After MI6 learned of Amniarix’s ominous report, the British government decided to manufacture an extra one hundred thousand Morrison shelters.
Londoners could hide inside iron cages.
Named after Britain’s home secretary, Morrison shelters looked like giant rabbit pens buttressed by iron strips and topped with heavy metal sheets. First introduced in 1941, they were designed for citizens without gardens, who couldn’t install the buried Anderson shelters, and had become part of many homes’ standard furniture. Families ate on them nightly like dining-room tables, and when the bombs arrived, parents, children, and grandparents alike crawled inside the crates—each some six-and-a-half-feet long, four feet wide, and three feet tall—and hoped to sleep. The cages couldn’t absorb a direct hit, but their ductile frames could bend to withstand chunks of ceiling.
Fabricating the extra shelters, R. V. Jones learned, would require so much metal that the construction of two British battleships had to be delayed.
Jones said little at the meeting with Prime Minister Churchill. He was still digesting Rousseau’s dispatch. Were there in fact not one but two Nazi superweapons in development? Both meant for London? The picture was blurry.
He returned briefly to Gloucestershire but did not shoot hares.
Anxious to learn more about the quality of the information, he inquired about Amniarix. He was told only that the source spoke five languages and was thought to be “the most remarkable young woman of her generation.”
Days later, a decoded Nazi message provided Jones with another vital clue to the pilotless-aircraft puzzle. In the communiqué, German antiaircraft forces were urgently requested to protect one “Flakzielgerät 76,” or “antiaircraft target apparatus 76.” The message also reported, as if to justify the request, that the British had recently prioritized the search for secret weapons.
Why were secret weapons mentioned? And what did protecting an antiaircraft device have to do with it? If Flakzielgerät 76 really was some kind of antiaircraft target drone, why would the Nazis need AA guns to protect it?
Jones already knew, from Amniarix, that Colonel Max Wachtel’s men “were to form the cadres of an anti-aircraft regiment” and use “catapults” to launch bombs at London. Flakzielgerät 76, he realized, could refer to flying bombs.
On September 14, he concluded that the Nazis were “installing, under the cover name of FZG 76, a large and important ground organization in Belgium-N. France which is probably concerned with directing an attack on England by rocket-driven pilotless aircraft.” He reported to Churchill that “the German Air Force has been developing a pilotless aircraft for long range bombardment in competition with the rocket, and it is very possible that the aircraft will arrive first.”
Around the same time, his inspired hunch began to pay off. It had been six months since Jones had asked his friends at Bletchley Park to help locate Germany’s top radar specialists, who might be called on to track the secret weapons during test flights off Peenemünde. MI6 had indeed found the Fourteenth Company of the German Air Signals Experimental Regiment. The unit had moved a Würzburg radar to the Baltic base, and set up a string of detachments eastward along the coast.
It played out exactly as Jones had imagined.
Whatever objects the Fourteenth Company was now plotting were taking off from Peenemünde at some four hundred miles per hour. By decoding radio reports from each detachment, MI6 could follow the course of every test flight.
The Nazis even made reference to FZG 76.
Jones had a front-row seat to Wachtel’s flying bomb trials. He watched nervously from London as the flight paths grew more and more accurate.
Luftwaffe agents began to seize plots of land in northern France near the coast, in Normandy and Pas-de-Calais. At each site, French construction crews arrived to erect small, peculiar, identical structures. Local farmers were allowed to keep cultivating, but certain areas of the camps were strictly off-limits.
Rumors of unusual construction reached the ears of a French railway worker, who passed them along to a forty-five-year-old engineer in Paris, Michel Hollard. An expert in machinery, mechanics, and metallurgy, Hollard was a distinguished World War I veteran who had found civilian life anticlimactic. He was a small man with a handsome, chiseled face and a penchant for disguises. During the First World War, to pass the medical test for combatants, he had been so slender that he faked his chest measurements, and so adolescent that he stuck on fake pubic hair. His current vocation, as a traveling salesman hawking gas engines, provided a convenient cover for his true business of running a spy ring for the Resistance.
Commerce wasn’t his only smoke screen.
Posing as a Protestant missionary, Hollard traveled to Rouen, the capital of Normandy, and approached a welfare worker in a labor office who would know exactly where French construction crews were being sent. He professed deep concern for the workers, who had been recently uprooted to work on Nazi projects, and who might find comfort in his Bibles and religious literature.
Armed with a list of local German construction sites, he then boarded a train to the village of Auffay, some twenty miles north of Rouen, where he switched identities once again. Donning shabby workman’s clothes, Hollard discovered nothing at the village itself. But three miles southwest, near the hamlet of Beuville, he came upon a noisy construction site in the middle of an apple orchard.
Hundreds of French laborers were busy at work. Undeterred, Hollard picked up an unclaimed wheelbarrow from a ditch, and paraded directly past a German sentry. He simply entered the camp. He filled his wheelbarrow with supplies, chatted with a few French workers, and conducted a daring reconnaissance.
Scattered across the site were ten new buildings. Connected by a winding concrete path, they were all single-story and modest in appearance. Most of the structures were about ten feet tall. Their use remained a mystery, but one strange feature of the camp immediately stood out. Marked by a blue rope and studded with wooden posts down the middle, a one-hundred-and-fifty-foot concrete strip had been paved.
It looked like a small runway.
Hollard leaned down as if to tie his bootlaces, pulled out a compass he kept in his pocket, laid it on the ground, and took the bearing. Then he slipped out of camp.
That night, back in Paris, at a hotel near the train station, he fanned out a map of northern France and southern England and plotted the direction of the mysterious concrete “runway.” It was pointing directly at London.
Having enlisted a team of reliable French agents, Hollard set out to learn more. He gave the spies bicycles, advised them of the buildings and concrete strip, and assigned each of them a territory of coastal land. Evading detection by staying off radios, his operatives pedaled through farmland along backcountry lanes.
Across two hundred miles, they found sixty identical sites.
To pry out their exact function, Hollard then sought out construction blueprints. He enlisted an engineer named André Comps, who had been hired at one of the camps as a draftsman. From Comps, Hollard got his hands on drawings of every building at a site later called Bois Carré. The name translates to “square woods,” reflecting the shape of the forested plot. Comps even managed to duplicate a blueprint for the unusual runway. A German engineer kept it securely in his overcoat pocket, but Comps copied the schematic while the officer was on the toilet.
Hollard crossed into Switzerland and delivered his report to an MI6 agent stationed in Lausanne. Jones received it on October 28, 1943.
Comps’s sketch of the installation revealed the concrete platform with its center axis aimed directly at London, and six days later, photo reconnaissance of Bois Carré confirmed the sketch and the “runway.” The concrete strip, Jones saw from the blueprint, was intended to support an inclined ramp with two metal rails that rose up at an angle of fifteen degrees, and stretched some one hundred and fifty feet.
Amniarix’s “catapults” were real.
Aerial photography confirmed other peculiar features at Bois Carré.
To the east of the site, three narrow buildings perhaps two hundred and fifty feet long, all precisely identical and curved slightly at one end, fed into pathways leading toward the center of camp. They resembled three skis turned on their sides.
For some reason, one of the huts at the camp, according to Hollard’s and Comps’s dispatch, contained no metal parts. As it turned out, the hut—which was nearly thirty feet high, much taller than the other buildings at Bois Carré—contained no magnetic parts. Perhaps using iron in its construction would disturb an aiming system for a weapon that depended upon some kind of magnetic guidance. Inside the tall hut, the blueprint revealed, was an arc inscribed on the floor, suggesting that a weapon could be swung to test its compass. Paths from the “ski” buildings fed into the hut, which had a low, wide arch, perfectly suited for a small winged aircraft.
MI6 called these military stations “ski sites.”
They had to be bombed.
While Amniarix and Michel Hollard risked their lives to reveal the looming threat against London, Jones faced yet another petty political battle over scientific intelligence regarding Nazi rockets and flying bombs.
Spies were executed as analysts bickered.
Despite Jones’s successes with uncovering radio-bomb targeting, the Bruneval Raid, identifying the first rocket, and his clever strategy to track the flying bomb trials—and despite the trust the prime minister had in his skills and judgment—the British air staff now in effect sought to demote Jones and his team. Scientific intelligence, in the eyes of some, had grown too important to leave to Jones now that London’s very survival depended on it. So the air staff brought in an outsider, Air Commodore Claude Pelly, who had no previous experience in intelligence, to coordinate analysis and plan countermeasures. R.V. was asked to merely supply raw information to Pelly’s new committee.
Instead, Jones penned a scathing letter to the chairman of the Joint Intelligence Committee. “It has been my duty since the beginning of the war,” he wrote, “to anticipate new applications of science to warfare by the enemy.” Unless he had failed in that duty, he argued, there was no plausible reason for a new committee. Its formation, he wrote, “indicates a lack of confidence in my methods which—if I shared—would lead me to resign.” Pelly’s committee was not only unnecessary but would, he believed, waste valuable time.
His own team, he added, would not be stepping down. “My section will continue its work regardless of any parallel Committees which may arise and will be mindful only of the safety of the country.”
“I trust that we shall not be hindered.”
He did not receive a reply to his fiery letter. But he did soon afterward come down with tonsillitis and the flu, running a temperature of 108. While he was sick in bed, his deputy Charles Frank brought him reconnaissance photos from above Zempin, where Amniarix claimed Max Wachtel and his men were stationed.
The snaps revealed the same iconic concrete strip discovered at sites across northern France. They also showed, startlingly, an installed catapult, a breakthrough finding that allowed Jones to photograph identical launching ramps at Peenemünde proper, where they had been mistaken for irrigation pumps.
One photo revealed a flying bomb perched on a ramp.
Jones was forbidden from returning to the office, but he disobeyed the doctor, remarking that he only needed to last another six to eight months. The clock was ticking, he now knew, on both D-Day and the flying bombs.
From the German radar unit’s tracking of the trials, and the photos of Peenemünde and the ski sites, MI6 now had a robust picture of Wachtel’s secret weapon. The V-1 warhead probably weighed between one thousand and three thousand pounds. Its top speed might be four hundred miles per hour, and it likely flew at an altitude of sixty-five hundred feet. The pilotless aircraft should have a maximum range of one hundred and fifty-five miles, a wingspan of twenty feet, and a length of perhaps nineteen feet. Its guidance system was magnetic.
R.V. uncovered yet another odd construction detail among the blueprints delivered by Michel Hollard. One building at Bois Carré—the “Stofflager”—was divided in two by a blast wall. Each side had its own entrance, and there was no connecting door between them. Whoever designed that building was very serious about keeping the contents of the two compartments separate.
Stofflager was a maddeningly ambiguous term. The word Stoff means “material,” and Lager is “storage.” Stofflager : “a place for stuff.” But Stoff is also fuel and a common military code name for chemicals. In World War I, A-Stoff, Bn-Stoff, and T-Stoff were tear gases. Was the building for fuel for the V-1s?
Would they be armed with explosives? Something worse?
In the fall of 1943, Adolf Hitler offered hints to his supporters, and to the world, of the Nazi plan to wreak havoc on the British. On September 10, only two days after Italy’s surrender to the Allies was made public, in a strange nighttime broadcast that seemed prerecorded—and, for some reason, speeded up—the Führer promised that a “reply” to the destruction of German cities was close at hand.
“The technical and organizational conditions are being created,” Hitler said, “not only to stop [the Allies’] terror for good, but also to pay him back.”
Joseph Goebbels, the Nazi propaganda minister, assured citizens that “the theme of ‘revenge,’ discussed by the German people with such hot passion,” was more than “a mere rhetorical or propagandist slogan” meant to boost morale.
In early November, Hitler informed his senior commanders of his plan to strengthen the Atlantic defenses, “particularly in the region from which we shall be opening our long-range bombardment of England.” Four days later, in a broadcast from a Munich beer hall, he directed an explicit threat against England.
“Our hour of revenge is near!” he said. “Even if at present we cannot reach America . . . at least one country is near enough for us to tackle.”
The V-1 was meant to be ready by winter. But the flying-bomb trials at Peenemünde weren’t complete, and production of the drone at the Volkswagen factory at Fallersleben, in the heart of Germany, was hampered by design changes. And the Fieseler plant in Kassel, the second main production line, was hit by the Royal Air Force as part of the Allies’ routine strategic bombing campaign.
Colonel Wachtel trained his unit, now designated as Flak Regiment 155(W), while the Nazis raced to finalize and mass-produce the pilotless aircraft.
The Allies did what they could to delay them. Operation Crossbow, the Anglo-American effort to neutralize Hitler’s revenge weapons, targeted the ski sites in early December. Several large bunkers designed to launch the armaments—which were far more conspicuous from the air—had already been hit.
The ski sites would prove harder targets.
On December 5, under poor weather at night, the American Ninth Air Force bombed several ski sites. But the strikes were so ineffective that Wachtel did not even mention them in the war diary of his regiment. The colonel did take note of the ski site air raids nine days later, on December 14, when three more V-1 launching camps were attacked but did not sustain any significant damage.
The targets were too small and spread out. The launching ramps were long and narrow. The ski-shaped buildings were only fourteen feet wide.
The British Royal Air Force decided the tactics weren’t working, and planned instead, with help from America, on large-scale daylight raids.
Two days before Christmas, American bombardiers, pilots, and navigators were briefed on the ski sites, the pilotless aircraft, and the dire threat they posed. “If these missile launch sites are not destroyed within the next three months,” one briefing officer warned, “the city of London will be totally destroyed.”
On December 24, over five hundred fighters and seven hundred bombers of the Eighth Air Force targeted twenty-three ski sites in northern France, delivering 1,745 tons of bombs on Wachtel’s catapult camps. The Ninth Air Force hit additional sites. The raids represented the largest single mission in the European air war to date.
Only two ski sites were destroyed. Only three were damaged in the massive operation, according to German records. Craters pockmarked the farmland around the ski shapes like a deranged game of tic-tac-toe. Brute-force bombing, the British would admit, felt a bit like using “sledgehammers for tintacks.”
Wachtel, meanwhile, was stationed safely outside of Beauvais, north of Paris. At Château de Merlemont (a small “schloss,” as he put it), he enjoyed Christmas Eve with a party, presents, fine French wine, chocolate, and cigarettes.
The raids were scattershot, but they were also relentless. Wachtel’s launching camps were exposed, and his regiment did not have air support for protection. “At the slightest suspicion of the sound of aircraft,” he noted, in January of 1944, the French construction workers would “throw up work and leave.” Even some of the German foremen would run off at the hint of bombers above.
The ski sites were practically unusable.
Wachtel’s identity had also been revealed somehow. From an intercepted radio message, he learned that Allied intelligence had put a price on his head. His regiment was already using a new code name; he now needed an alias. He received new identity papers in the name of Martin Wolf, and grew a beard.
The Nazis had a plan B.