The Bastard Brigade by Sam Kean

Author:Sam Kean
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Little, Brown and Company
Published: 2019-07-08T16:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 30

Beautiful Peenemünde

In the second half of 1943 the British began seeing signs that, as the German generals had promised, the “fun” with the V-weapons was about to start. Common sense held that the Nazis would launch the rockets from northern France, the closest point of attack to London. And in a sickening noncoincidence, reconnaissance planes caught the Germans hard at work building massive infrastructure there. In some cases they erected what looked like huge skis—launch rails to guide rockets to their targets. In other cases they were excavating trenches the size of canyons, to build gigantic bunkers. Even scarier, an escaped French prisoner who turned up at the American embassy in Switzerland in June 1943 claimed to have escorted a cask of heavy water to Peenemünde recently. He didn’t know what it was for, but given that heavy water had no conceivable use in rocketry, only nuclear research, connecting the dots wasn’t hard. The Nazis were clearly developing atomic rockets at Peenemünde, then building the apparatus in northern France to hurl them at London.

Still, not everyone reached such dire conclusions. A powerful faction within British intelligence thought the whole rocket danger overblown, and they dismissed Peenemünde as a factory for making airplane bombs, or even harmless sledge pumps. Between Nazi tanks and fighter planes, they argued, we have enough to worry about without inventing new threats. Pretty soon a civil war broke out within British intelligence, and things got so heated that Winston Churchill finally had to arbitrate during a late-night meeting on June 29. It took place in a subterranean chamber deep beneath the government offices at Whitehall. There, behind a thick green door with an observation slit, stood the Cabinet War Room, a dark windowless space with a U-shaped table covered in blue cloth.

The antagonists that night were two of Churchill’s confidants, Duncan Sandys and Frederick Lindemann, Lord Cherwell. The German-born Cherwell was an accomplished Oxford physicist with a nasty temperament: he reportedly despised Jews, women, and Africans, and instead channeled all his affection toward Churchill, whom he practically fell in love with. He served as the prime minister’s personal scientific advisor, and in that capacity had been downplaying the threat of Peenemünde. Opposed to him was Sandys, who was both an intelligence officer and Churchill’s son-in-law, having married Diana Churchill eight years earlier. Sandys had nearly lost a foot early in the war after his driver fell asleep at the wheel one night and crashed. He endured several grueling months of rehab, and Churchill took pity on him and appointed him head of a committee investigating Peenemünde. This sign of favor gave Cherwell fits, and from that moment forward he despised his young rival.

Sandys presented his case first that night, recapping all the evidence his team had gathered: prisoner testimony, spy reports, the conversation between von Thoma and Crüwell, reconnaissance photos of rockets at Peenemünde, pictures of the concrete bunkers being built in northern France. He capped his argument with a chilling statistic. Given their apparent

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