The war was fought in the laboratory as well as on the front line. While German scientists worked on guided missiles, the Allies unlocked the secrets of the atomic bomb.
THE SECOND WORLD WAR was the biggest conventional conflict ever fought. It was also the first in which both sides sought to win a decision by purely technological means, by 'secret weapons' that would save conventional forces the price of a victory paid for in blood.
Two lines of research dominated the technological effort: long-range pilotless weapons that would deliver a warhead accurately to a target in enemy territory; and a warhead of unprecedented explosive power. The Western Allies concentrated exclusively on the second effort, in which they were eventually successful. The Germans tried for both, and while they failed to produce an atomic bomb, they managed to deploy two pilotless weapons - the V-1 flying bomb and the V-2 rocket - from which descend respectively all modern cruise and ballistic missiles.
The story of the German pilotless weapons programme began in 1927, when a 19-year old student at the Berlin Technical College, Werner von Braun, joined the German Society for Space Travel. This was merely a discussion society, but it led him on to the German Amateur Rocket Society, which actually built experimental missiles.
The society's Berlin testing ground was visited in 1932 by a regular artillery officer, Walter Dornberger, who had just been appointed to the army department concerned with rocket experiments. Dornberger was immensely impressed by von Braun's energy and theoretical knowledge, and the two began to co-operate.
Guided missiles
For Dornberger, and for the German army, the attraction of rockets was that they were not forbidden to Germany by the Treaty of Versailles as heavy artillery was. Dornberger, himself a heavy artillery officer, later wrote: 'I had been a heavy gunner. Gunnery's highest achievement to date had been the huge Paris gun (which) fired a 21cm shell with about 25lb of high explosive about 80 miles. My idea of a first big rocket was something that would send a ton of high explosive over 160 miles.'
He also stipulated a 'number of military requirements, among others that for every 1,000ft range a deviation of only two or three feet from (the chosen point of impact) was acceptable'. The missile must also be transportable 'intact by road and must not exceed the maximum width laid down for road vehicles'.
Dornberger's design prescription betrayed his background as a heavy gunner, harking back as it did to the 303mm and 420mm guns with which the Germans had devastated the Belgian forts in 1914. It ensured that future German ballistic missiles would be weapons of the artillery arms. And it cast rocket research far into the future. What he demanded, in effect, was a prototype for the mobile ballistic missile which has become a principal strategic weapon of the superpowers in the late 20th century.
Moreover, his later insistence that the missile should travel on a vehicle which was also its launcher - the Meillerwagen - led to the appearance of the transporter-erector which has made today's Soviet SS-20 and American Pershing 2 instruments of strategic power so survivable that their existence has produced the first agreement to eliminate a whole category of weapons ever agreed between leading military powers.
Because the ballistic missile would be an army rather than an air force weapon, Dornberger was able to extract substantial funds from the General Staff for its development. By 1937, with von Braun as his chief scientist, he had established an experimental station on the Baltic island of Peenemunde, and by 1942 they were ready to stage a test firing of the A-4, as the V-2 was known to the Germans. Its specifications almost exactly met in detail those which Dornberger had laid down for a missile ten years earlier.
Meanwhile, the Luftwaffe had also entered the pilotless weapons programme. At the other end of Peenemunde island the air force was preparing to test its FZG-76 flying bomb, to be known to the Allies as the V-1. The V-1 had major advantages over the V-2: it was cheap to make, could be produced at the rate of about 5,000 a month, and consumed none of the scarce liquid oxygen and high-grade alcohol requied by the V-2.
Consequently, Dornberger was extremely gratified when, at a competitive firing held on 3 October, 1943, the V-2 behaved perfectly while the two V-1s launched both misfired.
Dornberger pressed ahead with the perfection of the V-2, while the V-1 team redoubled their efforts to make the flying bomb an effective weapon. Unknown to both, however, the British had got wind of the pilotless weapon programme and on the night of August 17/18 330 bombers devastated Peenemunde. As a result neither weapon would be ready for operational deployment until mid-1944.
The V-1 was ready first. Hitler had hoped to attack the English Channel ports in which the Allied armies were massing for the D-Day invasion. In the event, it was not until 13 June, a week after the invasion had begun, that the first V-1s were fired. Fortunately, the early launches were also erratic. By mid-July, however, the flying bomb, or 'doodlebug', had become an object of terror to Londoners, in whose city they were causing the greatest damage suffered since the daylight blitz of September 1940.
By 26 July 16,000 Londoners had become casualties and 700,000 houses had been damaged. The peculiar terror of the doodlebug was its initial audibility followed by silence over the point of descent. 'Buzz bombs', as they were also called, did indeed buzz when their pulse-jet motors were heard from a distance. But when the guidance system told the motor to stop, the bomb ceased to fly and dropped like a stone, to explode with a force that could destroy a whole city block.
Fighter, gun and balloon defence somewhat reduced the buzz bomb menace. Of 9,000 fired, 4,000 were destroyed in flight. But the most effective means found to reduce their destructiveness was via intelligence. The British security service had 'turned' all co-operative German agents landed in Britain since 1939 - the rest were imprisoned or shot - and used them to transmit false information of the V-1s' landing points. This system of deception caused Flak Regiment 155, the launch unit, progressively to shorten the range of its firings, until most V-1s landed in open country south of London.
By September the Allied liberation armies had overrun the V-1 launch sites in northern France and Belgium and so brought the flying bomb campaign to an end. On 8 September, however, the V-2 batteries came into operation. Located initially on the island of Walcheren at the mouth of the Scheldt, they would continue to fire from that location or others at London or Antwerp until 29 March 1945. Some 1,300 were fired at each target, and 2,500 Londoners were killed during the campaign.
At first the V-2 did not inspire the fear the V-1 had done, since it arrived without warning. Later, though, as George Orwell noted, people began to 'talk nostalgically of the days of the V-1. "The good old doodlebug did at least give you time to get under the table..." Some people are never satisfied.'
Together the German pilotless weapons had given Londoners a frightening and painful nine months. Yet at no stage had they threatened the viability of Britain as a base for Allied warmaking or weakened the British people's will to resist. Their warheads were simply too small for the purpose intended.
Had Germany been able to complete its atomic research programme in time, the outcome would have been different. The crowning mercy of the Second World War was that German atomic research was blighted and mismanaged from the start. By their racial policies, the Nazis deprived themselves of much Jewish scientific talent which migrated to the Allied side. And by their own disorganisation they dissipated funds and manpower among several competing programmes - perhaps as many as 12, each striving to present the F├╝hrer with a magic solution to his difficulties - with the result that none came close to fruition.
The Allied investigation teams which raced to dissect the remains of the German atomic weapons programme at the end of the war found that only one team had made objective progress towards its end, and it had got no further than constructing an atomic pile which might have produced weapons-grade atomic material had it gone critical - which it had not.
The British and American secret weapons programme, on the other hand, was organised with the strictest rationality from the start. In October 1939 Albert Einstein, the leading physicist of his generation and a fugitive from Nazi persecution, warned President Roosevelt that the Germans might be embarking on an atomic weapons programme and suggested that the United States study the feasibility of developing such weapons itself. Roosevelt responded by setting up a 'Uranium Committee' which reported in July 1941 that the project was feasible and that, if weapons were produced, they would be 'determining'.
Heavy water
The British, meanwhile, had been pursuing their own atomic weapons programme. Before the fall of France they had acquired the French stock of heavy water, an essential constituent of an atomic pile, and they had also taken steps to deprive the Germans of Norwegian heavy water. They had also put together a team of physicists, in an organisation codenamed Tube Alloys, to begin constructing their own atomic weapons.
In 1940 two refugee scientists based at Birmingham University, Otto Frisch and Rudolf Peierls, succeeded in writing a description of what an atomic bomb would be like. Tube Alloys then began the appropriate research, and after America's entry into the war in December 1941 this was transferred to the United States. There, in a co-ordinated research effort codenamed the Manhattan Project, American and British scientists undertook the development of an atomic weapon along the three lines of research that seemed most promising. Two - based on the isolation of the elements of plutonium and enriched uranium - eventually resulted in warheads, of which a uranium version was tested at Alamogordo on 16 July 1945.
Because Britain and the United States had developed a remote delivery system during the war years, the atomic weapons of which they had become the possessors - and after the Alamogordo test they possessed only two, one plutonium, one enriched uranium - could only be delivered by normal manned bomber. President Truman, the responsible authority, did not hesitate over the decision. He was currently confronted by estimates that an amphibious invasion of Japan might cost 'a million casualties'. Any means by which that toll might be avoided seemed acceptable in the fifth year of a war against a hated enemy.
On 6 August 1945, therefore, the B-29 Superfortress Enola Gay dropped the uranium version of the bomb on the Japanese city of Hiroshima, killing 78,000 people. Three days later another B-29 flew from Tinian to drop the plutonium bomb on Nagasaki, where 25,000 died.
The dropping of the atomic bombs coincided with the unleashing of the Russian offensive into Manchuria on 8 August, an offensive which some historians of the war regard as the stroke that brought an intransigent Japanese cabinet to surrender. It can only be said that when the Emperor Hirohito spoke to his people on 15 August, the first time a ruling Japanese monarch's voice had ever been heard by his subjects, he made no mention of the Manchurian offensive whatsoever. Instead, in explaining why 'the war had turned out not necessarily to Japan's advantage', he specifically cited 'a new and most cruel bomb' as the reason why the empire must now accept defeat at its enemy's hands.
The atomic age had begun. Its inauguration had also ended the Second World War - a fact only the intellectually perverse could deny - and had ushered in an age when nothing like a world war would seem remotely possible.
Taken from John Keegan's History of the Second World War, Part Five: The Defeat of the Axis, published with The Daily Telegraph, September 2, 1989.
