Allied and Axis leaders alike recognized that what happened during 1944 would decide the course of the war. On November 3, 1943, Hitler warned that the final crisis was at hand. “The threat from the East remains,” he wrote, “but an even greater danger looms in the West: the Anglo-American landing! If the enemy here succeeds in penetrating our defenses on a wide front, consequences of staggering proportions will follow within a short time.” For once Hitler was correct. The success of Operation Overlord marked the beginning of the end in the West. Even the belated deployment of Hitler’s vaunted V-weapon failed to buy time for the Nazis. In the east, Operation Bagration, the Soviet summer offensive in which Russian ground forces were supported by over 10,000 aircraft, led to the breakthrough that eventually took the Soviets to Berlin. In the Far East, the Japanese, too, were on the defensive. As island after island in their outer defensive ring fell to the Americans, they faced the prospect of an all-out US air assault on their sacred Home Islands.
When the Allies hit the D-Day beaches on June 6, 1944, their superiority in the air proved vital in enabling them to establish firm footholds in Normandy quickly. Between them, the Allied air forces fielded 2,434 fighters and fighter-bombers plus around 700 light and medium bombers to directly support the Normandy landings. There were thousands more in reserve. By contrast, the Luftwaffe, which had only 300 combat-ready aircraft stationed west of the Seine, was unready and outclassed. It managed to fly only 295 sorties on the day of the landings as opposed to the Allies’ 12,351.
Fighters continuously circled the skies above the invasion fleet, keeping the troop transports safe from air attack, while the fighter-bombers and bombers ranged inland. The fighter-bombers, operating at low altitude, concentrated on attacking vehicles and troops on the roads or in the fields. The bombers struck at towns and rail centers to hamper German resupply efforts and to slow down reinforcements desperately trying to move forward toward the fighting front.
By contrast, only a single Luftwaffe sortie, flown by Colonel Josef “Pips” Priller, commander of JG 26, and Heinz Wodarczyk, his wingman, managed to get as far as the invasion beaches on June 6. The Junkers 88s heading for Gold Beach were intercepted by an Allied fighter wing and shot down. The two German pilots made one swift pass over Sword Beach before turning for the safety of their home airfield at Lille 200 miles (321.8km) away. “The Luftwaffe,” Priller commented to Wodarczyk sardonically, “has had its moment.” The writing was on the wall for Hitler’s much-vaunted Thousand-Year Reich.
All this, of course, was in the future. Two years before the invasion was launched, preparations for it started. These involved launching a major photo-reconnaissance effort over the European mainland. It began in May 1942, when a small team of Army photographic interpreters were spirited away from RAF Medmenham, where they had been stationed, to Norfolk House, the headquarters of Home Forces Army Intelligence, in London. There they were tasked with working on a top-secret project—identifying possible landing beaches for the invasion of Europe when it was launched.
The photographic interpreters were given a head start. Based at Mount Farm in Oxfordshire, a satellite of RAF Benson, 140 Squadron had been photographing all the coastal defenses and beaches between Calais and Cherbourg ever since the fall of France in 1940. The search was now broadened to cover the entire coastal area from Den Helder in Holland to the Spanish frontier. Gradually, elaborate aerial mosaics were put together of the most likely landing areas. These were of inestimable help to the planners when it came to selecting the most suitable beaches for the invasion.
It was not until August 1943, however, that, after the Quebec Conference held between Roosevelt, Churchill, and the Allied Chiefs of Staff, Operation Overlord was given the final go-ahead. Rather than land in the Pas de Calais, which was heavily defended, the planners opted for the Normandy beaches between Cherbourg and Le Havre as providing better landing places. Months of detailed photo-reconnaissance followed. The aim was to pinpoint German gun positions and other strongpoints as well as producing a photographic mosaic so that the photographic interpreters could assess and monitor the state of the actual beach defenses.
D-DAY
After one postponement due to bad weather, the D-Day landings went ahead on June 6, 1944. The outcome of the ensuing battle would depend on how quickly the Allies could move off the beaches and consolidate their bridgeheads. The one thing they could be sure of was total air superiority. By the time of the invasion, Luftflotte 3 had only 200 aircraft west of the Seine ready for action.
Allied ground troops supported by their assault vehicles storm ashore onto one of the Normandy beaches. The British and Canadians met with surprisngly little resistance and quickly began moving inland. The Americans on Utah were pinned down on the beach for most of the opening day of the invasion, taking heavy casualties. It took them almost until nightfall to find a way off Utah and start to break through the stout German defenses.
The beaches were photographed at high and low tide to build up a complete picture of them and the nature and state of their defenses. The low-level oblique coverage the photo-reconnaissance pilots brought back was incredibly detailed. By closely examining the pebbles on each beach, for instance, the geologists among the photographic interpreters could determine whether the shingle would support the weight of Allied tanks driving forward over the beach once they had been landed.
Laborers are seen hard at work on the Atlantic Wall fortifications. Thousands of French conscripts were drafted in by the Organization Todt in an arrangement with the government of Vichy France; French building firms were also contracted to work on the Atlantic Wall’s construction. Hitler had ordered work on the wall to begin in March 1942, but, by the time of the invasion just over two years later, it was still far from complete. In France, the most impressive fortifications were in the Pas de Calais. By comparison, Normandy, where the Allies intended to land, was comparatively lightly fortified.
As the date set for the invasion grew closer, Allied air activity was stepped up accordingly. German radar stations were singled out for special attention—starting on May 22, rocket-firing Typhoons and Spitfires put 80 percent of them out of action in a series of daring low-level attacks. The potential invasion beaches were being continuously monitored as well, though right up to the last minute no one outside the highest levels of Allied supreme command knew which ones had been actually chosen. US photo-reconnaissance Lightnings from 10th Group flew practically constant low-level sorties over them—so low that the American fliers called them “dicing” missions, as in dicing with death.
Meanwhile, RAF Medmenham was working flat out, producing thousands of detailed photographic maps and master-models of the Normandy coastline, stretching inland for around 12 miles (19km). Nothing was being left to chance. Even the rows of obstacles on the foreshore were modeled.
The invasion planners had two major concerns. One was to keep the identity of the beaches they had selected secret, which meant that photo-reconnaissance had to be maintained along the entire length of Hitler’s much-vaunted Atlantic Wall. The second was the Atlantic Wall itself. Was it as impregnable to attack as the Nazi propaganda machine claimed?
To counter any Allied threat, the Germans busied themselves constructing powerful chains of fortifications along the coasts of Western Europe. The idea was to stop an invasion at the tide line on the beaches, so forcing the invaders to re-embark or face being driven into the sea. Work on the Atlantic Wall began in March 1942; that September, Hitler upgraded it by ordering the construction of no fewer than 15,000 concrete strongpoints along it. These were to be garrisoned by an army of 300,000 men.
The Fuehrer also decreed that construction work was to be finished by the following May, even though the Todt Organization responsible for building the Atlantic Wall protested that only 40 percent of it at most could be completed by that time. In fact, the figure fell far below this estimate. That fall, Field Marshal Gerd von Rundstedt, the commander-in-chief in the West since spring 1942, warned Hitler that the defenses were still far from complete. Field Marshal Erwin Rommel, in command of Army Group B and responsible for the defense of the Channel coast from the Pas de Calais to Normandy and Brittany, was even more scathing about the overall lack of preparedness.
THE ATLANTIC WALL
Hitler intended his famed Atlantic Wall (marked in red) to stretch along the coast of Nazi-occupied Western Europe from Norway to the Spanish border. Building it involved the construction of 15,000 strongpoints, the employment of 450,000 laborers, and the use of 11 million tons of concrete and a million tons of steel. Hitler claimed that what he christened “Fortress Europe” was impregnable; in fact, despite the image its German propaganda sought to project, the wall that had been built was never intended to be a continuous structure.
Rommel embarked on a detailed inspection of the Atlantic Wall in December 1943, shortly after his appointment. What he discovered shocked him to the core. Rather than being impregnable, as Hitler was boasting, the wall was “an enormous bluff, more for the German people than the enemy.” Most of the defenses were incomplete and in some places had not been started at all. It was, he concluded, “a figment of Hitler’s Wolkenkuckucksheim (cloud cuckoo land).” He estimated that he had less than six months to rectify the situation before the Allies attacked. His task was to transform the Atlantic Wall into a reality.
Taking the defenses he had created at El Alamein as his model, Rommel ordered belts of new fortifications to be constructed in depth to slow the Allies down and make them more vulnerable to counterattack. If the invading forces made it onto the beaches, they immediately would be faced by pillboxes, concrete bunkers, flame throwers, and machine gun nests, all with overlapping fields of fire. Just beyond the beaches “heavy antitank guns, self-propelled guns, and antiaircraft combat troops” would be standing ready for action in the forward part of the defense zone.
Even before they got on shore, the Allies would be subject to attack. Four “rows of obstacles, mined or otherwise” were to be erected in the sea below the high-water line to blow up the landing craft or tear the bottoms out of them as they neared the beaches. The beaches themselves were to be festooned with barbed wire and other obstacles. According to Army Group B’s War Diary, 517,000 of the latter were in position by May 13, 1944. Rommel also ordered 20 million more mines to be laid. By the end of the month, more than four million mines of various types were in place all along the Channel coast.
It seemed that Rommel had thought of everything. Aware that the Allies were likely to deploy airborne troops to assist the main landing forces, he ordered 10ft (3m) high poles to be planted at 100ft (30.4m) intervals in any likely spot where gliders might land. The poles were christened “Rommel’s asparagus.”
Rommel was right in his assessment, since airborne landings were an integral part of the Allied invasion plan. Minutes after midnight on D-Day, paratroopers from the US 101st and 82nd and the British 6th Airborne Divisions began dropping out of the skies over Normandy. Glider-borne troops swiftly followed.
The British got into action first, their targets being the bridges across the Caen Canal at Ronville and the River Orne at Benouville. The aim was to seize control of the bridges, so blocking German access to the left flank of the amphibious landings and, at the same time, opening up the way for the British to attack Caen itself. Other bridges over the River Dives were to be blown up using the demolition charges the Germans had placed obligingly under them. The task was given to two companies of the Oxfordshire and Buckinghamshire Light Infantry, commanded by Major John Howard, who had been training his men for months for the job. His orders were simple—to capture the two bridges intact and “hold until relieved.”
Just after midnight, two groups of three Halifax bombers, each bomber towing a Horsa glider, headed for the Caen area. At 12:16 a.m. precisely, the first glider touched down in a field just west of the Orne River and south of the main road, crushing the wire entanglements the Germans had erected on the field with its nose. Moments later, the men on board were pouring over the bridge at Ranville. The other gliders landed safely as well and the paratroopers on board them went straight into action. It took Howard less than 10 minutes to take both his objectives.
With the bridges secured, Howard and his troops prepared to defend their positions until they were relieved. They expected paratroops from the 5th Parachute Brigade, which had begun landing just after Howard’s gliders touched down, to reach them first. Forces advancing from the invasion beaches were expected to arrive by noon.
In the event, the task of relieving Howard fell to the 1st Special Services Brigade, commanded by the flamboyant Lord Lovat. Accompanied by his personal piper, who played “Blue Bonnets” and other Highland bagpipe music to encourage the commandos as they marched, Lovat and his men fought their way through slight German resistance to relieve Howard at 2:00 p.m.
It was perhaps not surprising that the troops from the 5th Parachute Brigade were delayed since the 6th Airborne, of which they were a part, had another equally important task to fulfill. Air reconnaissance had revealed that the Germans had built a new artillery battery at Merville. It was thought to be equipped with 150mm howitzers with a range of 14,000yd (12,802m). This put the British beaches within easy range of the guns. If they were allowed to get into action, the result would be havoc.
The position was a formidable one. The howitzers were housed in four concrete casemates, each containing a single gun. The casemates themselves were concealed by a covering of soil and the concrete of which they were constructed was 6ft 6in (2m) thick. Stout steel doors protected the entrance to each casemate, while the northern approach was guarded by a 140-feet-wide (42.7m) and 300-yards-long (274m) antitank ditch, festooned with two concertinas of barbed wire with mines in the gap between the concertinas. Around 160 men were believed to be holding the position, which was lavishly equipped with machine- and antiaircraft guns as well as the four howitzers.
Lieutenant-Colonel Terence Otway, commander of the 9th Parachute Battalion, devised a daring plan of attack. It would start with 100 Lancasters bombing the battery before he and his men dropped from the skies ready to begin their assault. Once his paratroops had been dropped, an advance party would cut through the protective wire and clear a path through the minefield. Finally, while the rest of his battalion waited, 60 paratroopers would be landed by glider right on top of the battery. The attack would then begin.
These Airspeed Horsa 1 gliders, seen under tow, were painted in 1944 by the British war artist Roy Nockolds. Paratroopers from the US 82nd and 101st Airborne Divisions, the British 6th Airborne Division, and the 1st Canadian Parachute Battalion spearheaded the airborne assault on D-Day, being dropped or landed by glider on the Cotentin Peninsula five hours before the seaborne landings took place. They were reinforced a few hours later by glider-borne infantry. Each Horsa could carry up to 30 soldiers; 500 of them took part in the D-Day operation.
US paratroopers drop from the C-47s carrying them into action in Normandy on D-Day. The assault did not succeed in its immediate objective, thanks to the excessive scattering of the parachute drops. Many of the paratroopers over- or undershot their designated drop zones, only 25 percent of one unit dropping within a mile of their target. After 24 hours, only 2,500 of the 6,000 men in the 101st Airborne Division were under the control of their headquarters. The rest were either bottled up in isolated pockets or roaming lost behind enemy lines.
At the start, nothing went according to plan. The bombers missed their target completely and the C-47s carrying Otway’s paratroops were scattered by antiaircraft fire. They dropped the paratroops over an area of around 50 sq. miles (129.5km2), with the result that most of them never made it to the rendezvous point. Nevertheless, Otway decided to press ahead with the 150 men he had at his disposal. His troops blasted a way through the wire with their Bangalore torpedoes, stormed the battery, forced its garrison to surrender, and blew up the guns.
Howard and his men had been fortunate, but the US paratroops from the 101st and 82nd Airborne Divisions were not as lucky. As the C-47s carrying them in a 300-mile-long (482km) formation crossed the French coast, the aircraft ran into heavy cloud. All of the pilots instinctively banked, turned, climbed, dived, and dodged attempting to avoid a mid-air collision. By the time they had emerged from the cloud, their flying formation had fallen apart.
Worse was to follow. As heavy German antiaircraft fire commenced, many pilots reacted by increasing their speed, diving, or climbing to lose or gain height and taking violent evasive action. The paratroops were tossed around inside the planes like ninepins. They anxiously awaited the signal to drop as the pilots—some of whom now hopelessly lost—searched for the markers that were supposed to mark the drop zones. They could see little or nothing. Flying virtually blind, they hit their dropping signals when they thought they were close to their targets. And then, once the paratroops had tumbled out of their planes, they “took off for England, full bore, like a scalded dog” as one embittered paratrooper later put it.
As the paratroops jumped, they realized that their planes had been flying too fast and much too low. Many lost their leg bags, containing weapons, ammunition, and hard rations, as soon as their parachutes opened. Some swung just once in their chutes before hitting the ground; others never had the time to get their chutes open. Some dropped into the sea and drowned in the English Channel; others landed in the marshes that had been formed when the Germans flooded the Merderet River. The vast majority of them were hopelessly out of position and lost.
Given the confusion, it was scarcely surprising that the 82nd Airborne got off to a bad start. The division had been tasked with securing bridgeheads over the Merderet River and occupying and holding the town of St. Mère-Église. Even though one of its battalions succeeded in capturing the town at around 4:30 a.m. that morning and then defended it successfully through the day against German counterattack, most of 82nd Airborne’s troops remained stalled on the west side of the Merderet River.
The 101st Airborne Division ran into much the same difficulties. Its tasks were to secure the western end of the four exists from Utah Beach, where the US VII Corps, consisting of the 4th, 90th, and 9th Infantry Divisions, would be landing. It also was to destroy the bridges spanning the Douve River, establish bridgeheads across it at Le Port, and capture the lock at La Barquette. In addition, it was ordered to take the coastal artillery battery at St. Martin-de-Varreville, though reconnaissance revealed that its gun positions had been destroyed by bombing and the fortification was deserted.
The two northern beach exists were secured quickly, but it took longer to reach the southern ones, largely because the paratroops assigned to the task had been dropped out of position. They reached the first exit around noon, capturing Pouppeville in the process, but by the time they got to the second one about an hour-and-a-half later, the amphibious troops had already secured it. Though other units from the division succeeded in getting across the bridges at Le Port and in digging in defensively on the east back of the river, enemy artillery fire soon made their position untenable. They pulled back to the west bank for the rest of the day.
US paratroopers stand in line to board a Douglas DC-4, the military variant of the Douglas DC-47 21-passenger aircraft. The DC-47, with its more powerful engines, utility seating for up to 35 soldiers, strengthened floor and rear fuselage, and large loading doors, became the Allies’ most important transport plane of the entire war. It was used to carry troops, freight, air-drop supplies, and paratroops; tow gliders; and to evacuate battle casualties. Its rugged construction made it practically indestructible. In the USAAF it was dubbed the Skytrain; in the RAF it was called the Dakota.
The attempt to take the lock at Le Barquette started disastrously. Lieutenant-Colonel Robert G. Carroll, commander of the battalion of the 501st Parachute Infantry Regiment entrusted with the job, was killed, Major Philip S. Gage, the Executive Officer, was captured, and all the company commanders were missing. Luckily, Colonel Howard R. Johnson, the regimental commander, landed in the right place and was able to rally 150 men to take the lock and save the situation. However, attempts to destroy the Douve bridges west of St. Côme-du-Mont had to be abandoned after a reconnaissance patrol came under heavy German fire as it approached the target. Johnson concluded that his force was too small to blow the bridges. He decided to hold the lock and wait for reinforcements.
Neither division succeeded in completing the whole of their missions. Nevertheless, by fulfilling the most important parts of their assignments, they made the landings on Utah and the subsequent movement inland relatively easy. They suffered heavy losses in the process, although not on the scale predicted by Air Marshal Sir Trafford Leigh-Mallory, the commander of the Tactical Air Force, when he tried to persuade Eisenhower to call off the drops. Leigh-Mallory predicted 70 percent losses among the glider-borne troops and up to 50 percent among the paratroops even before they could get into action on the ground. It would all end in a “futile slaughter of two fine divisions.” In fact, the 82nd Airborne lost 1,259 men and the 101st Airborne 1,250 out of the roughly 6,600 men both divisions deployed on D-Day.
By refusing to cancel the airborne landings, Eisenhower showed that he was his own man. He had been equally opposed to attempts to abandon or water down what became known as the Transport Plan. Like all the other Allied ground commanders, he was convinced that achieving total air superiority was the key to winning the subsequent battle. When his son, a young second lieutenant, met his father a week after D-Day, he commented on the rows of US vehicles, parked bumper to bumper out in the open at Eisenhower’s beachhead headquarters, waiting to get into combat. “You’d never get away with this if you didn’t have air supremacy,” he told his father. The general replied: “If I didn’t have air supremacy, I wouldn’t be here.”
Air power was the key not only to getting onto the beaches in the first place, but also to stopping German efforts to get reinforcements into position to counterattack the invasion beachheads in strength. The Allied commanders probably had the example of the Anzio landings earlier that year in Italy at the back of their minds. There, after meeting only light initial resistance, the Allies were counterattacked by the reinforcements the Germans hastily rushed to the scene from as far away as Yugoslavia and southern France. They came perilously close to driving the Allies back into the sea.
What was needed was a strategical rethink to ensure that the Germans could not repeat that feat in Normandy. The key, Eisenhower and the other Allied ground commanders decided, was the French railway system. If they could bomb this to a standstill, they believed that the Germans, who were already short of fuel and motorized transport, would be forced onto the roads. This would leave them exposed and vulnerable to the hundreds of fighter-bombers that would rove the skies above the main highways, attacking anything and everything trying to move along them.
Opinion, however, was divided as to whether the Transport Plan, as it was termed, would work or not. Eisenhower, Air Marshal Air Arthur Tedder, the Deputy Supreme Commander, and Leigh-Mallory were in favor of it. Tedder argued that it was the only plan “offering a reasonable prospect of disorganizing enemy movement and supply… and of preparing the ground for imposing the tactical delays which can be vital once the land battle is joined.” Harris and Spaatz, the two “bomber barons,” opposed it.
Harris’s opposition was overcome by his own airmen, who, at the insistence of Sir Charles Portal, Chief of the Air Staff, launched a series of experiment raids on the important marshalling yards at Trappes, Aulnoye, Le Mans, Amiens/Longueau, Courtrai, and Laon in March 1944. The attacks were a complete success; French civilian casualties, too, were far lower than expected. Harris was left nonplussed. One of his main arguments against the Transport Plan was that his aircrews lacked the precision bombing skills to carry it out.
This aerial reconnaissance photograph shows the scene near Vierville-sur-Mer in lower Normandy just over three weeks after D-Day. Note the DUKW amphibious trucks shuttling between the beach and the ships offshore, the vehicles heading off the breach, and the knocked-out German coastal defense position to the west of the port.
Spaatz persisted in his opposition. So, too, did Churchill because of the civilian casualties he still feared the plan might cause. Eventually, Eisenhower appealed to Roosevelt, telling him that he considered the plan indispensable if the Allies were to achieve success. “There is no other way in which this tremendous air force can help us, during the preparatory period, to get ashore and stay there,” he wrote to the President. Roosevelt came down on Eisenhower’s side.
The attacks began in April and gradually intensified over the following weeks as bombers from the 9th and 12th Air Forces swung into action, joined later by the 15th Air Force and the heavy bombers of the 8th Army Air Force and Bomber Command. The Germans started to feel the effects immediately. By the end of the month, the Allies had dropped more than 30,000 tons of bombs on rail targets in France, Belgium, and western Germany. 1,000 trains—600 loaded with Wehrmacht supplies—were backed up all along the rail lines, unable to move forward or backward. It was the equivalent of a monster traffic jam.
In particular, the backlog of delayed trains scheduled for Normandy and Brittany rose from 30 on April 1 to 228 on May 1. Rundstedt was forced to order 18,000 men to stop working on the strengthening of the Atlantic Wall defenses to start repairing the damaged tracks. 10,000 more followed them in May, but to no avail. Military train capacity in the crucial northern region of France fell from around 58,000 tons a day to barely 25,000 tons. The number of miles of track in use dropped from about 236,000 miles (379,810km) to just over 62,000 miles (99,779km) by June 1.
The railway yards at Aulnoye, around 100 miles (160km) northeast of Paris, were photographed before and after 253 Lancasters from Bomber Command blitzed them on April 27, 1944. Air Chief Marshal Sir Arthur Harris had argued fervently that Bomber Command was incapable of carrying out the kind of precision attacks crippling the French transport system required, but his aircrews proved him wrong. Churchill, too, required persuading to get him to agree to such attacks. He was concerned about the number of French civilian casualties they might cause.
This was as nothing compared to the chaos that overtook subsequent German troop movements in response to the Allied landings. What happened to the Panzer Lehr Division was typical. Early on June 6, it was in the Le Mans area, actually preparing to load its tanks onto rail transporters for the journey to Poland when the order was countermanded. Late the same afternoon, it got underway northward to confront the Allies and attack the Normandy bridgeheads. The next morning, it suffered its first air attack near Falaise. Blasted bridges and bombed road junctions slowed its progress to a crawl. By nightfall, it had lost more than 200 of its vehicles to Allied fighter-bomber attack.
The 7th Panzer Division suffered the same fate. Strikes by Typhoon and Mustang squadrons decimated its tanks and transport as it moved toward the Channel coast on June 7. The 2nd SS Panzer Division Das Reich was struck as well once it had crossed the Loire on its way from Toulouse to Normandy. Nowhere was safe from Allied air attack. “The worst thing,” one exasperated German soldier wrote, “continues to be the planes, so everything has to be done at night. Those bastards strafe individuals with their onboard machine guns; we should have antiaircraft artillery and planes here, but they are nowhere in sight. You can imagine that this completely exhausts morale.”
Rundstedt and General Leo Geyr von Schweppenburg, commander of Panzer Group West, were both taken aback by the ferocity of the Allied air attack. Rundstedt’s last combat command had been against the Russians in 1941, when the Luftwaffe still ruled the skies. Schweppenburg was also an Eastern Front man, who had little idea of what enemy air supremacy could achieve. He was soon to find out for himself. On June 10, his poorly camouflaged headquarters were heavily bombed. Many of his staff were killed and his command put out of action for a crucial two weeks.
On the other hand, Rommel, the one-time “Desert Fox” who was in command of Army Group B, knew that the Luftwaffe was a spent force, totally incapable of protecting his armies from the hordes of Allied fighters and bombers that would be supporting the invasion. The Allies, he insisted, had to be defeated on the beaches or not at all. Therefore, all available reserves—especially the panzers—had to be positioned within striking distance of the coast to bring this about.
Rommel, however, had reckoned without Hitler. By keeping the bulk of the German panzers in reserve to deal with landings in the Pas-de-Calais that never took place, the self-proclaimed “greatest commander of all time” himself destroyed his best and only chance of success. Though the Germans held on grimly in the Normandy bocage for weeks, they were not able to muster sufficient reinforcements quickly enough to deliver a decisive counterattack before Allied numerical and material superiority began to tell.
The Allied plan to exploit their success and break out of Normandy was as follows. The British and Canadians would advance on Caen, so luring most of the German panzers to their part of the front. This would enable the Americans on the Allied right to envelop the weakened enemy there with a wheeling movement south and east. The Caen battle was codenamed Operation Goodwood; the American advance Operation Cobra.
Operation Goodwood began with a massive aerial bombardment; 1,900 bombers dropped 6,858 tons of bombs within a matter of minutes. Montgomery was relying on this overwhelming air support to redress the odds on the ground, which were against him. As the two sides battled ferociously, General Omar Bradley, commander of the US 12th Army Group, prepared to launch Operation Cobra. His Army Group, spearheaded by Patton’s newly formed 3rd Army, broke through at Avranches and penetrated deep into Brittany.
By mid-August, the British and Canadian forces in the north and Patton’s troops sweeping round to the south had encircled the Germans creating the so-called Falaise Gap. In three days of continual air attack, the armored divisions of the 5th and 7th Panzer Armies were practically annihilated. Of the 2,300 tanks with which the Germans had started the battle, all bar 120 were destroyed.
It was the beginning of the end for the Germans in France. There was no prospect now of an orderly retreat to the line of the Seine; instead, constantly harried from the air, the Wehrmacht fell back in disorder into Belgium and eventually to the German frontier. Paris was liberated—despite explicit orders from Hitler to burn the city to the ground, General Dietrich von Choltitz, its mlitary governor, surrendered it without putting up a fight. Brussels followed. Allied air power ruled the skies. Many confidently believed that the war in Europe would end in 1944 with Germany’s capitulation. Rekindled German resistance, Arnhem, and the Ardennes offensive were to prove these hopes unfounded.
NORMANDY BREAKOUT
The Allied breakout from Normandy began on July 18, 1944, when the British and Canadians launched Operation Goodwood, their aim being to thrust forward with their armor to capture Caen. 2,000 bombers paved the way for them with a massive aerial bombardment. The city fell on July 20. Five days later, the Americans struck in Brittany; 2,251 US tanks faced just 190 German panzers. Avranches fell to US forces on July 30. By August 19, the German 5th and 7th panzer armies had been practically encircled at Falaise. When the encirclement was completed a few days later, the battle for Normandy was effectively over.
This vertical air reconnaissance photograph of Cagny, a small village southeast of Caen, was taken on July 18, shortly after aircraft from Bomber Command had blitzed German fortified positions there. Six-hundred-and-fifty tons of bombs were dropped on them in 10 minutes. The attack was part of Operation Goodwood, the British and Canadian armored thrust toward Caen. The German high command concentrated six-and-a-half panzer divisions to face Montgomery’s attack, leaving only one- and-a-half to face the Americans in Brittany.
It was RAF Medmenham’s finest hour. Starting in 1943, Wing Commander Douglas Kendall’s photographic interpreters led the hunt for Hitler’s so-called “Vengeance Weapons,” which the Fuehrer believed would turn the tide of war decisively in his favor. The search involved the taking of more than 1,200,000 reconnaissance photographs and months of patient air intelligence work before the full extent of German missile developments was revealed.
Despite Hitler’s belief that his terrible new missiles would prove to be war-winners, this was not to be the case. By the time they were finally deployed, the Russians were in Poland and the Western Allies had landed in Normandy. Had the Germans started their bombardment six months earlier, as had originally been planned, the story might have been different, but, in the final analysis, the missiles were what Goebbels christened Vergeltungswaffe—“vengeance weapons.” They were nothing more and nothing less.
Though rumors that the Germans were engaged in experimental rocket research had been prevalent in intelligence circles since November 1939, the first hard evidence for it was obtained by accident, not design. On May 15, 1942, Flight Lieutenant Donald Steventon, piloting his Spitfire on a routine naval reconnaissance mission over the Baltic, noticed major construction work being carried out around an airfield on the northern tip of an island below him. Steventon decided to take a few photographs of the site. Once these reached RAF Medmenham, the photographic interpreters, though puzzled by what they saw, most notably three strange circular clearings carved into the forest, had the photographs filed for reference as showing nothing of immediate military significance.
The photographic interpreters could not have been more mistaken. What Steventon had stumbled across was the German rocket research establishment at Peenemünde, where Nazi scientists, technicians, and engineers were feverishly developing what they hoped would prove to be revolutionary new secret weapons.
German fascination with rocketry began in the late 1920s. Many of the first enthusiasts were men of peace, but, from 1929 onward, the army became interested in it, primarily as a way of getting around the weapons restrictions imposed by the Treaty of Versailles. After Hitler came to power in 1933, the amount of government money made available to the early rocket scientists dramatically increased. In 1936, work began on the construction of a vast new rocket research center at Peenemünde, on an island off the Baltic coast. It became the hub for all subsequent missile development.
Peenemünde was the ideal place to site a rocket firing range. Its remoteness made it easy to keep what was going on there secret; the fact that the island was densely forested made it easy to conceal workshops, laboratories, hangars, power plants, and test stands from prying eyes. Gradually, the number of scientists, engineers, and technicians working there grew. The initial figure was 30. By the middle of the war, this had increased to around 4,000 living on the island. Another 11,000 commuted forward and backward from the mainland via a specially constructed rail link each day.
The Germans launched their first V2 successfully at Peenemünde on October 23, 1942. Rocket developments at the research facility there were one of the Third Reich’s most closely guarded secrets. Though Flight Lieutenant Donald Steventon had photographed the site on May 15, 1942, no evidence of rocket activity was then detected. No one knew what the strange circular sites were intended for or was even prepared to hazard a guess. It was not until June 12, 1943 that an actual rocket lying horizontal on its side in a rail truck was spotted. Two more V2s on transporters were photographed by an RAF Mosquito just over a week later. The British response was immediate. Bomber Command was ordered to bomb Peenemünde.
Bomber Command launched Operation Hydra, its first massed strike against Peenemünde, on August 17, 1943. The aircrews taking part in the attack were not made aware of the significance of their target; they were merely told that if it was not damaged significantly, they would be sent back to do the job again. This detailed plan of the facility was produced by RAF Medmenham some time following the operation after a searching analysis of all available air-reconnaissance photographs. The raid, though not completely successful, forced the Germans to abandon plans to mass-produce V2s at Peenemünde and to manufacture it underground elsewhere. The enforced change delayed the deployment of the missile for crucial months.
Two teams worked independently at the facility. The Luftwaffe thought that Peenemünde was the best place for the development of new and revolutionary jet aircraft. The army team, under the technical direction of Wernher von Braun, a brilliant young scientist it had been funding since 1932, focused on rockets. The first two rockets von Braun and his colleagues designed—the A1 and A2—were small and relatively rudimentary. The 20-foot-long (6m) A3, which came next, was larger and more sophisticated, though its failings demonstrated that there were a host of technical problems the rocketeers still had to resolve. Nevertheless, impressed by the progress von Braun and his team had made, the army authorized the development of an even more advanced rocket. What was eventually to become the V2 had been born.
A test stand at Peenemünde. After the RAF bombed the facility successfully, V2 testing was shifted to Blizna in southeastern Poland. The Germans were confident that their work would go undetected, but they were mistaken. Mosquitoes, flying from Italy, started photographing the site in April 1944. In July, the Polish Underground succeeded in recovering the remains of a crashed rocket and getting them flown safely out of the country.
V1 FLYING BOMB
Type Pilotless missile
Crew 0
Length 25ft 9in (7.89m)
Wingspan 17ft 3in (5.27m)
Speed 350/400mph (563/2km/h, 643.7km/h)
Range 150 miles (214.4km)
The first of Germany’s “vengeance weapons” to be deployed, the V1 (also called the Fiesler F1 103), was a small, pilotless aircraft powered by a pulse-jet engine and fitted with a one-ton high-explosive warhead. Ramp-launched by a hydrogen peroxide-powered catapult, the missile could fly an average of 150 miles (241km) before its engine automatically cut out and it dived silently on its intended target.
Fuelled by a mixture of liquid oxygen and alcohol, the A4 was to travel at three times the speed of sound 50 miles (80km) up into space and down onto its target, its one-ton warhead exploding before its victims could even hear the rocket coming. It was to have a minimum range of 200 miles (322km). Designing it, getting it to fly, and hitting its target would push German technological expertise to its limits. It was not until October 14, 1942 that the first A4 successfully took to the air. Up until then, Hitler had been skeptical about the chances of success. Now, after von Braun showed him a film of the successful test launch, he was convinced that the A4 would become “the decisive weapon of the war. Humanity will never be able to endure it.”
By this time, the Luftwaffe had embarked on the development of its own “Vengeance Weapon”—the V1 flying bomb. It was the brainchild of Fritz Gosslar of the Argus engine works and Robert Lusser of the Fieseler aircraft company. Gosslar devised the pulse jet that would power the new weapon; Fieseler designed the airframe. The idea was to build a cheap, expendable pilotless aircraft with a one-ton warhead, capable of flying faster than the fastest enemy fighter. What emerged from the drawing board was a small, straight-winged airplane with an Argus Tube, as Gosslar’s pulse jet was christened, attached to the top of the tailplane. It would have a top speed of 440mph (708km/h) and a range of some 160 miles (257km).
The rocket-powered Messerschmitt Me 163B Komet interceptor was one of the most unusual aircraft produced by either side during World War II. Testing of the prototypes started in 1941, but the aircraft was not ready for operational use until July 1944. With a top speed of 596mph (959km/h), the plane was certainly fast with a phenomenal rate of climb, but its combat range was just 50 miles (80km) as its fuel, which was dangerously volatile, lasted for only 7.5 minutes.
The Messerschmitt Me 262 was the world’s first turbojet fighter to go into action. Though it first flew as a pure jet in July 1942, its subsequent development was bedevilled by political infighting—Hitler insisted that the revolutionary new aircraft be deployed as a fast bomber and not a fighter—and it did not get into service until late summer 1944, far too late to regain air superiority for the Luftwaffe. While over 1,000 Me 262s were produced, only 200 to 250 made it to the frontline squadrons, due to shortages of fuel, pilots, and spare parts.
The beauty of the V1 lay in the fact that its main fuselage was constructed of readily available thin steel plate, rather than costly and scarce aluminum, while its short, stubby wings were made of even cheaper plywood. The Argus Tube was fuelled by cheap kerosene, which was in plentiful supply, as opposed to the pure aviation fuel that powered conventional aircraft engines. Luftwaffe experts estimated that each missile would probably take no more than 550 man-hours to build as opposed to the 10,000 man-hours required to construct a Messerschmitt Me 109 fighter and would cost around 100 times less than an A4 rocket. The idea was to catapult it into the air at 200mph (322km/h) and then the Argus Tube would take over. Gyroscopes would keep the V1 stable so that its automatic pilot, linked to a magnetic compass, could keep it flying straight, level, and on course for its target. Once it got there, a counter driven by a vane anemometer on its nose would cut off the fuel supply to the pulse jet, so triggering the missile’s final unpowered dive.
The logic was simple. Compared to a manned bomber and its crew, the V1 was quicker and cheaper to produce. Even if the majority of the missiles were to be shot down by the British defenses—an eventuality the Luftwaffe considered extremely unlikely—enough of them would get through to wreak havoc on their targets below. The V1 prototype made its first powered test flight in December 1942, only 15 months after its development started; the Luftwaffe optimistically planned mass production to start early the following year.
Across the English Channel, British Intelligence was becoming concerned by reports it was receiving from its agents in the field about various secret weapons the Germans supposedly were developing. In March 1943, it received more tangible evidence that something was indeed afoot. Generals von Thoma and Crüwell, whom the British had taken prisoner in North Africa, were secretly bugged talking about a top-secret weapons program. Thoma told Crüwell that he had actually witnessed an experimental rocket launch and been told to “wait until next year and the fun will start.”
The conversation was the catalyst that prompted British Intelligence to take further action. RAF Medmenham was alerted to be on the watch for “any suspicious erections of rails or scaffolding” along the French coast, the presence of which would be an indication that the Germans were beginning to construct possible missile-launching sites. The photographic interpreters were also given Intelligence’s best guess as to the weight and length of the missile and of its range, which was thought to be around 130 miles (209km). “The obvious target for such a weapon,” the Intelligence report concluded, “is London.”
The response to these warnings was to step up photo-reconnaissance over the Baltic and to start a search of every square mile of the French coast from Cherbourg to the Belgian border to try to identify possible launch sites. On April 15, Churchill was alerted to the possible danger. His response was to set up an investigatory committee, chaired by Duncan Sandys, a junior minister at the Ministry of Supply and also the premier’s son-in-law, to investigate the threat.
A Flying Fortress, seen from above, makes its bomb run over a V2 launching site. The pockmarked craters littering the site are a clear indication of the success of this and previous attacks. Raids like this one forced the Germans to abandon massive fixed sites. Instead, they fired their rockets from mobile transporters, which were easy to conceal and so hard to detect.
Sandys and his committee went to Medmenham and examined all the photographs of Peenemünde that had been taken over the previous months. They concluded that the site was “probably an experimental station” but that “the whole area is not in full use” and that “a heavy long-range rocket is not yet an immediate menace.” It was an accurate summary of the position as it existed at the time, but took no account of the speed at which the Germans were working. Both the Peenemünde teams were under constant pressure from above to get their weapons into action. There was also substantial rivalry between them to win the race.
The trouble was that neither Sandys, his committee, the photographic interpreters at Medmenham, or the reconnaissance pilots knew exactly what they should be looking for. They had no idea, for instance, that the Germans were developing two missiles, not just one. The Air Ministry speculated that the target was “a long-range gun… or rocket aircraft… or some sort of tube located in a disused mine out of which a rocket could be squirted.” It was thought possible, too, that the rockets, if indeed they existed, would be launched horizontally from a cave or quarry, rather than vertically from a rocket stand.
The scientific community itself was divided about exactly what the Germans were up to. Lord Cherwell, Churchill’s closest scientific adviser, argued that the Germans were incapable of developing a rocket with sufficient propulsive power to fly as far as 130 miles (209km). If, however, they tried, the rocket would be too heavy to ever get off the ground. Physicist Dr. R.V. Jones, the scientist working with the Secret Intelligence Service who had solved the mystery of the Luftwaffe’s direction-finding radio beams, disagreed. He was convinced the Germans were developing an extremely powerful rocket that could possibly weigh as much as 80 tons. If, as Jones speculated, it was able to carry a 10-ton warhead, just one of the rockets might kill up to 4,000 people if it landed in a city center.
V2 (A4) ROCKET
Type Rocket missile
Length 45ft 11in (14m)
Wingspan 11ft 8in (3.56m)
Warhead 2,200lb (1,000kg)
Speed 3,580mph (5,760km/h)
Range 200 miles (320km)
Fuelled by a potent mixture of ethanol, water, and liquid oxygen (the latter acting as an oxidizer), the second of Hitler’s “vengeance weapons” was undetectable and unstoppable once it had been launched. The first V2 was launched against Paris on September 8, 1944, followed by one aimed at London later the same day. Over the next months, at least 3,172 V2s were launched, with the Belgian port of Antwerp and London the principal targets.
The one thing that was clear from the hundreds of photographs from the reconnaissance missions the RAF was now mounting from RAF Benson and the USAAF from Mount Farm on an almost daily basis was that activity at Peenemünde was constantly on the increase. The Medmenham photographic interpreters noticed, for instance, that giant crane-like structures had appeared at the center of the giant circular concreted clearings the Germans had carved out of the forest. Then, on June 12, there was a major breakthrough.
Photographs taken on that date showed a long object lying horizontal on its side on a trailer close to one of the circular emplacements. “The appearance presented by this object,” the Medmenham report concluded cautiously, “is not incompatible with its being a cylinder tapered at one end and provided with three radial fins at the other,” presumably waiting to be launched. Close by a number of what the photographic interpreters described as “columns” were standing upright. By measuring the shadows they cast, it was calculated they were about 40ft (12.1m) in length. When he saw the photographs six days later, Jones positively identified them as being rockets.
A follow-up reconnaissance flight on June 23 was even more revealing. Its photographs captured “two torpedo-like objects” lying horizontally on some form of transporter inside the elliptical earthworks north of what was thought to be the development area. The new objects were 38ft (11.5m) long and six ft (1.8m) wide with a tail of three 12ft (3.6m) wide fins. The photographic interpreters also spotted high-pressure containers on some nearby railway wagons. These, they thought, must contain liquid fuel for the objects they had seen. If this assessment was correct, it meant that whatever the Germans were testing could be smaller and lighter than previously had been assumed.
Sandys was convinced. On June 29, he chaired a top-level meeting in the Cabinet War Rooms to discuss the Medmenham findings and all the other intelligence that had been gathered about Peenemünde over the preceding months. Cherwell and Jones were both present. So was Churchill himself. Sandys said that all the evidence pointed to the rockets being a fact. The best countermeasure to them was for Bomber Command to launch a mass attack on Peenemünde, though that could not be mounted until the nights were long enough, which meant early August at the earliest. Cherwell vehemently disagreed. The whole thing was a hoax, he argued, devised to lure Bomber Command into a trap so that it could be decimated by the German night fighter force. Or it might have been planned to divert attention away from something else altogether, such as the development of a pilotless plane. If the photographs showed anything sinister at all, he concluded, the objects might well be giant torpedoes. The one thing they were not was rockets.
Jones supported Sandys. Churchill, having listened to all the arguments carefully, came down on his son-in-law’s side. Peenemünde was to be blitzed. The RAF would activate Operation Hydra as soon as the conditions were right.
A V2 rockets skywards, photographed four seconds after lift-off into a Peenemünde test flight on June 21, 1943. The German Army pressed Hitler to make the mass production of the missile a top weapons priority. At first, the Fuehrer had been ambivalent about the missile program, but successes like this—and the ever-growing ferocity of British and American bomber attacks on Germany—changed his mind. He ignored the fact that the V2 was expensive to produce, that the liquid oxygen that was an essential part of its fuel was in short supply, and that it could carry only a one-ton high-explosive warhead.
While Peenemünde itself won a temporary respite from air attack, photographic reconnaissance over France revealed another new and potentially terrifying development. Hitler personally had given the go-ahead for the construction of a massive rocket launching site, situated in what had been a gravel quarry at Watten, near St. Omer in the Pas-de-Calais.
The initial assumption was that what the Germans were building at Watten was a new command bunker as part of their Atlantic Wall defenses against Allied invasion, but the sheer size of the structure seemed to be far in excess of anything required for that purpose. The French Resistance reported that thousands of slave laborers had been brought in to work on the site night and day and that thousands of tons of steel and concrete were being used to make whatever it was the Germans were building impregnable to air attack. Sandys added it to the list of targets he felt must be bombed at the first opportunity.
Meanwhile, the first priority remained the attack on Peenemünde. On August 17, Bomber Command finally bombed it: 596 Lancasters and Halifaxes, loaded down with 281 tons of incendiaries and nearly 1,600 tons of high-explosive bombs, set out that night for the Baltic. It was what Bomber Command termed “maximum effort.” The aircrews taking part in the attack were briefed that their target was “a radar development station that promises to improve greatly the German night defense organization.” The briefing ended with a chilling warning: “If the attack fails… it will be repeated the next night and on ensuing nights regardless of loss.”
It was a clear moonlit night and flying conditions were excellent. The plan was for the bombers to attack in three waves, each wave making a timed run from an offshore island to the target at a height of no more than 7,000ft (2,133m) to help them to bomb as accurately as possible. The priority target was the scientists’ living quarters, followed by Peenemünde’s workshops and laboratories. The raid caught the antiaircraft defenses off guard. Nor, distracted by a dummy Mosquito raid on Berlin, did the German night fighters arrive on the scene until after most of the attacking aircraft had bombed and turned for home. Forty of the bombers were shot down.
Post-raid photo-reconnaissance the following day indicated that the attack had been a complete success. The Medmenham photographic interpreters reported as follows. “There is a large concentration of craters in and around the target area and many buildings are still on fire. In the north manufacturing area some 27 buildings of medium size have been completely destroyed; at least four buildings are still seen burning.” In fact, the pilot production works had escaped serious damage, while many bombs had fallen in the surrounding forest and done no damage at all. Though the living area had been blitzed, what had suffered the most was the camp housing Peenemünde’s foreign forced labor force, 790 of whom had been killed.
Watten, in the Pas-de-Calais, was chosen as the most suitable site for the first giant V2 launching bunker in December 1942; the Todt Organization began building the bunker the following spring. The Germans were not left undisturbed for long. In May 1943, RAF aerial photographic reconnaissance detected the construction work. On August 27, 187 B-17 Flying Fortresses from the US 8th Army Air Force targeted the site, bombing it in the late evening. As the photograph here demonstrates, the northern part of the bunker was devastated. Eventually, attempts to deal with the damage having failed, the entire site was abandoned in favor of mobile V2 launch operations.
Nevertheless, the damage was sufficient to put Peenemünde out of action for two crucial months. Dr. Walter Thiel, in charge of developing the A4’s rocket engine, was killed. The raid also indirectly claimed another scalp. The morning after it, Hitler and Goering berated General Hans Jeschonnek, the Luftwaffe’s Chief of Staff, for the air force’s failure to defend Peenemünde effectively. Jeschonnek went back to his office and shot himself. The suicide note he left behind him concluded: “It is impossible to work with Goering any longer. Long live the Fuehrer! Heil Hitler!”
Watten was the next target: 224 Flying Fortresses from the US 8th Army Air Force blitzed the construction site 10 days after the raid on Peenemünde. The American aircrews were told they were attacking an “aeronautical facilities station.” US aircraft losses were light and the damage inflicted severe. Fortuitously, the Germans had just laid tons of concrete at the site, which was still wet when the bombs came raining down. It hardened over the twisted mass of iron and steel girders the bombers had left behind them.
Another American raid on September 7 was even more destructive. The Medmenham photographic interpreters described what was left of Watten after this second raid as “a desolate heap.” Sir Malcolm McAlpine, a leading British construction specialist, was also asked to examine the post-raid reconnaissance photographs. Having studied them carefully, he opined that the Germans would find it easier to start all over again elsewhere rather than to waste time trying to repair such extensive damage. McAlpine was correct in his assessment. Work at Watten was abandoned for good.
Though the Medmenham photographic interpreters had managed to confirm that the Germans were developing and testing a rocket at their top-secret Baltic base, it was suspected that Peenemünde had not yet yielded up all its secrets. The suspicion was confirmed when a secret agent in France reported to British Intelligence that the Germans had started building unfamiliar new structures at eight sites near Abbeville in northern France. At the beginning of November 1943, reconnaissance aircraft from RAF Benson photographed them from the air. The photographs were immediately handed over to Medmenham and Douglas Kendall for photographic interpretation.
On close examination, the photographs revealed that all eight sites shared features in common. At the center of each site, large buildings were being constructed that, from the air, looked like giant skis lying on their sides. Other similarly shaped structures were dotted around them, including the foundations of what Kendall and his team thought could be long, narrow launching ramps. One ominous fact was also clear. Every one of the ramps was pointing directly toward London.
A V1 launching ramp hidden in woodland on the road to Abbeville near Amiens is examined by Allied troops after being abandoned and partly demolished by the retreating Germans. At the peak of the V1 offensive, sites like this were firing 300 missiles a day at Britain, targeted mainly at London. More than 6,000 Londoners were killed and 18,000 wounded. For some reason, the Germans decided not to target the invasion supply ports for attack. If they had, a protracted V1 bombardment would have caused real chaos.
A V1 ground crew manhandles a flying bomb toward its launch ramp, from which it will be catapulted into the air. After their original launch sites had been detected, heavily bombed, and put out of action before a single V1 could be launched from them, the Germans came up with a much simpler concept. All the buildings were prefabricated, which meant that they could be assembled at the last minute, while the V1s themselves were brought onto the site ready to launch as and when required. Rather than concentrate on bombing the sites, which were hard to find, the Allies focused on destroying the bombs’ storage depots.
Constant aerial reconnaissance soon detected another 26 sites. Within the space of a few weeks, the number had risen to 96. What did the Germans intend to use them for? The scientific experts doubted that they could be employed to launch rockets as these would require heavy handling gear and there was no evidence of this being installed. Nor were they situated near railway lines, which the experts believed would be needed to deliver rockets to their firing sites. They concluded it was more likely than not the Germans were developing some sort of pilotless bomb to be launched against London either before or in conjunction with a rocket offensive. The scientists’ view confirmed intelligence that had reached London on July 25 from what was guardedly described as “a diplomatic source.” This stated explicitly that two weapons—a rocket and a pilotless plane—were under development at Peenemünde.
Kendell asked Constance Babington Smith, one of Medmenham’s most skillful photographic interpreters, to re-examine all the photographs the RAF had taken of Peenemünde to see if she could spot anything that looked like a very small airplane—possibly even smaller than the experimental Messerschmitt Me 163 rocket fighter she had already discovered parked neatly on the tarmac of Peenemünde’s airfield. Toward the end of November she struck gold.
Armed solely with her stereo viewing frame and jeweler’s Leitz magnifying glass, Babington Smith noticed something outside a building in which she assumed some sort of engine was being tested. It was a small cruciform object less than a millimeter in length on the photograph she was studying and only just visible thanks to its white reflective outline and the shadow it was casting on the tarmac. Babington Smith had found a flying bomb.
Now the photographic interpreters knew what they were looking out for, progress was swift. They found similar midget planes on other Peenemünde photographs. Then, following another photo-reconnaissance mission on November 26, they detected ski sites similar to the ones being built in France being erected at Zinnowitz, a few miles away from Peenemünde along the Baltic coast. The sites featured what looked like a steel ramp pointing out toward the sea. Using their stereo viewers to make three-dimensional measurements, the photographic interpreters calculated that the ramp was angled upward at an angle of around 10° and was 125ft (38m) long.
Similar ramps were soon spotted at Peenemünde itself. To cap it all, Babington Smith spotted a tiny airplane in position at the bottom of one of the ramps. It was a V1 about to be launched on a test flight. The jigsaw was complete.
Everyone from Churchill and Sandys down appreciated that Medmenham’s efforts had been invaluable. Support for its findings came from a somewhat unexpected source. On August 22, a mysterious object fell out of the sky into a cabbage field on the island of Bornholm in occupied Denmark. Superintendant Hansen, a senior Danish policeman, and Lieutenant-Commander Christiansen of the Danish Navy, set off to investigate and got to the scene before the Germans. Christiansen photographed the wreckage. It appeared to be that of a miniature aircraft with no cockpit and a mysterious tube strapped underneath the fuselage. A cylinder that seemed to have been the aircraft’s power plant lay nearby. It was still “very warm an hour after the crash.”
In these remarkable photographs taken from a USAAF F-5 on July 4, 1944, a Hawker Tempest fighter is captured in hot pursuit of a flying bomb across the English countryside: the photographs were probably taken over Kent. Only a few Allied aircraft, such as the Tempest, possessed the speed to catch up with and destroy the V1s in midair. Nevertheless, once the V1s were within range of the British defenses, more than one-tenth of them were shot down into the sea by fighters. Once the remaining missiles had crossed the Channel, more than half of them were brought down over land by fighters, antiaircraft fire, or balloon barrages. London’s 880 antiaircraft guns were shifted nearer to the south coast, so that they could bring down the V1s relatively safely over open country rather than over the capital.
This annotated aerial reconnaissance photograph of V2 rockets poised on Test Stands I and VII at Peenemünde in June 1943 shows the quality of the material the photographic interpreters at RAF Medmenham had to work with. Coming up with a convincing overview of what the Germans were up to was taxing in the extreme. It was, said Constance Babington Smith, as if “two or three jigsaw puzzles had been jumbled together.”
Inside the airframe, there were some curious wire-wrapped spheres and what seemed to be some sort of guidance mechanism “operating valves with compressed air which in turn operate the rudder.” The Danes smuggled the photographs to Copenhagen and then to neutral Sweden, where they were passed to the British Embassy in Sweden for onward transmission to London and, via the Secret Intelligence Service, to Sandys and his committee.
Not much could be done to attack V-weapons manufacture directly. Following the Peenemünde raid, the Germans shifted A4 rocket development to a new site at Blizna in Poland, well out of Allied bombing range, though this did not stop partisans from the Polish Home Army locating a missile that had gone off course and crashed without exploding. The Poles managed to conceal the rocket from the German patrols searching for it. They then dismantled it. In July 1944, the RAF sent a Dakota to collect the pieces, which were then flown to Brindisi and then back to Britain for expert examination.
Months earlier, it had been decided to site the mass production of the A4 in a vast underground factory complex the Germans were constructing deep beneath Kohnstein Mountain, near Nordhausen in central Germany. Himmler, who on Hitler’s orders had taken over responsibility for A4 manufacture, put Hans Kammler, an SS Brigadier-General, in charge. Thousands of concentration camp inmates, most of them Polish, Russian, and French, were employed as forced labor to tunnel under the site. “Pay no attention to the human cost,” Kammler told his SS overseers. “The work must go ahead, and in the shortest possible time.” Even if RAF or USAAF air reconnaissance had managed to locate it, the complex would have been impervious to bombing.
V1 production went unbombed until June 20, 1944, when 137 B-17s raided the missile’s assembly plant in the Volkswagen works at Fallersleben (Volkswagen had been selected for mass-production purposes because Fiesler was incapable of making the number of flying bombs the Luftwaffe required). The attack was repeated by a force of B-24s nine days later with great success.
Unbeknownst to the Allies, however, the Luftwaffe had already been its own worst enemy. It decided to rush its wonder-weapon into mass production without waiting for the prototypes to complete all their trials. The results were disastrous from the German point of view. Design flaws meant that the first 2,000 V1s churned out by the Volkswagen works had to be scrapped. It took months to iron out the faults and get the flying bomb back into production.
What the Allies could destroy were the ski sites in France. The plan to attack them was christened Operation Crossbow. The first raid was launched on December 16, 1943, by which time Medmenham had managed to build up a comprehensive picture of what particular roles the various buildings on each site had been given. The long, low ski-shaped ones were for bomb storage; the curve was intended to serve as antiblast protection in the event of an accidental explosion. The square buildings were for bomb assembly. When the Germans were ready, the completed V1 would be hauled onto its firing ramp. A powerful rocket booster would catapult it up the ramp and into the air, when the bomb’s pulse jet would take over and the V1 would set course for its target.
The aim was to time the bombing raids so that they were launched when most of the construction work had been completed, but before the sites were ready for action. This meant mounting regular photo-reconnaissance flights to monitor them. Medmenham allocated points to each construction element as it was completed—10 for each ski building, five for the sunken control bunker, 10 for the square assembly workshop, 10 for the launching ramp, and so on. Half those numbers of points were given to buildings that appeared to be half-complete. When 90 points had been awarded, the site was made a bombing priority.
The first raid, carried out by 470 RAF bombers, targeted the ski sites around Abbeville. On Christmas Eve, 722 B-17s and B-24s from the US 8th Army Air Force’s 1st, 2nd, and 3rd Bombardment Wings struck at the sites in the Pas de Calais with devastating results. The attack spread to newly discovered sites around Cherbourg early in the New Year, the heavy bombers being joined by medium bombers and fighter-bombers from the RAF’s 2nd Tactical Air Force and the US 9th Air Force as winter started to turn into spring. The results were certainly impressive. By the end of March 1944—the Luftwaffe had originally planned to launch the flying bomb offensive by bombarding London on April 20 to celebrate Hitler’s birthday—all 96 sites had been bombed and 88 of them put permanently out of action.
The Germans, however, were by no means beaten yet. They designed far less complex launching sites, many of which were adapted from existing farm buildings, or built to resemble such buildings if spotted from the air. Some were concealed in woods so as to be practically invisible. All the permanent building required was the concrete foundations for the launch ramps. There was no bomb storage on sight; the completed V1s were brought in ready-assembled as required. One square building was prefabricated and so could be erected quickly at the last minute prior to launch. It was estimated that it would take just 48 hours to get the sites ready for action.
By the beginning of June, 68 new sites had been located; the total rose to 133 by the end of the month. Photographic reconnaissance clearly indicated that the Germans were in the last stages of getting them ready for action. On June 11, Medmenham signalled the code word “Diver” to the Allied Chiefs of Staff. This warned them that an attack could be expected imminently. The photographic interpreters were right again. In the early hours of June 13, the first 10 flying bombs took to the air. It was hardly the mass attack that the Luftwaffe had promised Hitler it would make. Five V1s crashed shortly after launch and one went missing completely. It probably went down somewhere over the English Channel. Three made it as far as Kent and Sussex. Only one reached London. It hit a railway bridge in Bethnal Green, killing six people in the nearby houses and making 200 more homeless. It was a grim foretaste of what was to come.
Two days later, the flying bomb offensive finally began in earnest. More than 200 V1s were successfully launched. Over the next months, the number rose inexorably. As the campaign reached its climax, 100 V1s were dropping in London minute by minute, hour by hour, and day by day. However, it could have been worse. Originally, the Germans had calculated that they could launch 2,000 V1s every 24 hours. Now, the most they could manage was 300. Nor did all of them get through to their target. The RAF’s fastest fighters—notably the new Hawker Tempests—tried every trick in the book to shoot them down in mid-flight, either over the Channel or the open countryside in Sussex and Kent. On the ground, General Sir Frederick Pile, the head of Antiaircraft Command, masterminded a massive reorganization of London’s antiaircraft defenses, moving them south to the strip of coast running from Beach Head to Dover. After the move was completed on July 19, he had 412 heavy and 572 light antiaircraft guns, 168 Bofors guns, and 246 20mm guns in position ready to open fire. By the end of the second week of August, they were responsible for nearly 40 percent of the V1s that were shot down in flight.
All in all, 2,340 V1s hit London. More than 6,000 civilians were killed, 18,000 wounded, and 750,000 homes were damaged or destroyed. But, though civilian morale was dented by the strangely impersonal nature of the constant attack, it did not break. Also, as the invading Allied armies pushed farther and farther into France after the breakout from their Normandy beachheads, Londoners could see an end in sight. By the end of September, most of the V1 launch sites had been overrun and the offensive slowly came to an end. The Flying Bombs did not possess the range to reach Britain once France had been liberated. The Germans switched targets to Antwerp and later to Liège. Though some attempts were made to launch V1s from Heinkel III bombers flying over the North Sea, these were few and far between.
HAWKER TEMPEST V
Type Fighter
Crew 1
Length 33ft 8in (10.26m)
Wingspan 41ft (12.49m)
Speed 432mph (695km/h)
Range 740 miles (1,190km), 1,530 miles (2,462km) with drop tanks
Logically, the Tempest was Hawker’s obvious fighter development after the Typhoon. The aircraft combined a new semielliptical wing with the Typhoon airframe and a Sabre IIA engine. First deliveries of Tempests to British fighter squadrons began in January 1944; they showed themselves to be the fastest low- to medium-altitude fighter in RAF service. Between June 1944, when the first V1s were launched to the beginning of September, Tempest pilots were responsible for the destruction of 638 of them.
The Germans had one last trick up their sleeves. On September 8, the first A4 rocket—now renamed the V2—was fired against London. It landed in Chiswick, killing three people and wounding another 17, some of them severely. There was no conceivable defense against V2 attacks. The only way of stopping them was to capture the V2s’ launch sites, but these proved almost impossible to find. The V2 was highly mobile and could be fired from practically anywhere. It did not need a permanent launching site—a handy road or clearing in a wood would suffice. It did not have to be moved by rail either. It traveled on a motorized transporter that could easily be concealed until just before the rocket was fired. The best air intelligence could do was to establish that the V2 was being launched from Holland, most likely in or near The Hague. Only once, on February 26, 1945, did three photo-reconnaissance Mosquitoes fortuitously catch sight of a V2 ready for launch, its fuel tanker, transporter, and other support vehicles standing close to hand.
A grand total of 2,115 V2s were launched against Britain, the last one falling on Orpington in Kent on March 27, 1945. Half of the rockets the Germans managed to fire landed in the London area, killing 2,054 people and seriously injuring a further 7,000. Around one in three V2s exploded in flight, probably because Himmler had ordered their deployment before the rocket’s test program had been completed. The Germans were also short of the specialist fuels the rocket required, which cut down the number that could be fired. Nevertheless, its deployment marked the start of a revolution in warfare as future events were to show.
A Tempest V Series II is photographed during a test flight from the Hawker factory at Langley, outside Slough, on November 25, 1944. Test pilot William “Bill” Humble is in the cockpit and at the joystick. By this time, the Tempest’s main purpose had been redefined. It was to carry out “armed reconnaissance” operations deep behind enemy lines. The aircraft proved supremely successful. That December alone, Tempest pilots shot down 52 Luftwaffe fighters and destroyed 89 trains.
On March 9, 1945, 363 Boeing B-29 Superfortresses carried out the single deadliest air raid of the entire war when they rained ton after ton of incendiary bombs on Tokyo, the Japanese capital. It was a low-level attack—the Superfortresses bombed from around 5,000ft (1,524m)—and, from the American point of view, it proved immensely successful. The raid triggered a firestorm that killed upward of 100,000 people, left more than a million homeless, and razed a quarter of the city to the ground. The death toll was higher than the one that resulted from the dropping of atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki six months later.
Codenamed Operation Meetinghouse, the assault marked the start of an aerial onslaught which proved so destructive that, at the end of July, the US air force high command concluded that there were no more cities worth attacking remaining on the Japanese Home Islands. The B-29s had gone on to launch strike after strike against Japan’s other large cities. Nagoya, Osaka, and Kobe were blitzed particularly heavily, Nagoya being hit twice within the space of a single week. US planes blanketed the few cities that remained unscarred with leaflets warning their inhabitants to flee before the inevitable attack. By the time the war ended in August, more than 60 Japanese cities had been laid waste. Only Kyoto, the ancient imperial capital, and four other cities were spared.
After the Doolittle Raid in 1942 (see pp. 108–111), there were no more air attacks on Japan itself for just over two years. The reason for the hiatus was simple. The B-17 Flying Fortress, the US Army Air Force’s main strategic bomber, could not get there and back carrying a full bomb load without running out of fuel on the return flight. As US forces advanced step-by-step across the central Pacific—a strategy aptly termed “island hopping”—one of their aims was to open up the Japanese Home Islands to aerial assault.
With the liberation of the Marianas group of islands in the late summer of 1944, this aim was achieved. Rather than fly from mainland China, which the Americans had started doing that June, the bombers would now be shifted to the massive new airbases being constructed on Guam, Saipan, and Tinian. They were only 1,500 miles (2,414km) south of Tokyo, meaning that the Home Islands were now well within bombing range.
The bomber the Americans would rely on for their aerial assault had already been chosen. It was the giant B-29 Superfortress, the biggest, heaviest, and most expensive bomber the US aircraft industry had produced to date. Its development, however, had been fraught with problems, largely because it pushed existing military aviation technology to its limits. The complicated airframe was unlike anything Boeing had ever built before. The four radial engines—giant Wright R-3550 Duplex-Cyclones—were initially unreliable, prone to overheating and catching fire in the air. Their propellers proved almost equally troublesome. Then there was the revolutionary cabin pressurization system, larger and more sophisticated than anything that ever had been attempted before. It was essential if the B-29 was to fly at its planned service ceiling of 40,000ft (12,192m). Even the machine guns it relied on as its defensive armament were automated, so they could be fired by remote control. It meant that a single gunner could operate several gun turrets simultaneously from sighting positions in the nose, tail, and the Perspex blisters in the central fuselage.
The prototype B-29 first flew in August 1942. Mass production started in July 1943. Six months later, however, only 97 B-29s had actually been delivered and just 16 of these were considered fit to fly. The problem stemmed from the immense pressure Boeing was under to get the bombers into action. There were so many design changes that special plants had to be set up to modify the B-29s coming off the assembly lines. It took precious months for all the problems that had been detected to be finally sorted out.
BOEING B-29 SUPERFORTRESS
Type Long-range strategic bomber
Crew 11
Length 99ft (30.18m)
Wingspan 141ft 3in (43.06m)
Speed 357mph (574km/h), 220mph (350km/h) cruising
Range 3,250 miles (5,230km)
One of the most advanced aircraft of its day, the Superfortress featured a pressurized cabin for its aircrew, an electronic fire-control system, remote-controlled machine gun turrets, and many other technological innovations. Boeing built 2,766 of the giant planes, which served primarily in the Pacific theater of war. With more than 1,000 of them taking to the air at a time, they were at the forefront of American air attacks on the Japanese Home Islands from late 1944 onward.
A B-29 Superfortress cruises over Osaka, Japan, on 1 June 1945. It was the second great US air raid on the city; subsequent attacks were launched on 6, 7, 15 and 26 June, 15 and 24 July and on 14 August, the last day of the war. The first US air raid, on 13 March, set the pattern for what was to follow. About 8.1/10 sq. miles (21kmÇ) of Osaka were destroyed. The damage was done by clusters of M-69 incendiary bombs. The B-29s carried just over 1,400 of them per plane.
The B-29s assigned to attack Tokyo were further modified for their task. General Curtis LeMay, in command of the operation, had decided on a radical change of tactics. Rather than continuing to fly at high altitude in daylight to deliver precision attacks on specific Japanese targets, his bombers would now fly by night to launch low-level area assaults. His objective was to set fire to the closely packed wooden houses and buildings characteristic of Japanese cities, creating a raging inferno that ultimately would turn into a devastating firestorm.
Because Japanese air defenses were virtually nonexistent by this stage of the war, the Boeings were stripped of their defensive armament, with the exception of the tail turrets, and the number of aircrew was cut back to the minimum required to fly the planes. This meant an increase of 65 percent in bomb capacity; each Superfortress was now able to carry more than seven tons of bombs. These included deadly white phosphorus and napalm incendiaries. Napalm was a new gasoline-based fuel-gel cocktail recently developed by scientists at Harvard University. It was to prove chillingly effective. LeMay, now commander of the 20th Army Air Force, told the aircrews who were to fly the mission that they were “going to deliver the biggest firecracker the Japanese have ever seen.”
FIRE BOMBING
This map composite, produced by the USAAF, shows the most important Japanese cities attacked by General Curtis LeMay’s B-29s at the start of their 1945 fire-bombing campaign. The red indicates the areas of each city that were leveled as a result of the raids. LeMay, in command of the 20th Army Air Force decided on this new tactic because high-level precision bombing of specific Japanese targets was proving a failure. He believed that area bombing entire cities from heights ranging from 5,000–8,000ft (1,524–2,438m) would be the answer. The first raids, launched against Tokyo, Kobe, Osaka, and Nagoya proved LeMay right. Large areas of each city were burned to the ground.
Tokyo photographed from the air before and after the first fire-bombing raid on the city, carried out on March 10, 1945: 334 B-29s took part in the raid, striking late at night so they could take advantage of daylight when flying back to their bases in the Marianas Islands. A quarter of the city was destroyed, more than 100,000 of its citizens killed, and over a million Japanese left homeless. It was the single deadliest air raid of the entire war, greater in its impact than Hamburg, Dresden, Hiroshima, or Nagasaki.
The lead attackers acted as pathfinders, arriving over Tokyo around midnight. Their job was to mark the target area—downtown Shitamachi—with a flaming “X” to guide the main waves of bombers, flying at around 6,000ft (1,828.8m), in to bomb. The raid proper which followed lasted for three hours with roughly 2,000 tons of incendiaries being dropped on the hapless city. As the second wave of B-29s approached, they could see the flames rising into the sky from 150 miles (241km) away.
The Japanese on the ground never stood a chance. Tokyo’s fire brigades, understrength, poorly trained and inadequately equipped, were totally overwhelmed. With most men of fighting age conscripted into the armed forces, women, children, and the elderly struggled in vain to battle the flames. The B-29s quickly kindled a giant bonfire that, fanned by a 30-knot wind, spread across the entire city. By dawn, 16 sq. miles (41.4km2) of it were in ashes.
Masses of panicking civilians scrambled to escape the inferno. Most of them were unsuccessful. Walls of fire blocked tens of thousands fleeing for their lives. The heat of the firestorm was so intense that it boiled the water in Tokyo’s rivers and canals. “In the black Sumida River,” wrote a doctor, “countless bodies were floating, clothed bodies, naked bodies, all black as charcoal. It was unreal.” In some places, the temperature rose to as much as 3,272°F.
Police cameraman Koyo Ishikaw was another eyewitness. He described the scene on the streets as “flaming pieces of furniture exploded in the heat while the people themselves blazed like matchsticks and their wood-and-paper homes exploded in flames. Thanks to the wind, immense incandescent vortices rose in a number of places, swirling, flattening, and sucking whole blocks of houses into their maelstrom of fire.” Even the American bomber crews were affected. Aircrews of the B-29s coming in to bomb toward the end of the raid reported that they were able to smell the stench of charred human flesh as they flew over the burning capital. Many put on their oxygen masks to avoid being made physically sick by the smell.
Robert Guillain was a French news reporter, who had been in Japan since 1938 and remained there throughout the war. He compiled a vivid record of the great attack, starting at the moment when the sound of the city’s air-raid sirens pierced the night as the first B-29s prepared to bomb.
“They set to work at once sowing the sky with fire,” he wrote. “Bursts of light flashed everywhere in the darkness, like Christmas trees lifting their decorations of flame high into the night, then fell back to earth in whistling bouquets of jagged flame. Barely a quarter of an hour after the raid started, the fire, whipped by the wind, began to scythe its way through the density of the wooden city.”
Guillain’s district was not singled out for direct attack. He decided not to seek shelter. “There was no question in such a raid of huddling blindly underground,” he opined. “You could be roasted alive before you knew what was happening.” Instead, he tried his best to observe what was going on. He watched as the waves of B-29s powered in, seemingly impervious to the increasingly desperate Japanese antiaircraft fire.
“The bright light dispelled the night and B-29s were visible here and there in the sky. They flew low or middling high in staggered levels. Their long, glinting wings, sharp as blades, could be seen through the oblique columns of smoke rising from the city, suddenly reflecting the fire from the furnace below, black silhouettes gliding through the fiery sky to reappear farther on, shining golden against the dark roof of heaven or glittering blue, like meteors, in the searchlight beams spraying the vault from horizon to horizon. All the Japanese in the gardens near mine were out of doors or peering out of their holes, uttering cries of admiration—this was typically Japanese—at this grandiose, almost theatrical spectacle.”
The Japanese bearing the brunt of the bombing were in no mood to admire anything. “Hundreds of people gave up trying to escape and crawled into the holes that served as shelters. Their charred bodies were found after the raids,” Guillain recorded. “Wherever there was a canal, people hurled themselves into the water… thousands of them were later found dead, not drowned but asphyxiated by the burning air and smoke. In other places, the water got so hot that the luckless bathers were boiled alive.”
“In Asakusa and Honjo,” Guillain continued, “people crowded onto the bridges, but the spans were made of steel that gradually heated; human clusters clinging to the white-hot railings finally let go, fell into the water, and were carried off on the current. Thousands jammed the parks and gardens that lined both banks of the Sumida. As panic brought ever fresh waves of people pressing into these narrow strips of land, those in front were pushed irresistibly toward the river; whole waves of screaming humanity toppled over and disappeared in the deep water.” They all drowned.
The raid finally came to an end, though the fires the bombers had started continued to burn for four days afterward. “The sirens sounded the all-clear at around 5:00 a.m.,” Guillain concluded. “I talked to someone who had inspected the scene…What was most awful, my informant told me, was having to get off his bicycle every couple of feet to pass over the countless bodies strewn through the streets. There was still a light wind blowing, and some of the bodies, reduced to ashes, were simply scattering like sand. In many sectors, passage was blocked by whole incinerated crowds.”
It was not over. On May 23, 520 Superfortresses dropped a further 4,500 tons of bombs on Tokyo, obliterating the city’s commercial center, the railway yards, and the Guiza entertainment district. Two days later, 502 B-29s dropped another 4,000 tons of bombs. LeMay boasted that the American bombers were “driving [the Japanese] back to the Stone Age.” The city was bombed for the last time on 10 August, four days after the dropping of the first atomic bomb on Hiroshima and less than a week before the Japanese surrender. By that time, 50 percent of Tokyo had been reduced to rubble.
Tokyo photographed from the air while the city was being bombed by LeMay’s B-29s on the night of May 26, 1945. The target for the 520 Superfortresses taking part in the raid was the area immediately south of the imperial palace. The planes dropped between 3,500 and 4,000 tons of incendiaries between them, turning the city below them into what one B-29 pilot described as “one horrendous area of fire.”
On August 6, 1945, the world changed forever. An American B-29 Superfortress dropped the first atomic bomb to be deployed in warfare over the city of Hiroshima in Japan. The resulting explosion wiped out 80 percent of the city and killed an estimated 80,000 of its inhabitants outright. Tens of thousands would die later as the result of their exposure to nuclear radiation.
The age of atomic warfare had begun. Three days later, another B-29 dropped a second atomic bomb on Nagasaki. The bomb was almost 10 times more powerful than the one dropped on Hiroshima. This time, almost the entire industrial area of the city was destroyed and nearly 74,000 Japanese were killed. Ironically, Nagasaki had not been the mission’s original target. The American intention had been to bomb Kokura, but, when the B-29 reached it, it found that the city was shrouded in smoke from the firebombing of nearby Yawata the previous day.
The mission to Hiroshima began at 2:45 a.m. when a B-29 took off from Tinian, an island in the Marianas group in the North Pacific 1,500 miles (2,414km) south of Japan. It carried just one bomb, weighing about 9,000lb (4,082kg). “Little Boy” as the bomb had been codenamed, was 28in (71cm) in diameter and 10ft (3m) long. Colonel Paul W. Tibbets, the bomber’s commander, had nicknamed his aircraft “Enola Gay” after his mother. Shortly before takeoff, he had the name painted onto its fuselage just below the cockpit.
Though four hours into the flight, Tibbets finally was able to tell his aircrew exactly what type of bomb they were carrying, he was burdened with another secret he was unable to share. Before boarding his aircraft, he had been handed a dozen cyanide capsules to distribute to his crew. They were to kill themselves in the event of the B-29 being shot down. Tibbets was ordered to shoot anyone refusing to swallow his capsule—the Japanese could not be allowed to capture anyone alive.
Fortunately, the flight went smoothly for Tibbets and his crew. He later described it as a “milk run.” Enola Gay rendezvoused successfully with its two escorting planes over Iwo Jima and, having received radio confirmation from a reconnaissance flight that the weather over Hiroshima was clear, the three aircraft flew on toward their target. The B-29 arrived over Hiroshima only 17 seconds behind schedule. Major Thomas W. Ferebee, the plane’s bombardier, spotted his target—the distinctive T-shaped Aioi Bridge in the downtown part of the city. As Tibbets held the Enola Gay steady at 31,600ft (9,632m), Ferebee released the bomb. Watching it through the Plexiglas window right in the nose of the plane, he saw it hover momentarily and then pick up speed. It exploded 57 seconds later at a height of 1,890ft (576m) just a few hundred feet off target.
HIROSHIMA AND NAGASAKI FLIGHT PLANS
The B-29 Superfortress was the only US warplane capable of carrying the first atomic bombs to Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Commanded by Colonel Paul Tibbets of the 509th Composite Bombardment Group, Enola Gay carried out the Hiroshima attack; Bockscar, commanded by Major Charles Sweeney of the 393rd Squadron, attacked Nagasaki. Because of poor visibility, Sweeney bombed the city in preference to Kokura, the original choice of target.
Hiroshima photographed from the air by one of the two B-29s accompanying Tibbets prior to and shortly after the first atomic bomb was dropped on the city. Visibility was perfect over the target as Tibbets flew over it to drop his bomb. It detonated 57 seconds later at its prescribed height over a medical center; the original aiming point was the Aioa Bridge, but the wind blew the bomb off course. “A bright light filled the plane,” Tibbets recalled. “The first shock wave hit us. We were eleven-and-a-half miles (18.5km) slant range from the atomic explosion, but the whole airplane cracked and crinkled from the blast.”
As soon as Ferebee released the bomb, the B-29 lurched suddenly upward. Tibbets threw it into a tight turn, dropped 1,700ft (518m) in height and flew away from the target area as quickly as he could to minimize the risk of Enola Gay being damaged by the shock waves caused by the bomb’s detonation. He was nine miles (14.5km) away by the time “Little Boy” exploded. Even so, the B-29 was still tossed around in the air like confetti; one of the aircrew said that it felt “as if a giant was smashing the plane with a telegraph pole.” Even though they had been told to put on protective dark glasses before dropping the bomb, the explosion was so bright that some of the crew feared they had been blinded. Ferebee recalled: “There are no words to describe how bright the flash was. The sun doesn’t compare at all.” Tibbets told his crew: “Fellows, you have just dropped the first atomic bomb in history.”
Only Staff Sergeant Bob Caron, seated in his rear gun turret, actually saw the bomb explode. The others had to wait until Tibbets had completed his evasive maneuvers before they could see its effects. Caron described what he saw as “a peep into hell.” He continued: “A column of smoke is rising fast. It has a fiery red core… Fires are springing up everywhere, like flames shooting out of a huge bed of coals. I’m starting to count the fires. One, two, three, four, five six, 14, 15—it’s impossible. There are too many to count.”
In milliseconds after the explosion a plasma fireball began to form and then a dense cloud started to rise up high into the air. Around 70,000 to 80,000 Japanese in the city were killed instantly by the initial blast and an area of the city one mile (1.6km) in radius reduced to total ruin. Fires broke out through much of the remainder of Hiroshima. Tibbets wrote how “the city was hidden by that awful cloud, mushrooming terrible and incredibly tall.”
Caron continued: “Here it comes, the mushroom shape… It’s coming this way. It’s like a mass of bubbling molasses. The mushroom is spreading out. It’s maybe a mile or two wide and half a mile high. It’s growing up and up. It’s nearly level with us and climbing. It’s very black, but there is a purplish tint to the cloud. The base of the mushroom looks like a heavy undercast shot through with flames. The city must be below that. The flames and smoke are billowing out, whirling out into the hills. The hills are disappearing under the smoke.”
Tibbets concurred. In his biography, The Tibbets Story, he wrote: “The giant purple mushroom… had already risen to a height of 40,000ft (12,192m), three miles (4.8km) above our own altitude, and was still boiling upward like something terribly alive. Even more fearsome was the sight on the ground below. Fires were springing up everywhere amid a turbulent mass of smoke that had the appearance of boiling tar.”
Tibbets and his aircrew could see little or nothing of what was happening on the ground. Captain Robert Lewis, the B-29s copilot, recorded: “Where we had seen a clear city two minutes before, we could not see the city. We could see smoke and fires creeping up the side of the mountains.” Hidden from view, what remained of Hiroshima was burning. Two-thirds of the city had been destroyed; within three miles (4.8km) of the bomb’s detonation point, 60,000 out of 90,000 buildings had been demolished.
The unsuspecting people caught by the explosion suffered equally. Michihiko Hachiya, a Japanese doctor who survived the bombing, wrote at length about his experience:
“Suddenly a strong flash of light startled me—and then another. So well does one recall little things that I remember vividly how a stone lantern in the garden became brilliantly lit and I debated whether this light was caused by a magnesium flare or sparks from a passing trolley.
“LITTLE BOY” BOMB
Type Nuclear weapon
Weight 9,700lb (4,400kg)
Length 16ft (3m)
Diameter 28in (71cm)
Filling Uranium 235
Yield 16 kilotons
“Little Boy” was the codename for the nuclear device dropped on Hiroshima on August 6, 1945. It was the first atomic bomb to be deployed as a weapon. The Los Alamos scientists and engineers produced two other atomic bomb designs—“Fat Man” and “Thin Man.” “Fat Man,” a plutonium bomb, was dropped on Nagasaki on August 9. “Thin Man” was a failure.
“Garden shadows disappeared. The view which a moment before had been so bright and sunny was now dark and hazy. Through swirling dust I could barely discern a wooden column that had supported a corner of my house. It was leaning crazily and the roof sagged dangerously.
“Moving instinctively, I tried to escape, but rubble and fallen timbers barred the way. By picking my way cautiously, I managed to reach the roka and stepped down into my garden. A profound weakness overcame me, so I stopped to regain my strength. To my surprise, I discovered I was completely naked. How odd! Where were my drawers and undershirt?
“All over the right side of my body, I was cut and bleeding. A large splinter was protruding from a mangled wound in my thigh and something warm trickled into my mouth. My cheek was torn, I discovered as I felt it gingerly, with the lower lip laid wide open. Embedded in my neck was a sizable fragment of glass, which I matter-of-factly dislodged, and, with the detachment of one stunned and shocked studied it and my bloodstained hand.”
Hachiya’s next thoughts were of his wife. “Suddenly, thoroughly alarmed, I began to yell for her. ‘Yaeko-san, where are you?’ Pale and frightened, her clothes torn and bloodstained, she emerged from the ruins of our house holding her elbow. Seeing her, I was reassured. My own panic assuaged, I tried to reassure her. ‘We’ll be all right,’ I exclaimed. ‘Only let’s get out of here as fast as we can.’”
“She nodded and I motioned her to follow me.”
Hachiya and his wife were lucky. Tens of thousands were not as fortunate. An unnamed survivor described the carnage elsewhere in the city. “The appearance of people was… they all had skin blackened by burns… They had no hair because the hair was burned, and at a glance you couldn’t tell whether you were looking at them from in front or in back… They held their arms bent forward….and their skin—not only on their hands, but on their faces and bodies too—hung down… If there had been only one or two such people, perhaps I would not have had such a strong impression… But wherever I walked I met these people… Many of them died along the road—I can still picture them in my mind—like walking ghosts.”
By this time, Enola Gay had turned for home. Its aircrew ate their sandwiches. No one spoke—it was, said one of them later, as if they were stunned by the enormity of what they had done. They landed to be greeted by cheering crowds of soldiers lining the runway and, said another crew member, “more generals and admirals than I had ever seen in my life.”
Everyone was convinced that the successful bombing of Hiroshima would trigger a Japanese surrender, but there was complete silence from Tokyo. On August 9, another B-29 took to the air and headed toward Japan. It carried “Fat Man,” the second atomic bomb. The flight was captained by Charles W. Sweeney, who had piloted one of the two other Superfortresses that had accompanied Tibbets to Hiroshima.
Sweeney dropped “Fat Man” 1,650ft (502m) above Nagasaki precisely at 11:02 a.m. Approximately 40 percent of the city was destroyed. Around 70,000 people died, either in the explosion or of radiation sickness by the end of the year. Fujie Urata Matsumoto was a survivor. She recalled: “The pumpkin field in front of the house was blown clean. Nothing was left of the entire thick crop, except that in place of the pumpkins there was a woman’s head… It was a woman of about 40… A gold tooth gleamed in her wide-open mouth. A handful of singed hair hung down from the left temple over her cheek, dangling in her mouth. Her eyelids were drawn up, showing black holes where her eyes had been burned out… She had probably looked square into the flash and got her eyeballs burned.”
Preparations got underway for the dropping of a third atomic bomb, but this proved unnecessary. On August 14, the Japanese surrendered. Before this, however, the decision to drop the bomb on Japan was already provoking considerable high-level controversy. Some of the physicists involved in the Manhattan Project to build the bomb, opposed it, arguing that, at the least, the Japanese leadership should have been given the chance to witness a demonstration of the bomb’s awesome power before a city was targeted. Others argued that, given the Japanese refusal to consider peace terms and the 500,000 to 1,000,000 casualties it was predicted the USA would incur if it was forced to mount an invasion of the Japanese Home Islands, there was no alternative.
Eventually, the buck stopped with President Harry S. Truman, who, as Vice-President of the USA, had succeeded to the presidency after Roosevelt’s death earlier in the year. He decided that there was no other course of action open to him other than to authorize the atomic bombing of Japan to go ahead. After the bombing of Nagasaki, he told the American people he had ordered the bomb’s use “to shorten the agony of war, to save the lives of hundreds and thousands of young Americans.” He believed this until his own death.
“FAT MAN” BOMB
Type Nuclear weapon
Weight 10,300lb (4,670kg)
Length 128in (3.3m)
Diameter 60in (1.5m)
Filling Plutonium Yield
Yield 21 kilotons
Filled with plutonium as opposed to the uranium 235 used in “Little Boy,” “Fat Man” was a more powerful and sophisticated nuclear weapon—it was ten times more efficient than “Little Boy.” Many of the physicists involved in the Manhattan Project believed that the device could not be made to work; only Seth Neddermeyer’s faith in it kept it alive.
A fully formed mushroom cloud towers over Nagasaki, following the city’s atomic bombing. Sweeney dropped his bomb through a break in the cloud over the Urakami Valley, which meant that much of the main part of Nagasaki was shielded from blast damage. Nevertheless, between 40,000 and 70,000 of the city’s inhabitants were killed instantly. The heat generated by the explosion reached a temperature of 7,052°F (3,900°C); the blast generated winds that gusted at up to 600mph (965km/h). Sweeney turned for home, but, thanks to the time it had taken him to switch targets, he was forced to land on Okinawa as his B-29 was running out of fuel.
