Hitler's Terror Weapons by Geoffrey Brooks

Author:Geoffrey Brooks
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Tags: Non-Fiction, World War II, War & Military
ISBN: 9781783379330
Publisher: Pen and Sword
Published: 2013-04-25T12:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 10

The Sands of Time Run Out

“The Germans were preparing rocket surprises for England in particular, which would have, it is believed, changed the course of the war if the invasion had been postponed for so short a time as half a year,” Lt-Gen Donald Leander Putt, Deputy Commanding General, US Army Air Force Intelligence, told the Society of Aeronautical Engineers in a speech in 1946. Since he was speaking here of rockets, Lt-Gen Putt was implying that forcing the Germans back to their own frontier by December 1944 was critical to the Allies not losing the war. In December 1944 the Germans launched a military operation, the purpose of which no historian has explained satisfactorily: the Ardennes offensive, which began on the 16th of that month. Hitler’s motorized forces were to bear down on Antwerp with the intention of recapturing the port. For the purpose he had released huge quantities of fuel and ammunition and transferred the bulk of his panzers from the East. Two full divisions – one SS and one Wehrmacht – were deployed. Secrecy was absolute. Hitler’s Luftwaffe ADC von Below remarked in his 1982 memoirs that even he could not understand why Hitler wanted to go to Antwerp – “a place that led nowhere”. And at the same time orders were placed with naval shipyards at Stettin and Elbing in the Baltic for twenty-four 500-ton submersible barges able to transport and launch V-2 rockets. Antwerp was a sea port. Antwerp was 200 miles from London. The maximum range of a V-2 was 200 miles. Launched from a submersible barge, a V-2 could hit London from the River Scheldt on which Antwerp stood. Here we begin to see the logic. But the V-2 campaign had been a failure. Hitler knew that. There had to be something extra to make all this worthwhile.

In an aside to accredited journalists Kurowski and Romersa it is alleged that Lt-Gen Putt had added, “The Germans had V-2s with atomic explosive warheads”. Hitler told Otto Skorzeny106 that the whole point was to introduce “a new and really revolutionary weapon which would take them utterly by surprise” – the same expression as used by US Lt-Gen Putt in his speech. If the Uraniumbombe was ready, and he now had the deadly warhead mass-produced to fit into his V-2s, then the picture makes some kind of sense at last. In this new campaign every V-2 arriving from the heavens on London at Mach 3.5 would crush into a critical mass on impact a sphere in its nose or waist filled with half a tonne or so of plutonium-enriched uranium powder. The assembling of the material, though instantaneous, lacked symmetry, and so a full chain reaction would not develop, but there would certainly be a “fizzle” equivalent to up to 50 tons of TNT, meltdown and fallout. And every V-2 would bring the same punishment until Britain pulled out of the war and all troops of the western Alliance departed from the European mainland. It was a bold plan.

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