There were gaps, nevertheless, in the Gestapo system, particularly in its ability to protect the German secret weapons programme. Because the testing of Germany’s pilotless weapons, later to be known to the British as the V-1 and V-2, necessitated test flights over areas populated by non-Germans in the Baltic and Poland, and because Germany’s acute shortage of labour forced the organisers of the secret weapons programme to employ non-German labour in work, particularly construction work, at the secret weapon sites, information leaked out. Over time, eyewitness reports, transmitted through networks run particularly by Poles, would yield considerable amounts of information about German secret weapon development. It was not, however, information for which the British were particularly looking at the outset. Under threat of invasion after June 1940 and heavy air attack after September, they were more concerned about the dangers of the here and now rather than those that might lie in the future.
As early as February 1939, however, seven months before the outbreak of war, the Committee for the Scientific Survey of Air Defence, chaired by the distinguished scientist Sir Henry Tizard, had decided to form an intelligence section and a young physicist, Dr. R. V. Jones, had been appointed to lead it. He was first directed to collect information about bacterial and chemical weapons, then believed to be a serious menace. In October his attention was diverted elsewhere, if only briefly. A report was received of an experimental station, located on the Baltic coast between Danzig and Königsberg in East Prussia, where the Germans were testing a “rocket shell” carrying 320 pounds of Ekracite explosive over ranges up to 300 miles.1 The source lay in gossip and might therefore have been discounted, along with much other rumour about fantasy devices. On 4 November, however, another report arrived on Dr. Jones’ desk, sent by the British naval attaché in Oslo, the capital of Norway.
About 2,000 words in length, “the Oslo Report,” as it became known, was not rumour but a detailed communication, obviously written by a practising scientist, describing nine weapons or weapon systems under development in Germany. Some were conventional—a new bomber, an aircraft carrier—some were not; the report also identified sites at which the new weapons were being tested. Among the unconventional weapons mentioned were a remote-controlled anti-ship glider bomb, a pilotless aircraft, “remote-controlled shells” propelled by rocket, acoustic torpedoes and an anti-aircraft proximity fuse. One of the two test sites named was at Peenemünde on the Baltic coast.2
The origin of the Oslo Report was mysterious and remained so for many years. Recently, however, it has been suggested—the suggestion has not been universally accepted—that the author was a German scientist, Hans Friederich Meyer, director of research at the great German electrical company Siemens.3 Meyer, who opposed Hitler’s racial policies, had a British friend, Cobden Turner, of the British General Electric Company. Much troubled by the treatment of a half-Jewish child whose mother he knew, Meyer told Turner of the case and Turner, equally troubled, managed to obtain a visa for the girl to leave Germany for England from the head of the MI6 station at the British embassy in Berlin, Frank Foley, just before war broke out. Foley was then posted to Oslo but Turner induced Meyer, as a token of gratitude for the grant of the visa, to write what we now know as the Oslo Report. Meyer typed it up on a visit to Oslo on official business on 1–2 November 1939 and it reached R.V. Jones, without attribution, two days later.
Though Jones was astounded by the Oslo Report—he described it later as “the most amazing statement I have ever seen”—it was allowed, because it was unsubstantiated and not amplified, to lie on the file. British intelligence had other matters on its mind during 1940–42; in the scientific field particularly German advances in aerial radio navigation, radar, tank technology and underwater warfare.
Jones was nevertheless right to recognise that the Oslo Report was pregnant with warning. In one form or another, however vague, it gave advance notice of at least four weapons that were to do the Allies great harm before the war was out: in ascending order of importance, the anti-ship glider bomb (the HS293), the acoustic torpedo (Zaunkönig), the rocket-propelled shell, eventually to be realised as the A-4 projectile—V-2 to the British and father to all ballistic missiles—and the FZG-76, or flying-bomb, father of the modern cruise missile. While the Oslo Report slept on a British shelf in 1940–42, German scientists were busy bringing to production stage the weapons of which it warned.
British—and then American—efforts spurred them on. Had RAF Bomber Command, joined in the strategic bombing offensive by the American Eighth Air Force during 1942, not succeeded in that year in breaking through the Reich’s air defences and beginning the destruction of Germany’s major cities, it is possible that Hitler would not have chosen to allocate the resources necessary to make “weapons of reprisal,” as he came to call them, the agents of destruction of the cities of his enemies, particularly London but also Antwerp in Belgium, that they became in 1944–45. Allied bombing not only wrought terrible devastation on German homes and factories, and on Germany’s cultural heritage, and terrible disruption as well as termination of ordinary Germans’ everyday lives; it also directly attacked Hitler’s and his Nazi party’s claim to be the protectors of the German people. While bombs rained down on Berlin, Hamburg, Cologne and his state’s other centres of population, unanswered after the defeat of the Luftwaffe as a means of attack against Britain in 1941, Hitler began to burn with the urge to pay back. Göring’s conventional bombers had failed him. During 1943 he turned to the promise of unconventional weapons to repay the hurt.
The British scientific intelligence service’s attention was first drawn back to German secret weapons at the end of 1942, when a report reached London, from a Danish chemical engineer, of a conversation overheard in a Berlin restaurant about a rocket fired from Swinemünde—not far from the Oslo Report’s Peenemünde—which was said to carry five tons of explosives over 130 miles. In February 1943 a second report, from another source, gave different capabilities to the rocket but specified that it was launched from Peenemünde.4
Germany has little sea coast. West of the Danish peninsula, its seaboard runs inside the Friesian islands, forming a region that provided Erskine Childers with the setting for the first serious novel of espionage, The Riddle of the Sands, written just before the First World War and warning the British of the Kaiser’s hostile intentions against their coasts. East of the Danish peninsula, inside the Baltic, lie Germany’s historic mercantile ports but also the summer holiday places of its leisured class—small fishing villages amid fir-lined dunes and white beaches. It was the holiday connection that brought Germany’s secret weapons programme to the Baltic. The family of Wernher von Braun, the leading young rocket designer, had spent summers there, and when a testing site was being sought, his mother suggested that remote and sparsely populated spot.5 Work began on the site in 1936, and by 1943, when the British began to take an increasingly close interest, the establishment had grown considerably. It consisted of two locations, Peenemünde West, under the control of the Luftwaffe, where the flying bombs were under development; and Peenemünde East, the army base where the V-2 rocket, known to the Germans as the A-4, was tested. An airfield had been built, a camp for the labour force—largely non-German—laboratories, workshops, a plant for producing liquid oxygen, an essential ingredient of the V-2’s fuel which was in short supply, and a housing estate for the scientific staff.
Peter Wegener, a young scientist who had been recalled from an anti-aircraft unit on the Eastern Front to work at Peenemünde, has left a revealing picture of life there. In some ways it mirrored that of Bletchley Park. The rocket scientists were young, highly educated, often from the upper middle class. Wegener was a boarding-school product from a professional family. Von Braun was from a similar background, as was, notably, Albert Speer, who, in 1943, had risen from the position of Hitler’s personal architect to be Reich armaments minister and so directly responsible for V-1 and V-2 production. Von Braun and Speer were handsome and charming young men of wide interests and considerable social assurance. Wegener was formed in the same mould. After three years in the army, only latterly as an officer, he found the transfer to the university-like surroundings of Peenemünde, among people of his own sort, men and women with doctoral degrees and civilised manners, a delightful liberation. “I never heard a harsh word: everyone helped everyone else, and good humour reigned”; little attention was paid to rank; “in fact, it was a pleasure to work in this place.”6 The description might apply to Bletchley. There was this difference. At Bletchley, despite the common-room atmosphere, the in-jokes, the amateur dramatics and the undercurrent of romance, the strictest rules of security applied. No one ever spoke about his or her work outside the immediate workplace; instant removal was the penalty. At Peenemünde, by contrast, “need to know” was not a principle. “Practically all discussions in larger groups—in the mess hall and other public places—concerned technical problems. Everybody spoke freely of his work; internal security simply did not exist. Fachsimplen, or shop talk, squeezed out all other discussions.”
It was a recipe for leaks, all the more oddly given the reputation of the British as gossips and rule-breakers and of the Germans as humourless disciplinarians. Peenemünde clearly did leak, in a way that Bletchley, whose 10,000 initiates kept the secret intact for twenty-eight years, did not. It was leaks that alerted the British to the danger brewing at Peenemünde, first the Danish engineer’s report of careless talk in a Berlin restaurant, then in February 1943 another, mentioning Peenemünde, third, in March, serious authentication. On 22 March, two captured German generals, well known to the British as a result of their part in the desert battles against the Eighth Army, were brought together in a room wired for sound. They—Generals Cruewell and von Thoma—had not seen each other for several months. In the warmth of re-encounter, they began to talk—too freely. Von Thoma spoke of a visit to a test site where he had been told by the officer in charge of “huge rockets” which would go ten miles into the stratosphere and had unlimited range.7 A copy of the transcript of the Cruewell–von Thoma conversation was sent to R. V. Jones, head of scientific intelligence at the Air Ministry. He passed his concern up the chain of command, asking for authority to take charge of an investigation, the results not to be released, for fear of causing unnecessary alarm, until it was complete. When his proposal reached General Ismay, Chief of Staff to Winston Churchill in his capacity as Minister of Defence, a one-man ministry Churchill had created for himself, it was turned down. Ismay argued that a matter as important as a rocket attack on Britain must be taken out of the narrow scientific field and confided to a single investigator able to call on the widest advice. He was supported by the Chiefs of Staff, who accepted the gravity of the danger. “The fact,” Ismay wrote to Churchill on 15 April, “that five reports have been received since the end of 1942 indicates a foundation of fact even if details are inaccurate.”8 The Chiefs proposed that the single investigator should be Duncan Sandys, a son-in-law of Churchill who had been invalided out of the army’s only rocket regiment, an anti-aircraft unit, and, as a Member of Parliament, was currently serving as Parliamentary Secretary to the Ministry of Supply, responsible for weapons research. Churchill at once agreed—Sandys was a man of known ability and energy—and he started work on 20 April.
The previous day the Central Interpretation Unit (CIU), which examined photographic intelligence at Medmenham in Buckinghamshire, not far from Bletchley, had received orders from the Air Ministry to investigate signs of a German secret weapons programme wherever they could be found. The first area of search was to be in northwest France, since prognosis suggested that the likely weapons, a long-range gun, a rocket aircraft or “a rocket launched from a tube,” would have to be based within 130 miles of London. Duncan Sandys, displaying remarkable insight, wanted the search to be cast wider. He argued, on the basis of his experience with experimental anti-aircraft rockets, that any German weapons under development would have to be tested first, well away from populated areas, not in occupied territory and near the sea. Those limiting conditions suggested a site on Germany’s short coastline and as Peenemünde had already been mentioned in agents’ reports, it became the obvious target for close photographic reconnaissance.9
Peenemünde had been overflown by RAF photographic reconnaissance (PR) aircraft, but in the course of the general surveillance of enemy territory, not as a specific reconnaissance target. It now began to receive close attention; Peter Wegener was later to record in his memoir of Peenemünde the frequent passage overhead, in the beautiful Baltic summer months, of Mosquito aircraft. He accepted them uncomprehendingly as part of the scene and invested them with no menace; the skies of Germany in 1943 were full of British and American aircraft, but most were bound for Berlin.10 On 21 April, however, Peenemünde had been photographed carefully and many of its buildings identified, wrongly as would later appear. Photographed again on 14 May, and on 12 June, more mistaken identifications were made. Not until 23 June was the evidence interpreted to yield an identification of rockets. The photographic interpreters might be forgiven; what they had first described as “objects” were only 1H millimeters long on the film. There was also much to confuse them. Unknown to anyone in Britain, two, not one, revenge weapons were under development at Peenemünde, the flying bomb as well as the rocket; while in Britain the scientific defence establishment was riven by a bitter and highly personalised dispute between clever men, some of whom denied the possibility of the rocket’s existence.