Cautionary Tales with Tim Harford - Supersonic Nazi Vengeance: V2 Rocket (Part 1)

Episode Date: February 2, 2024

At the height of World War Two, British intelligence began receiving reports that the enemy was developing a rocket weapon. The idea seemed fantastical — resources in Nazi Germany were scarce and a rocket-building program defied economic logic. But one intelligence chief took the reports of a rocket weapon seriously and he managed to convince Winston Churchill to heed the threat too. The British Prime Minister gave the order to bomb Germany’s rocket factory to rubble, and 600 bomber planes embarked on a full-scale attempt to obliterate it. From the air, the damage appeared devastating. The British thought they had succeeded in crushing the rocket-building program. But they were wrong. For a full list of sources, see the show notes at timharford.com. Do you have a question for Tim? Send it to [e-mail] and we'll do our best to answer it in an upcoming Q&A episode.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Pushkin If you are a loyal Pushkin Plus subscriber, thank you so much. We're really grateful for your support for the show, which helps us give you the storytelling, the acting, the research and the sound design we strive for on cautionary tales. And we hope you're gripped by the two-part story of the Tenereef air disaster we recently released on the Pushkin Plus feed. Now, if you are not a Pushkin Plus subscriber, not to worry, we know it's not for everyone and we still love you.

And as a token of that affection, we're releasing our epic trilogy about the V2 rocket previously only available on Pushkin Plus. I first started working on this story back in the spring of 2022. It was a real labor of love, initially sparked by curiosity about a strange statistic my producer Ryan Dilly had told me, and then just going deeper and deeper, and eventually

darker and darker too. There is tragedy, there is moral complexity, brilliance, courage, pure evil, and of course, there's rocket ships and the dream of travelling into space. Enjoy. By late November 1944, there was no doubt that the Allies were winning the Second World War, and London was far from the front line. Still, Londoners had to make sacrifices. To pick a trivial example, it was awfully difficult to get hold of a new saucepan.

So when a young woman called Betty heard rumours that a branch of Woolworths in southeast London had a new consignment of kitchenware. She didn't hesitate. I was a very young bride of a couple of years with my first baby of about two months. So I promptly thanked my informer, dressed my baby daughter in her outdoor clothing,

put on my coat and hat and set off for a hopeful purchase. Betty had to travel across the city to reach the store. It was Saturday, the 29th of November, and she arrived in South East London just before half past 12. The road was very steep at this point, and I walked up the road on the right hand side with my bag in the right hand and my baby on the left arm. At that point there came a sudden airless quiet which seemed to stop one's breath. Then an almighty sound so tremendous that it seemed to blot out my mind completely.

She was knocked senseless and sideways. When I came to, seconds later, I found myself over the road, pinned to the wall. After a second or two, I was released and slid to the ground. She had no idea what had happened. She looked at her baby. Her bonnet was twisted grotesquely and hung round her neck. Her hair was blown back tightly as if she had none. She was staring at space, not comprehending.

Betty's clothes were a mess, buttons and ribbons everywhere. But she wasn't hurt, and neither was her daughter. A horse and cart careening down the street, her driver's legs waving in the air. I was laughing hysterically. She picked up her daughter, got to her feet, and continued her journey. Around the corner, a man stopped her. Where were you, Eddied Love? Woolworth's, for a saucepan.

He gently touched her shoulder and turned her around. Not today, my love. Go home and try tomorrow. And so, Betty, perplexed, went home with her baby. And she never had to see the sight of the explosion, the jagged skeleton bricks and timber that used to be the Woolworth store, the scraps of clothing and wedding rings that were all the remained of the women who'd been queuing up for saucepans just a few minutes ahead of her. She didn't have to gaze at the number 53 bus that had stopped outside the store, filled with motionless passengers, covered in dust, apparently unharmed, but all killed instantly.

All killed instantly by a weapon that couldn't be seen and could not be stopped. A weapon called the V2. I'm Tim Harford and you're listening to Cautionary Tales. 168 people were killed by the V2 strike on Woolworths. Many more were seriously injured. 11 people were simply recorded as missing. We presumed that they were inside the Woolworth store when the V2 hit, and that they were vaporized, leaving no trace at all. But we'll never know. This is the story of the V2, the dreaded rocket-powered bomb that the Nazis began to use in the last few months of the Second World War. It travelled faster than the

speed of sound. You couldn't hear it coming. One moment you're queuing up to buy a saucepan, the next moment, well, there is no next moment. I want to explore how this terrible weapon came into existence. Why so many of the people it hurt weren't the people you might expect, and the lessons we can learn even today. Later we'll try to understand the weapon from the perspective of the Germans and the Americans, but let's start with the British, and wind back a little further in time. Britain had been at war with Nazi Germany since 1939. London and many other British towns and cities had been at war with Nazi Germany since 1939. London and many other British towns and cities had been relentlessly bombed in late 1940 and early 1941, but by 1942 the

focus of the war had moved elsewhere. Around about Christmas in 1942 a British intelligence officer named R. V. Jones received a worrying message. Jones had risen to a lofty position in the British intelligence service at the age of just 31, and he didn't like what he read. The message was from an informant in Germany who had managed to overhear a conversation between two senior Nazi engineers about... A new German weapon. Weapon is a rocket containing five tons explosive, with a maximum range of 200 kilometers. Two weeks later, another message.

The Germans have constructed a new factory at Peinemunde, where new weapons are manufactured. The new weapon is in the form of a rocket which has been seen fired from the testing ground. Other similar reports dribbled in over the following three months. Sitting in London, R.V. Jones was intrigued, but the reports were little more than rumours and the weapons seemed fantastical. Jones asked for details on the movements of the German units with the most expert radar

operators. He was sure that if a rocket was being tested at Peinemunde, which is on the north coast of Germany between Denmark and Poland, then those radar units would be deployed to the area. Sure enough, that's where they were. He commissioned high-level aerial photographs of Penemunda, and after exhaustive study found what looked like it might be a rocket, about 35 feet long. These clues convinced RV Jones that the reports of a rocket weapon had to be taken seriously. But he was making a lonely argument. Most of the rest of the British establishment was skeptical.

In June 1943, R.V. Jones was summoned to a meeting of Prime Minister Winston Churchill's War Cabinet, along with several other experts. Churchill wanted to resolve once and for all the argument about the existence or non-existence of a secret German rocket program. On one side, there was R. V. Jones, convinced that the rocket existed based on the clues from the telegrams and aerial photographs and the movements of German radar teams, on the other, the skeptics, led by Churchill's senior adviser, Frederick Lindemann. The debate

was spirited. Frederick Lindemann pointed out that Britain had rocket scientists too, and those scientists believed that the rocket-shaped object in the aerial photograph wasn't big enough to deliver anything like the range being rumoured. The Germans would have had to have delivered a technological miracle to make a rocket that small fly that far. And that was surely out of the question. Even if the rocket did exist and could fly, Lindemann continued. It wouldn't be able to hit targets

with any accuracy. And even if the Germans could build some kind of bomb on a rocket ship, why on earth would they do that? Lindemann reminded the group that Germany had to marshal its scarce resources carefully. It desperately needed material for tanks and planes. It seemed quite absurd that they would waste time and money on a costly and impractical program to put bombs on rockets. Pouring vast amounts of resources into making rocket bombs made no strategic sense. It defied all economic logic. Lindemann was hugely influential.

He was also the person who'd originally recommended R.V. Jones to Churchill. But now he vigorously disagreed with his young protege. He thought that Jones must have been mistaken when examining the aerial photographs, that Jones had seen a plywood decoy, not a real rocket. Lindemann had heard different rumours, he told Churchill and the others. He'd heard that the Germans were working on some kind of pilotless plane instead. That sounded more believable, although it still didn't make much sense. The most sensible thing that the Germans could focus on was making more of their proven weapons of war – fighter planes, bombers and tanks. The idea of a vast secret program to develop a rocket bomb that surely couldn't work, the whole thing was clearly a hoax, said Lindemann.

But young R.V. Jones was well able to defend his view that the rocket was real. His aerial photographs proved that Peinemunde was a huge site, full of complex equipment and facilities. Whatever was happening there was plainly important. If the Germans were attempting to pull off a hoax, it was a hoax calculated to prompt an attack on Peinemunda. What would they gain from that? Churchill was delighted with a young man standing up for himself. He teased Lindemann, Hear that? That's a weighty point against you. Remember, it was you who introduced him to me. After vigorous argument, RV Jones convinced the Prime Minister that the Germans had no reason to create a self-destructive hoax.

The rocket must be real. The meeting concluded with Churchill's order. Bomb, pain and wonder, into rubble. Cautionary tales will return after the break. Hang on! It's off the charts spectacular. Go, go, go! Tom Cruise has outdone himself. The world's coming after you. Stay out of my way. Prepare for one of the best action movies ever made. This is getting exciting.

Mission Impossible Dead Reckoning. Now streaming on Paramount Plus, 3D PG-13. Some material may be inappropriate for children under 13. Here's what the British didn't know, as Churchill listened to the experts' debate in 1943. They didn't know that a senior member of the German army had been obsessed with the idea of a rocket bomb for a quarter of a century. His name was Captain Dr. Walter Dornberger, later to be Major General Dr. Walter Dornberger. In the First World War, Dornberger had been an officer with the Paris gun, a huge piece of German artillery. Paris gun could fire 230 pound shells a range of 80 miles. They took three

minutes to sail through the air in a vast parabolic arc until eventually arriving at their destination, which was, of course, Paris. That was a glorious memory for an artillery officer, shelling the enemy from 80 miles away. The joy of waging war from well out of range. But the First World War ended in German defeat and humiliation. Among other things, the Treaty of Versailles banned the German army from using artillery like the Paris gun. The treaty didn't ban rockets though.

Why would it? Rocket ships were the stuff of hobbyists, daydreams and science fiction. In the 1920s Germans were positively giddy about rocket ship stories. They flocked to the movie theatres to see a new film by Fritz Lang and Théavon Habou, the husband and wife creators of Metropolis. The film was called Frau im Mond, The Woman in the Moon. Meanwhile, pioneers such as Hermann Obert and Max Valle were beginning to experiment with small-scale rocket engines

and publishing books about the far-off promise of space travel. To Captain Dornberger, these rockets meant more than stories about space. They presented an opportunity. If the German army couldn't build long-range artillery anymore, why not try to put a bomb on a rocket? With hindsight, the attraction of rockets as a military technology is obvious. Today we call them ballistic missiles. They fly high and far and fast. Even with 21st century technology, it's hard to intercept them and you get very little warning that they're coming.

With 1930s technology, defence would be hopeless. A rocket could fly at several times the speed of sound, almost a mile per second. You wouldn't see it, you wouldn't hear it, and you certainly couldn't stop it. But the question was, could they build it? Rockets were complex, temperamental, dangerous things. Rocket pioneer Herman Obert lost an eye in 1929, and he was merely trying to produce special effects for the Frau Imande movie. His little model rocket exploded. Max Vallier, realising that space was still beyond his grasp, was building and driving rocket-powered cars, reaching a record breaking speed of 155 miles per hour.

But he was killed in 1930, when one of the rocket engines blew up on the test bench, sending shrapnel through his chest. If you couldn't lose an eye making a model rocket for a movie, or die in your own workshop, what were the risks of building reliable missile weapons at scale and volume so great that they could replace artillery? Nevertheless, in 1932, Walter Dornberger secured some funding from his military superiors, recruited his first rocket scientists,

and began the long quest to build the deadly rocket weapon that would eventually be called the V-2. The top British scientists in 1943 thought that rocket weapons were a pipe dream. But here's something else they didn't know. For more than a decade, the German government had been throwing money at Walter Dornberger's

team of scientists to try to crack the rocket problem. The British would not have been surprised to learn that Dornberger's team had produced failed launch after failed launch year after year. They would have been astonished to learn that despite all the failures, the Nazis were still giving Dornberger more and more resources to keep on trying. The young British intelligence officer, R. V. Jones, had been right to conclude that something important was happening at Pena Munda. But even he couldn't have guessed how important. Dornberger had built a vast facility, costing 550 million Reichsmarks,

the equivalent of billions of dollars today. There were research facilities and a testing site, a large oval embankment big enough to contain four football pitches, with 40-yard-thick earthworks designed to corral missiles that they toppled over and blasted off horizontally. And there were facilities to build ballistic missiles, in large quantities once they had one that worked. The site housed the largest industrial factory building Europe had yet seen.

And beyond that, German is most modern housing estate, providing stylish accommodation for 3,000 people, the families of the scientists and engineers. There were schools, shops, sports and leisure facilities, a beach resort, and well-tended paths meandering through the nearby forest. Since there wasn't room on the site for everyone who would work at Pain & Wunder, there were purpose-built railway lines to bring in workers. The docks were enlarged to allow for the flow of raw materials and food. There was a liquid oxygen plant and a 30 megawatt coal-fired power station – that's enough to power a small city. All intended to mass produce a technology that the British experts thought was impossible.

At least that was what Walter Dornberger had intended. But not everyone in Nazi Germany was convinced that Dornberger would be able to deliver on his rocket bomb ambitions. So another part of the German war machine began to advance a parallel plan. Like Dornberger's rockets, it promised a far greater range, payload, and accuracy than even the largest artillery. Like the rockets, it was intended to bring German firepower to bear far behind enemy lines. But unlike the rockets, it was to be cheap, simple and ruthlessly practical. This parallel weapon became known as the V1. The

V stood for Wegelton or Vengeance. Walter Dornberger managed to get this rival technology moved to Pena Munda, where the cutting edge facilities would be devoted to producing both the V1 and the V2. Remember when Churchill's senior advisor Frederick Lindemann said he'd heard another rumour that the Germans were working on a pilotless plane? That rumour was right too. The pilotless plane was the V1. The idea was straightforward, make a bomb in the shape of a plane, give it a primitive

jet engine so that it flies quickly, point it in the right direction and use a gyroscope to keep it on course. The V1 looks oddly modern, like a contemporary predator drone or a torpedo with wings. It became known as the buzz bomb or the doodle bug because of the loud vibrating sound it produced. These vibrations were a side effect to the jet engine's cheap design and were so violent that the V1 would sometimes shake itself into scrap by the end of the flight. That didn't matter. The whole point of the V1 was that it was a flying bomb, designed to drop out of the sky over London. If it was falling apart by the time it reached its target, who cared?

The contrast between the two weapons was striking. While the V2 was fuelled with a volatile mix of alcohol and liquid oxygen, the V1 ran on simple gasoline. The V2 could reach nearly 3,600 miles per hour and climb an astonishing 55 miles high, which is most of the way to space. The V1 flew at just 400 miles per hour, at a height of about half a mile. In principle, the V2 seemed like the superior weapon. It was untrackable and unstoppable. You could fire it from mobile sites and change them every day. The V1, in contrast, would be trackable on radar. The British could shoot it down with anti-aircraft guns. It would

have to be catapulted from a fixed ramp. The British could find those ramps and destroy them. But when Frederick Lindemann told Churchill that the pilotless plane was a more logical aim for the Germans than the rocket, he was right. Because the V1 was so much easier to design and build. By 1943, Dornberger's V2 rocket bomb had been more than a decade in the making and still wasn't working. The V1 went from a vague concept to a successful test flight in just 18 months. And for the price of a single V2 rocket, Nazi Germany could build and launch maybe 25 V1s.

And since they carried a similar payload, a similar distance with similar accuracy, why wouldn't they? Why indeed? The experts in Churchill's war room didn't yet know all these details, of course. All they knew were rumors of pilotless planes and rocket bombs. Experts in Churchill's War Room didn't yet know all these details, of course. All they knew were rumors of pilotless planes and rocket bombs. For Frederick Lindemann, the conclusion was obvious. The rocket bomb made no sense, so it must be a hoax.

No, said R.V. Jones, it might make no sense, but they really are doing it. In August 1943, Britain's Royal Air Force put Churchill's order into action. Six hundred planes took off and headed to Peinemunda. Cautionary tales will return after the break. Late in the evening, on the 17th of August 1943, the air raid sirens at Pénamunda began to sound. Walter Dornberger was not overly concerned. British bombers often assembled over the sea near Penehmunder before flying directly south to strike at Berlin.

Penehmunder itself maintained a strict blackout, but General Dornberger noticed with unease how clearly the full moon picked out the dark houses against the silver lawns. He prepared for bed and soon fell asleep. He was jolted awake not long after midnight by the thunderous sound of anti-aircraft guns and then of exploding bombs. Dornberger leaped out of bed to pull on his trousers and boots to discover that only his bedroom slippers were close at hand.

His house was shaking, broken glass everywhere, the heavy oak door blown out and angled on the steps leading to his garden. He stood for a moment, snug in his slippers, as he gazed out over the smoke and the fiery glow of 600 British planes embarking on a full-scale attempt to obliterate Penemundas rocket factories, and to wipe out its scientific staff. Dornberger hurried to the bomb shelter. The British thought they had succeeded.

From the air, the damage seemed so devastating that they even called off a planned follow-up strike. But they hadn't realised how huge a complex Penham-Wonder was. They'd missed many of its key facilities entirely, or damaged them only superficially, including the launch pad, a supersonic wind tunnel, and the rocket factory itself.

They destroyed most of the homes of the top engineers and their families, but like Walter Dornberger, most of these senior people had made it safely to the bombshells in time. The bombing raid did kill hundreds of people, but those people weren't the top scientists the British had been hoping to target. Instead, they were construction workers from Eastern Europe, penned behind barbed wire in a camp two miles away from the main facilities. To the Nazi regime, these workers were disposable and replaceable. The Nazis now recognised, though, that Pena Munda was vulnerable. They moved the manufacturing operation to a different site, underground.

The British thought they'd destroyed the missile programme. In fact, they'd just delayed its progress, and by only a few months at most. In June 1944, ten months after the bombing of Penamunda, and just days after the D-Day landings in Normandy, the first V1 bombs started to rain down on London. The crude, vibrating, gasoline-powered doodle bugs had beaten the crazily complex V2 to the punch. But then on the 8th of September, the first V2 rocket hit London. The British experts had thought it would take a technological miracle to make a rocket bomb that could launch from Germany and hit targets in England. The Germans, it seemed, had made that miracle happen. Although

the target surely wasn't what they'd aimed at. The rocket landed in the suburb of Chiswick in West London. It did kill a soldier, but only because he happened to be in Chiswick on leave. The other victims were a 63-year-old woman, Ada Harrison, and a three-year-old girl, Rosemary Clark. The V2 was an unstoppable weapon. It was launched from mobile platforms, flew faster than sound, and was therefore silent, although some survivors reported their ears popping a moment before impact as the pressure wave hit. Surely, an unstoppable weapon must win any war. Perhaps if you can aim it accurately. The V2 was wildly unpredictable.

The Nazis wanted to hit the port in Antwerp, northern Belgium, which the Allies were using to reinforce and resupply their advance on the western front. They launched over 1,600 V2 rockets at Antwerp were killed when a V2 hit a local cinema. That strike came just a couple of weeks after a V2 hit the Woolworths' department store in southeast London. Ten days later, the day after Christmas, London suffered another blow when a rocket struck a pub in Islington called The Prince of Wales. It was packed with people celebrating the engagement of local girl Emily Neyba, and the explosion was strong enough to knock down 15 houses.

Seven children from the house across the street died, killed by the shock of the blast alone. They had no outward sign of injury. In total, at least 73 people died. All this was typical of the V2 program. The missiles were too wayward to have much military value, but every now and then, a missile would strike a crowded place, and dozens or even hundreds of people would die without ever knowing what had hit them. Remember that the V stood for vengeance.

That's about right. The rocket bombs had been intended to terrify Germany's enemies, but they achieved nothing but petty revenge for Germany's mounting wartime losses. Civilians were more unnerved than terrified. Faced with the V2, there was nothing to do but shrug and hope. And the Allied strategists weren't terrified either.

They were baffled. They couldn't understand why the Germans had squandered so much effort and expense, developing a missile that achieved so little. Freeman Dyson, the great physicist, worked for British bomber command during the war. He later mused, Those of us who were seriously engaged in the war were very grateful for the V2 program. We knew that each V2 cost as much to produce as a high-performance fighter airplane.

We knew that German forces on the fighting fronts were in desperate need of airplanes, and that the V2 rockets were doing us no military damage. From our point of view, the V2 program was almost as good as if Hitler had adopted a policy of unilateral disarmament. Germany's rocket program had started in 1932, when Walter Dornberger had first started to recruit rocket scientists. It ran for 12 years before the rockets achieved their first fatal attack, the one that killed three-year-old Rosemary Clark. And just seven months later, it was all over. As the last V2 strike killed 34-year-old Ivy Miller Champ of Orpington, Kent. She was the last civilian casualty of the war on British

soil. The V2 terror had lasted less than a year. Neither Rosemary Clark nor Ivy Miller-Champ would know it, but the V2 program was a disaster for Germany. It's generally reckoned to have placed a similar burden on Germany's economy to that placed by the Atomic Weapon Program, the Manhattan Project, on Americas. And for what? In the end, the V2s killed about 5,000 innocent people, mostly in Antwerp and London. It was terrifying, but those attacks had almost no military effect. And both sides demonstrated over and over again that dropping conventional bombs from planes

was a much simpler and cheaper way to kill civilians. Add up the total explosive power of all the V2s ever fired and you'd get to about the same scale as one single large bombing raid from Britain's Royal Air Force. As the Allies pushed back the German front line, the V2s could no longer reach big cities. The Nazis fired them at whatever targets remained in range, such as the English market town of Ipswich. But Ipswich is a small town in fertile farming country. The expensive, sophisticated V2s, each one costing as much as a fighter plane, range

down randomly on fields of turnips and sugar beet. By 1945, that was the legacy of the German rocket programme. An astonishing technological triumph, but a baffling strategic mistake, a vast budget squandered. If you spend billions but end up mostly killing housewives shopping for saucepans in Woolworth's, you're not only committing a war crime, you're also going to lose the war. The British intelligence chief, R. V. Jones, had struggled to convince his colleagues that the Nazis were trying to build a rocket-powered

bomb. He struggled because his colleagues rightly pointed out that the idea made no sense. In the middle of a war, the Nazi regime would have been far better served by manufacturing more of the things they knew were effective, tanks and airplanes. All that leaves us with a question. If it was obvious to the British that the idea of a rocket bomb made no sense, why wasn't it obvious to Nazi Germany? Writing decades later, R.V. Jones mused, When we try to understand the policy behind the rocket, we are forced to abandon rationality and instead to enter a fantasy where romance has replaced economy. Why then have they made the rocket?

The answer is simple. No weapon yet produced has comparable romantic appeal. That's part of the answer. But there's more to it than that. Cautionary tales will be back next time with part two of the story, in which we'll meet the brilliant, charismatic man who Walter Dornberger recruited as his chief scientist. And we'll ask why so many governments are so fond of projects that are grand,

expensive and finished far too late. An excellent guide to the V2 program is Murray Barber's book V2, the A4 rocket from Peynermunda to Redstone. For a full list of our sources, see the show notes at timharford.com. full list of our sources see the show notes at timharford.com Caution Retails is written by me, Tim Harford, with Andrew Wright. It's produced by Alice Fiennes with support from Edith Husslow. The sound design and original music is the work of Pascal Wise. Julia Barton edited the scripts. It features the voice talents of Ben Crow, Melanie Gutteridge, Gemma Saunders and Rufus Wright.

The show wouldn't have been possible without the work of Jacob Weisberg, Ryan Dilly, Greta Kohn, Lita Almalade, John Schnars, Carly McGleory and Eric Sandler. Corshny Tales is a production of Pushkin Industries. It was recorded in Wardall Studios in London by Tom Berry. If you like the show, please remember to share, rate and review. Go on, you know it helps us. And if you want to hear the show ad-free, sign up for Pushkin Plus on the show page in Apple Podcasts or at pushkin.fm.com.