THE GERMANS IN NORMANDY by Hargreaves Richard

Author:Hargreaves, Richard [Hargreaves, Richard]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781781594704
Publisher: Pen and Sword
Published: 2006-11-06T00:00:00+00:00

The ordinary German was also impressed, as the Sicherheitsdienst monitors reported from the city of Schwerin:

The destruction cannot be too great; hatred for England is finally finding an outlet yearned for, for so long, a revenge without mercy or compassion. If one action of the Führer ever found an unqualified response, it is this vengeance. The only regret is ‘that we cannot get even with the Americans’.69

In July 1944, the V1 was Germany’s sole ‘trump card’. For the first time since the days of Blitz in the winter of 1940 and 1941, the English capital was ‘in the line of fire’, Joseph Goebbels celebrated. ‘Theatres and cinemas are for the most part closed. Life in London has been badly disrupted by our new weapon. We hope that it will be disrupted even more in the future.’70

The problem was that the British had the measure of the Germans’ ‘trump card’. The majority of Allied fighters could out run the ‘doodlebug’, as the British public nicknamed the flying bomb for its distinctive sound, but shooting the V1 down remained a challenge. The interceptors had barely seven minutes to destroy the missiles over the Channel and southern England before the V1 entered London’s twenty-mile deep defensive belt of barrage balloons and anti-aircraft guns. But shoot the V1 down the British did. And in great numbers. In the first month of the flying bomb offensive, 1,240 V1s were destroyed by the defenders. Of the 4,361 flying bombs launched at London and the south-east, barely three in ten reached the target area. The Engländer bore the vengeance stoically. In London, British officials noticed ‘strain, weariness, fear and despondency’ among the capital’s inhabitants: ‘Many think these raids worse than the Blitz.’ The flying bomb offensive was the main topic of conversation in London for more than a month, but for all the destruction, the Briton saw the V1 for what it was: a nuisance. ‘These raids are extremely unpleasant,’ the monitors of opinion noted, ‘but will make no difference to the outcome of the war.’71

It didn’t take long for the mood in Britain to filter back to the German public. Even before June was out, some sections of the populace were becoming disillusioned with the V1. It simply had not lived up to the hype. ‘People expected the retaliation would be sudden and destructive based on earlier propaganda,’ the opinion monitors in the Sicherheitsdienst reported; now the newspapers were talking about Störungsfeuer – disruptive fire – not destruction. Still, after months of promises, the ‘revenge weapons’ were about all the public had to believe in. The SD observed: ‘Faith in the overall “revenge action” is nevertheless undiminished, especially because people are confident that the German leadership has even more “unknown trump cards”.’ The German people ‘have high hopes it will bring about a fundamental change in the course of the war in our favour’.72

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