Hitler’s Terror Weapons: The Price of Vengeance. Richard Overy

      

      Hitler’s Terror Weapons

      The Price of Vengeance

      Roy Irons

Dedication

       This book is dedicated toErica Roe IronsandRebecca Ann Irons

      Contents

       Cover

       Title Page

Dedication

Foreword by Richard Overy

Preface

Part I. Development and Dreams

1. The Seeds of Vengeance

2. The Weapons of Vengeance

Part II. Raids and Revenge

3. The Renewal of War

4. Promise from Peenmuende

       Part III. Fear and Intelligence

       5. The Doom of London

       6. Terror, Strategy and a Poison Cloud

       Part IV. Impact and Reality

       7. Countdown

       8. The Robot Bombardment

       9. Attack from Airless Space – The final Preparations

       10. The Rocket’s Red Glare

       11. Terror and Morale

       12. Belgium the Brave

       13. Shooting the Rocket Down

       Part V. Evaluation and Hindsight

       14. Hitler’s War and the Terror Weapons

       15. Germany’s War and the Terror Weapons

       16. Conclusion

       Epilogue: ‘… but a whimper’

       Appendices

       1. The Paths of Vengeance

       2. ‘The Hubertus Train, the live whip of the German Armament Industry’

       3. Statistics

       4. Four Allied Analyses of the flying Bomb

       Selected Bibliography

       Index

       Copyright

       About the Publisher

Foreword

      On June 16 1944 Joseph Goebbel’s Propaganda Ministry sent out a directive to the German press announcing that the first attacks on London with weapons ‘of a new sort’ would take place that night. It was to be the ‘event of the day’ for the following morning’s front pages. Eight days later the press was told that the weapon would be called the ‘V 1’, the ‘V standing for Vergeltung or vengeance. Thus did the German public learn of what soon became the V-weapons campaign.

      Ever since the onset of heavy bombing on German cities in 1942 Adolf Hitler had sought some form of terrible retaliation that would force the British and Americans to stop. In the winter of 1943–4 the German Air Force launched the so-called ‘Baby Blitz’ on London, but there were too few bomber aircraft to achieve anything of significance against well-organised air and passive defences. Instead Hitler threw his dictatorial weight behind the development of long-range missiles, first the V-1 flying bomb, then the V-2 rocket. Plans were developed to produce them in vast numbers using simple work methods and slave labour supplied by Heinrich Himmler’s concentration camps. Some evidence suggests that Himmler was planning to fill the warheads with radioactive waste, but this came to nothing. Instead each missile became an expensive way of transporting modest quantities of conventional high explosives.

      The story of the German V-weapons has two sides to it. The British were aware that German scientists were pioneering weapons at the cutting edge of modern military technology. They imagined the worst, and prepared for a new apocalypse, just as they had done in the 1930s in anticipation of German conventional bombing. Until now little has been written about just what the British did to understand, anticipate and combat the new weapons. The account that follows explores not only the warped mindset that drove Hitler to gamble a large proportion of Germany’s overstretched war effort on untested technology, but it presents in fascinating detail the twists and turns of British policy in the full glare of the missile threat. Roy Irons gives us the first round in what became the principal feature of post-war superpower confrontation – missile threat and anti-missile defence.

      It is tempting to suggest on the basis of this candid account – exaggerated fears on the one side and expectations on the other – that later missile wars might have been different from the terrifying scenarios of nuclear destruction that fuelled the arms race of the 1950s and 1960s. Without the German experiments of the wartime