shoot down the V-Is before they could reach land.

On another day my shift was doing calisthenics outside Hall Place when a V-l came toward us. We hurried to flatten ourselves against the wall as we realized that on the buzz bomb's tail was a Spitfire whose guns were chattering away as it sought to bring the V-l down short of London. Fortunately, both planes went over the hill beyond our digs before the bomb exploded. Again, we learned later that the speeds of RAF fighters had been increased and Britain's own small fleet of jet planes pressed into use to run down the buzz bombs, mostly out at sea. As the summer went on, fewer and fewer of the bombs came our way and we began to breathe easier.

Although the V-ls destroyed more than a million homes and killed some ten thousand people, their reign was far shorter and less corrosive in terms of morale than the Germans had hoped. The launch sites originally chosen for them, in the Pas de Calais, were soon overrun by the Allies, forcing the Germans to fire the bombs from greater distances in Holland. Given this advantage, the RAF shot down more of them over the sea, and the coastal AA batteries were better able to track the ones that got through. In August the kill rate rose to seventy-four percent, and it climbed to eighty-three percent in the last days before the offensive ended in September. Hitler himself admitted, "The V-l unfortunately cannot decide the war."

The V-2s were another matter. They required little in the way of launch sites, and there was no defense against them. The giant rockets, prototypes of ballistic missiles, simply soared into the stratosphere, arced over Britain and smashed down with an impact that sent powerful shock waves radiating outward to remind war-weary Britons of the men, women and children who lay dead or dying at their epicenters. Braun and his colleagues managed a successful firing in October 1942. Seeing a film of the launch, Hitler called the V-2 "the decisive weapon of the war" and envisioned thousands of the missiles pouring down on England to pummel the cities into rubble and force the people, even at this late date, to sue for peace.

How near the Germans came to turning this last great fantasy of Adolf Hitler into reality is hard to assess. War historians seem to take it for granted that the plucky Brits, who had weathered so much, would also have endured this one without folding. As one who lived through that time, I am convinced that the threat of the V-2 rockets has been underestimated. Certainly, given more time, the Germans could have pounded much of England into dust, killed or maimed civilians by the thousands and hundreds of thousands and wiped out the masses of the Allied troops assembled there. And although it now seems inconceivable that British morale could have collapsed, I can testify that the V-2s' psychological impact was more powerful than their physical blows. There was no warning of them, no sirens wailing, no drone of approaching motors. There was just this brilliant flash and you and everything yards around you were gone, ionized, blown to bits. English people told me that the V-2s drove fear into the psyche as no earlier experience had done.

Add to this the fact that Braun's team was already working on a two-stage rocket that could have hurtled over the Atlantic to reach the U.S. Work was also under way on a rocket that could be launched from a platform towed by a U-boat.

The V-2 was a near thing. Its defeat in World War II was a matter of timing. The delays caused by the bombing of Peenemünde and other sites pushed back the beginning of the missiles' attack until September 8, 1944. On March 29, 1945, Allied troops overran their last launch sites. The countermeasures engineered by the British and their anti-Nazi colleagues on the continent limited the V-2 onslaught on Britain to 1,115 rockets, as calculated by Dr. Jones and his staff. In all they killed "only" about twenty-five hundred people in Britain. Their deaths were tokens of what might have been.

The Germans rained even more of the rockets on the Belgian cities of Antwerp and Liege after they were in Allied hands.

A footnote. For those of us Americans billeted in Kent's "Bomb Alley," the V-weapon attacks held an irony that we learned about only decades later. Lacking adequate air reconnaissance, the Germans decided to use their spies in Britain as forward observers for their unique artillery. The agents were instructed to report where the V-weapons hit and at what time, enabling the German specialists to correct their trajectories so as to deliver more of them on London rather than too far north or too far south. But of course the spies were under British control. Churchill's scientific guru, the ubiquitous Dr. Jones, devised a scheme whereby these pseudo observers reported the actual point of strike of bombs that had hit the central part of London coupled with the time of strike of those that had fallen short. This stratagem caused the Germans to believe the shorter-range setting was correct. Obligingly they set the timing mechanism so that more of them fell—where? On the approaches to London, on Bomb Alley. We at our intercept station were, unknowingly, helping to bring Hitler's vengeance weapons down on our own heads. That they landed all around us, without doing us in, was a matter of chance.