Rural, wooded areas on the west coast of Holland were used extensively for launching V2s against England in late 1944 and early 1945, leaving craters such as these along this track in Bergen Op Zoom. (Medmenham Collection)
On 16 December Operation UNTERNEHMEN WACHT AM RHEIN (WATCH ON THE RHINE), an unexpected German offensive involving 400,000 men, 1,200 tanks and 4,200 guns, caught a relatively weak force of American troops napping in the forests of the Ardennes. Making good use of landlines and with strict communications discipline, Allied intelligence had no specific information on the Germans’ intentions in that area, the small number of hints detected ‘on the wires’ seemingly ignored. Moreover, very poor weather had kept Allied reconnaissance aircraft on the ground, so surprise was on the Germans’ side. The Wehrmacht’s aim was to take back Antwerp, which had been occupied by the Allies since September, the port being crucial to them for reinforcement and re-supply, while at the same time encircling the Allied ground forces in the hope of then destroying them piecemeal.
As part of the plan V1s and V2s were fired at Antwerp from sites in Germany and Holland to ‘soften up’ the city. On 27 November 126 people were killed and 309 injured when a rocket hit close to the Central Station and, on the opening day of the offensive, another V2 demolished the Rex Cinema, causing the death of 567 Belgians and Allied troops, while injuring another 291 – the worst disaster to date in the history of the V-weapons. As a result, all the cinemas and theatres in the city were closed and large-scale gatherings prohibited.
Despite the difficult terrain favouring the defenders, and the pockets of fierce resistance, many German units made significant gains, benefitting from the surprise they had achieved and the poor weather which grounded Allied aircraft. However, any hopes of ultimate success were dashed on 23 December, when the weather cleared, allowing the might of the Allied air forces to be thrown against them, isolating many of their units, and denying them reinforcement and re-supply, with the result that the Germans were stopped short of the River Meuse.
The turbulence caused by the Ardennes campaign, and the almost continuous bombardment of Antwerp by the V1s and V2s, severely hampered the movement of supplies from its docks and the problem was exacerbated by the lack of transport, especially rolling stock, when freight cars were withdrawn to prepare for a possible evacuation of Liège and Luxembourg City, on which the German forces were advancing. After this scare, the output from the port increased, thanks in part to an American initiative with their ‘ABC Haul’, a system plying between Antwerp, Brussels and Charleroi involving some sixteen haulage companies using 5-ton tractors hauling 10-ton trailers – but this would not prove enough.
The failure of the Ardennes offensive brought much relief to the Allied camp but on New Year’s Eve the Germans struck again with Operation BODENPLATTE (BASEPLATE), a series of massive air attacks by the Luftwaffe on the Allies’ airfields in France, Belgium and Holland. BODENPLATTE should have been timed to support the leading panzers, which had been expected to cross the Meuse in late December, well on their way to Antwerp, but with the armour failing to reach the river, the aim of the operation was changed to that of causing maximum degradation of Allied air power when it was likely to be most vulnerable – early on New Year’s Day. So it was then that 1,000 German fighters and fighter-bombers, from eleven Luftwaffe wings, converged on seventeen Allied airfields, at low level to avoid radar, to attack with bombs, rockets and gunfire on their unsuspecting and perhaps rather drowsy victims. Three hundred Allied aircraft were destroyed on the ground, a further 146 seriously damaged and another seventy were lost in the air, split almost evenly between the RAF and the USAAF. However, the Allied fighter pilots and gunners had responded well, contributing to the destruction of 300 of the attacking aircraft, albeit with a number of these downed by over-zealous AA gunners back at the German bases. The reason for committing this huge slice of what remained of the Luftwaffe, when it was so badly needed to protect the Reich itself, and to support the German Operation WIRBELWIND (WHIRLWIND), against a rapid advance by the US Seventh Army, was hard to understand. Was it to help protect their ground forces from Allied air attacks as they retreated back through the Ardennes, or simply to reduce the Allied capability to seek and destroy their V1 and V2 launch sites in Holland and west Germany?
Given that the V1’s accuracy increased as ranges decreased , the Germans had set up three new launch sites in the Rotterdam area, a mere fifty-six miles from Antwerp, giving them a better chance of hitting point targets in the port – and so the results proved. The new sites were ready for action, with 300 bombs, by the end of January; they were artfully concealed within high buildings, one a port warehouse, another a sugar factory, and the fact that the bombs were only revealed when the doors of a building opened to fire them, posed new problems for the defenders. Inter alia, the Allies now had to re-deploy their AA defences astride new lines of attack from Rotterdam in the north.
BODENPLATTE had certainly been a timely wake-up call for the Allies, signalling that Germany could still spring surprises; their aircraft losses could not be made good overnight and an immediate review of active and passive defence measures at Allied air bases was undertaken. Standing air patrols were considered but this very expensive option, which also required the re-assignment of assets intended to support Allied ground forces advancing into Germany, was rejected, except in specific circumstances, in favour of higher readiness states. The air defence of Antwerp had lapsed temporarily when many of the gunners had to re-role as infantry to face a possible attack by German ground troops from the Ardennes, but they were soon able to revert to their AA duties. They now faced V1 attacks from the north and the east and a continuing problem for the defenders was the co-ordination of AA with Allied aircraft using a major airfield north of Antwerp, which lay beneath the flight path of new missile streams.
Offensive action against V1 and V2 targets on the ground was also proving increasingly difficult, as the Germans continued to improve their movement control, camouflage and deception, and as new missile sites were developed to threaten Antwerp and Liège. The RAF’s Second Tactical Air Force had, alone, flown 10,000 sorties against missile connected targets in the three months September-November 1944 and, despite the distraction of the Ardennes offensive and BODENPLATTE, there was no intention of letting up on this campaign. In this, the Americans were playing a full part, adding more P-51 Mustangs of the US 8th Air Force to this game of ‘hide and seek’ – but to the detriment of their primary purpose, that of escorting their heavy bomber force.
Continuing into 1945 the heavy V1 and V2 raids on the port of Antwerp were now having a critical effect on the unloading of men and supplies, with an alarming number of both missiles falling onto or close to the cargo ships. On 8 January the freighter Blenheim was put out of commission for a month, and the Michael De Kovats was seriously damaged a week later. The ship discharge rate was far less than had been expected and future targets had to be lowered to 496,000 tons in January, 504,000 tons in February and 551,000 tons in March. The citizens of Antwerp were also suffering badly; with their city being only a few feet above sea level, they had no deep shelters to protect them, such as were available to the Londoners. Moreover, many Belgian labourers refused to work in the primary target areas and had to be seduced back to their jobs with additional pay, which in turn caused much resentment among those who continued to do their duty on the fringes, where they were by no means safe from the bombs.
The many problems caused by this continuous assault on Antwerp combined to persuade the authorities to recommend that ammunition ships be denied entry to the port, on the grounds that if they took a hit from either of the V-weapons much of the port could be destroyed. The Allied naval command felt that this total embargo was unacceptable but agreed to a compromise that only ammunition and explosives needed urgently for operations, typically for AA units defending the port, should be landed in Antwerp, and then only in a remote part of the port where special precautions could be enforced. In fact, throughout the whole period of the V1 and V2 attacks, very few dangerous cargos were brought ashore in Antwerp, the vast majority having to travel the 500 miles from Cherbourg or 275 miles from le Havre to the front line, causing congestion on the roads and massive delays – while using many hundreds of gallons of precious motor fuel. All this affected the work rate, and prompted the search for an additional port.
Even before the flying bomb and rocket attacks had begun, the Americans had questioned the Allies’ reliance on the port of Antwerp and now, with additional restrictions on its use by explosives and ammunition carriers, plans were dusted off for the joint use by the British and the Americans of Ghent as a back-up gateway for reinforcements and supplies into the continent. The situation there was far from ideal, extensive dredging being necessary before the waterways could be used by deep-water oceangoing ships while many of the port facilities needed repair – but on 23 January the first of many cargo ships, the Liberty ship Hannis Taylor entered the port. Given the problems at Antwerp, where even the revised targets might not be met, the port facilities at Ghent were greatly welcomed.
In January 1945 Himmler brought the rocketeers and the flying-bomb men together in an Armeekorps zur Vergeltung (Army Corps for Retaliation, or ‘Revenge Corps’), commanded by Hans Kammler, with Oberst Georg Thom as his deputy. Also under the new command was the first (and only) Rheinbote battery (Artillerie 709), based at Nunspeet in Holland, which began its own bombardment of Antwerp on Christmas Eve 1944 and by mid-January, had reported forty-five successful firings. In fact, Rheinbote did little or nothing to help disrupt activities in the port. The projectiles had relatively small warheads, they were likely to have been spread over a wide area and it was believed that many overshot their aiming point. No records can be found of where the missiles fell, and in the absence of any definitive evidence of its success, Kammler cancelled the Rheinbote programme on 6 February, the missile having already consumed significant resources in manpower and material, to no good purpose.
At the same time, Dr Waldemar Peterson, who headed the commission to oversee Germany’s long-range bombardment operations, had a stroke, creating a vacancy at the helm. Dornberger, having recently been passed over as head of his V2 programme, was offered this unenviable role but declined, considering that the problems he would face would be nigh insoluble. This shock rejection threw the missile hierarchy into confusion, and brought von Braun in as arbiter. Von Braun suggested that the bureaucratic commission be disbanded, and that Dornberger be invited to head a group of dedicated scientists and engineers to pave the way ahead for the missile, and with full agreement Arbeitsstab Dornberger (Working Staff Dornberger) was formed on 12 January 1945 as part of the development department of the ministry of munitions.
Priorities in the operational commitment of the V1 continued to be controversial. Wechtel championed their use as ‘terror weapons’, specifically targeting London, while other military commanders demanded their use against targets which would affect the battle raging across Europe, examples being Antwerp and Liège. Also, there was increasing concern over the number of German soldiers and civilians killed and injured when errant missiles fell among them, 124 of them having crashed within central Holland in one twelve-day period in January. The missilemen seemed unable to solve the problem; could it be down to human error among the very busy, tired and war-weary launch crews? The launch units were also being deprived of the fuel they needed to sustain the bombardment ordered, less than half the requirement being delivered to them in January, while the bombs issued to them fell from 160 to 100.
Himmler’s man Hans Kammler was in the ascendancy again. In January he was promoted to SS Obergruppenführer, no longer subordinate to Speer, and given command of the Revenge Corps, with control over both V1 and V2 programmes. He immediately expanded and re-organised the forces under his command and set his sights on embracing Arbeitsstab Dornberger. Wechtel’s units, now combined within 5 Flak Division (W) remained in the Luftwaffe, and went about their business as usual, with orders to prepare for further attacks on London from launch sites in Holland, with the longer-range V1s undergoing final flight trials. However, when his officers were ordered to join the Waffen-SS, some, including Oberst Eugen Walter, acting commander of the division, refused, and was ordered to step aside, to be replaced in February by Max Wechtel. To consolidate his power, Kammler persuaded Göring to appoint him ‘Special Commissioner for Breaking the Air Terror’, making him the most powerful man in the Third Reich outside the ruling circle of the Nazi Party.
V1 and V2 launch crews were now overcoming many of the teething and quality control problems with their respective weapons, the failure rate of the latter decreasing from 37 per cent to 12 per cent by the end of 1944. Frustratingly, although the V2 units were under continuous surveillance and strafing, which kept them on the move, their firing rates remained high. On 26 January one regiment launched seventeen rockets successfully against England, and Antwerp continued to suffer greatly from an average of ninety-eight bombs per week, with a peak on one day of 160, while the bombs fired over the shorter distance from Rotterdam to Antwerp proved to be 25 per cent more accurate than those launched from farther afield.
Back at Peenemünde the engineers were struggling with a major programme of modifications to the V2 to increase its range, improve guidance and simplify production, but now with a much reduced workforce. Those who remained on Usedom were painfully aware of the steady advance of the Red Army towards them and the retribution which would surely be meted out to them following the atrocities committed by German soldiers on the Russian front in 1941. They were already suffering from severe shortages of all things and some of the inhabitants were thinking of defecting to the West, to surrender to the Americans or British rather than the Russians, but the commander, General Rossmann, would have none of it, ordering everyone to remain at their posts and threatening dire retribution for any who transgressed. All able-bodied men between the ages of 16 and 60 were ordered to join the Volksstrum (Home Guard). However, on 31 January 1945, Kammler ordered that the work in progress at Peenemünde be re-located to the south and to the west, together with 4,325 workers, using every available means of transport, including horses, carts and river barges, while each manager searched for temporary sanctuaries where they could continue their work. No provision was made for the workers’ families or dependants.
Werner von Braun arranged for the main party to move to Bleicherode, west of Nordhausen, where a centralised engineering co-operative Entwicklungsgemeinschaft Mittelbau, which embraced a number of other military industries, was allegedly being set up and where he aimed to continue his work on the rockets, but en route to Bleicherode, he and his driver fell asleep, von Braun breaking his arm badly in the crash which followed. What they found at Bleicherode was far from encouraging; much of their equipment had been lost in transit and few preparations had been made for their arrival. Hermann’s all-important supersonic wind tunnel went to Bavaria while another team, led by Dr Kurt Debus, the chief of Test Stand VII, went west to ‘Fortress Cuxhaven’, in the hope of continuing flight trials from there. Joining them was the Luftwaffe’s V1 team from Flakgruppe Zempin and Peenemünde West. Meanwhile, Bletchley noticed that, one by one, the many signals cells once involved with the missiles along the Baltic coast were ceasing transmissions. Close to Bleicherode, Mittelwerk was continuing to produce V1s and V2s, but in progressively more chaotic conditions. In the chaos, Russian PoWs broke out of captivity and killed their guards, but their freedom was shortlived; they were hunted down and executed, together with others in their bunker, their bodies left hanging outside the entrances to the tunnels to discourage others.
Proof that a new lightweight version of the V1 was in the offing came when one which landed near Antwerp without exploding was found to have a wooden nose, this giving the clue that they might have the range to reach London from sites in Holland and presaging a new assault on the capital. The new, long-range version of the V1 did become available in March, with the flight time increased from 30 minutes to 43 minutes, more than enough to reach England from well inside Holland, but at the expense of the warhead which was reduced from 1,830 to 1,169lb of high explosives. Thus Wachtel’s men resumed their offensive against London on 3 March, firing a total of thirteen V1s from midnight to 06.00, but only two of these crossed the coast into England, and only one reached London – landing at Bermondsey.
With the winter weather succumbing to spring, Allied PR aircraft had begun to enjoy more success and on 26 February alone they had found three V1 sites. An immediate attack on one, by rocket-firing Typhoons, was inconclusive, the clever selection of the site making its destruction difficult and it recovered quickly, to fire seven missiles against London that night. In the second week of March the new V1s were launched against London from Vlaardingen, Ypenburg and Delft, in Holland, the bombardment continuing thereafter, with 116 of the missiles fired against London by 20 March – although many of these fell to newly-deployed fighters and AA. To meet this new threat, multiple gun arrays straddled the new approach lanes to be expected, together with a force of six squadrons of P-51 Mustangs and three squadrons of Meteor jets, held at high states of readiness by day, while two squadrons of Mosquitos and one of Tempests stood guard at night. Learning from the past, the fighters were well separated from the GDAs.
Back at Antwerp the ABC fleet continued its sterling work, transporting 245,000 tons of supplies to the battle front from 30 November to 26 March but continuous missile attacks, coupled with random attacks by the Luftwaffe on the road and rail network, were still having a very detrimental effect on activities in the port. A total of 1,712 V2s had struck Greater Antwerp and the west side of the Scheldt River, 152 hitting the docks, killing fifty-three soldiers and 131 civilians, while a further thirty-one rockets fell on the outskirts. Extensive damage in the docks included two warehouses, twenty berths, a canal lock, a 150 ton crane and 150 ships either sunk or damaged, while much time was wasted when the stevedores had to take shelter from the bombs or be diverted to repair work – many also suffering from continuous ‘nervous strain’.
With a dearth of German heavy artillery to lay siege to the huge Allied supply centre at Liège, Wachtel’s flying bombs were called on to do the job, beginning on 20 November and taking everyone there by surprise. Throughout the next ten days the residents, transient and permanent, suffered the alarming effects of 331 V1s until the first phase of the offensive ceased on 30 November. There was then a pause before the start of the second phase on 15 December which coincided with the German offensive in the Ardennes, Luftwaffe bombers and fighter-bombers joining in (when the weather allowed) a continuous bombardment of Liège, with the railyards in this vital communications centre the primary target. This phase continued until March, by which time more than a thousand V1s had struck Liege and in its immediate vicinity, killing ninety-two Allied soldiers and wounding 336. The civilian population fared even worse, with a total of 1,158 casualties, massive disruption to the local infrastructure and 97 per cent of its 82,700 dwellings destroyed or damaged. Perhaps the Germans were not aware of the death and destruction they had wrought on Antwerp and Liège, no longer having sufficient PR aircraft or an effective intelligence network to make valid assessments.
With the V2s continuing to present ever greater problems in England and on mainland Europe and with the fighter-bomber attacks on sites around The Hague having little success, Home Secretary Herbert Morrison raised again the need for more intensive bombing of the V2 sites, if necessary with less precision using medium and heavy bombers. Controversially, it was argued that the Dutch must bear a share of the onslaught being suffered by Londoners. However, fearing excessive collateral damage on a friendly country, the Defence Committee found against an all-out bombardment by ‘the heavies’, only agreeing, with reservations, to the limited use of the generally more accurate medium bombers of 2TAF against selected targets. Perhaps there was little heed to the ‘law of unintended consequences’? So it was that, on 3 March 1945, fifty-six medium bombers were sent to saturate the Haagsche Bos, a small, heavily wooded area from which many launches were known to have come, to deliver sixty-nine tons of bombs from 12,000 feet. However, success depended on up-to-date intelligence and, with the target being in the middle of a highly populated area, the very best of precision bombing. In the event, the enemy had already departed from the Haagsche Bos and the bombs fell well wide of the original aiming point – at enormous cost to the Dutch residents of Bezuidenhout (See Chapter Eight).
On 23 March the Allied armies were on the verge of crossing the Rhine in strength and elements of Kammler’s Revenge Corps were ordered to retreat east, with as much of its equipment (including rockets) as possible, and to continue firing on London from any new sites they could find. Together with the units around The Hague, the V2 bombardment of London continued, with destructive strikes on Tottenham Court Road, Stepney (twice), Edmonton, Cheshunt, Ilford, Hutton and Orpington. With desperation in the air, the Germans tried hard to destroy the key bridge over the river Rhine at Remagen after it had been captured by the Americans on 7 March. Firing eleven V2s, surely more in hope than expectation for this point target, caused a great deal of collateral damage and fatalities among the American forces nearby – but the bridge survived.
Rural, wooded areas on the west coast of Holland were used extensively for launching V2s against England in late 1944 and early 1945, leaving craters such as these along this track in Bergen Op Zoom. (Medmenham Collection)
Last Gasp. In the last months of the Second World War Flak Abteilung 444 fired a final 77 V2s against England from the small forest of Het Rijsterbos, in Friesland, Holland. The author’s wife, a child living there at that time, reads the history at the forest entrance. (Author)
With natural and man-made camouflage readily available in West Holland, it was rare to find V2s in the open, ready to launch, these two PR shots, taken on 26 Feb 1945, merely revealing post-launch craters in the Duindigt area of Wassenaar, close to The Hague. (Medmenham Collection)
Kammler’s men were now very tired; they were facing endless disasters on the battle front, very heavy workloads and ever-changing plans, having to travel long distances, only at night, to attend endless meetings. However, he himself seemed tireless and had no patience with those who could not keep up with him – often using a burst of his tommy-gun to wake them from their slumbers. Production of the V-weapons continued apace, with streams of railcars carrying them from Mittelwerk to the front, but as the railways came under ever increasing attacks from the Allied bombers and the Dutch Resistance, so more soldiers were needed to guard them.
So it was that the last V2 was fired at London, by Battery 1/485 at The Hague, at 16.48 on 27 March 1945, landing in Orpington, Kent, 15 miles from its aiming point, killing one and injuring twenty-three. One day later, at 08.49, Battery 2/485 fired its last V2 at Antwerp, from Burgsteinfurt, Germany, the rocket landing 11 miles north-east of its target, at Ossendrecht. The V2 units then simply melted into Germany, to destinations largely unnoticed in the confusion of the time. The last V1 to be launched against London, from Delft in Holland, landed at Datchworth, Herts, at 16.00 on 29 March while two others which followed were brought down by AA, one at Sittingbourne, Kent, the other off the coast at Orfordness. Shortly thereafter, Mr Churchill announced that the missile attacks on England were over. Antwerp had to suffer from the V1s until 30 March – after which the missilemen were in full retreat, some re-roling, with great reluctance, as infantry soldiers. Although there had been plans to use the V-weapons against the Russians, these did not materialise.
In the last week of March Bletchley Park decoded a message from the Revenge Corps, which hinted strongly that its rocketmen were about to evacuate West Holland, and this was ordered by Kammler in a signal on 31 March; their fate was also to become infantry soldiers, in a final attempt to repel the Russians on the river Weser, north of Hannover. This was indeed a dismal prospect for them, given that, of the 1,000 gunners who had been sent as infantrymen to the Russian front in January, only 100 had returned in March, to the rallying point at Suttrop, in north Sauerland. Suttrop was also the scene of one of Kammler’s most brutal executions when he ordered Obersturmführer Wolfgang Wetzling to exterminate 208 slave labourers who were found cooking chickens in the surrounding woods as they tried to walk home to Russia.
Amongst all this chaos, missile production at Mittelwerk continued with 617 V2s and 2,275 V1s assembled there in February while plenty of components and the necessary machinery remained to manufacture more. Earlier plans to fire-bomb the tunnel entrances to the underground works had been shelved, but the RAF did bomb Nordhausen on 2/3 April, virtually destroying the old city and killing an estimated 8,000 people, including some 1,500 prisoners in the Boelcke Luftwaffe barracks. The Americans arrived there shortly thereafter, to find that many of the starving and dying prisoners of Camp Dora had been murdered by the guards, in one case 1,000 having been herded into a building and burned to death. SS guards then packed trains with an estimated 4,000 prisoners from Mittelwerk for transport to Bergen-Belsen Concentration Camp in Lower Saxony ready to resume work on the missiles there once the Germans had prevailed over the Allies. This route took them north via Gardelegen where their journey ended six days later, the rail lines beyond having been destroyed by Allied bombs. Those prisoners who had not died already were then herded into a barn full of straw soaked in petrol and burned to death, many of those trying to escape being gunned down by the guards, most of whom then defected and melted into the countryside. Much of the production and supporting equipment at Mittelwerk was then destroyed as the Wehrmacht retreated, but there were still many spoils of war to be had when the Allies arrived (Chapter Eleven).
On 1 April Kammler ordered 500 people, including von Braun, to leave Bleicherode – again without their families – to an unspecified destination ‘where you can continue your important work’. Those remaining at Bleicherode were simply left to face the Russians. The ‘Vengeance Express’, which had been home to many of the top rocketeers since their days in Blizna, rolled out of Bleicherode on 6 April, for the six-day journey to the Bavarian Alps. Von Braun realised that further work would not be practicable without all the notes and equipment left behind or lost en route and knew, realistically, that they were simply fleeing for their lives. He ordered his assistant, Dieter Huxel, to collect all the classified documents he could lay his hands on and take them, in three large trucks, to a hiding place in a mineshaft near the town of Dörnten, north of the Harz mountains, from where they could be retrieved at a later date, leaving him to make his own way south to Oberammergau. There, von Braun, Dornberger and others were accommodated at a hotel in the ski resort of Oberjoch, on the Austrian-German border, waiting to surrender to Americans. Von Braun was now suffering severely from incorrect treatment to his broken arm, but a local ski surgeon put this right by breaking the plaster cast and resetting the bone before confining him to bed. In the weeks to follow, the many photographs taken of him as a prisoner of the Americans, would show his arm raised as if in a salute – but not to the Führer!
Kammler seems to have departed from the Revenge Division on 7 April, and was later believed to have attempted to muster a few remaining troops for a futile fight against the Americans before he himself escaped to Prague, where it is said he shot himself to avoid capture by Czech partisans. On 14 April the Revenge Division was ordered to re-role as infantry, to face the oncoming Russians on the river Elbe but, in Kammler’s absence, the divisional commanders thought better of it and, on 26 April, they surrendered to the US Army, hoping that their proven knowledge of missile operations would stand them in good stead in what followed. They were disarmed on the Elbe and taken into captivity, only too pleased to escape the Russians – who failed in their demands that they should be their prisoners.
Hostilities in Europe ceased on 8 May 1945.