After a period during which ballistic missiles have rained down on Israel from Iran and its proxies, a new history of the first of these deadly weapons to be invented is very timely.
Those missiles were the V1 and V2, developed by Nazi Germany and unleashed on London and southern England in 1944 and 1945. Hitler hoped these revolutionary weapons would turn the tide of war, which was going against Germany by then, back in his favour. He was wrong, but we have lived in the shadow of such missiles ever since, as millions of Israelis who have recently been rushing to air-raid shelters will testify.
The journalist and historian Guy Walters has written a fascinating account of the development of the V1 and V2 but the main section of the book explains the book’s title: how the Polish underground was tasked by British intelligence with finding a V2 and somehow sending it to London so that our scientists could work out how dangerous the rocket was.
It is an extraordinary story which Walters tells with great panache and leaves one marvelling at the courage of the Polish resistance members who set out to fulfil London’s request, at enormous risk to themselves.
Walters describes the VI as “the world’s first cruise missile” and, like the V2, it was first developed at the remote Peenemunde site on Germany’s Baltic coast under the direction of Wernher von Braun, a name that would become famous, or infamous, after the war when he was poached by the Americans to head their moon rocket programme.
After the Allies devastated Peenemunde in a mass bombing raid, the Germans switched V2 production to deep inside a Polish forest. The first V1 to hit England killed six people near Gravesend, Kent, on 13 June 1944, a week after D-Day, and for a while the “doodlebug” as it instantly became known did terrible damage in London. But the much larger V2 was an infinitely deadlier weapon.
The Polish underground had already sent London a huge amount of information about the V2, gleaned from their members reporting on launches and scouring the terrain for fragments of missiles that had been fired or, as often happened, had exploded on launch.
Thanks to the Poles, London knew about the V2’s fuel, its range (more than 300 kilometres), and its crude gyroscopic guidance system. Crucially, it could not be stopped once launched, so there was no point in working on a jamming system. As Tom Lehrer later sang: “Once the rockets go up, who cares where they come down? That’s not my department, says Wernher von Braun.” And there was no Iron Dome defence shield, such as defends Israel today.
But all this wasn’t enough for London: they still wanted an actual rocket. The Poles regarded the demand as impossible but went to work.
Their opportunity came in May 1944 when a V2 test-fired from the new base at Blizna landed 250km away in the soft bank of the River Bug near the village of Kozki – and failed to explode. Alerted by the inhabitants of the remote area, the resistance managed to cut the rocket up and spirit it away to hideouts spread out round the countryside. The Nazis never discovered the landing site nor the remains of their V2.
That was the easy bit. The resistance still had to find a way to transport the missile to a makeshift landing site in a field the other side of the country and liaise with London while the British sent a plane from Italy to collect the precious cargo and ferry it back to London. All this was going on to a background of increasing chaos as the Russians advanced on Poland, the Nazis fought to hold them off and the Poles rose up in the ultimately disastrous Warsaw uprising. Antoni Kocjan, a brilliant glider designer who headed the resistance’s V2 project, was arrested around this time and presumably executed in prison, aged 42. His body was never found.
I won’t reveal the denouement in the hope that you buy the book yourselves. While reading it I was constantly reminded of those wonderful black-and-white British war films of the 1950s, and I hope someone makes a movie of this remarkable story, superbly reconstructed by Walters. The only problem may be that no one will believe it.
Stealing Hitler’s Rocket, by Guy Walters, is published by Head of Zeus
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