This is a very engaging book, written in a very accessible style, and this remarkable book does far more than its title suggests. From a personal perspective, having been born in 1946 in Croydon, I grew up acutely conscious of the ‘presence’ of multiple bomb sites. Guy Walters has made me reflect specifically for the first time on which forms of German bombing were responsible: the Blitz, V1 flying bombs or V-2 rocket bombs; and also on the effect that such bombing would have had on the morale of the community, as it acted swiftly to respond to the enormity of the damage and with a determination to return to as normal a life as possible. This has been a very powerful incentive for me to review what specifically happened just before I was born eighty years ago.
At the heart of this book Guy Walters reports on how Allied reconnaissance, supported strongly by Polish undercover observers, had identified in 1943 that a large self-contained area on the Baltic coast at Peenemunde had been created self-evidently for a major military development. With V-1 bombs already striking Britain, it was assumed to be something rather more sinister. The highly effective network of local informers was providing very detailed data about what appeared to be taking place, with the assumption that it must be some sort of rocket weapon. In 1944 the Allies bombed the site in an attempt to disrupt the preparations.
The Nazis acted immediately to remove all their experimental material across Germany and Poland to a remote test site in southeast Poland to a site near the Carpathian Mountains. Here they continued experimenting with their pilotless rockets which were designed to exceed the sound barrier and reach their targets with a parabola which took them to the edge of the stratosphere. The experimentation brought many crashes in that area and the Polish underground continually tried to get evidence about their design and the materials and fuel being used. The Allies asked for physical evidence but the ‘clear up’ teams aways arrived too quickly, until one crashed at Sarnaki.
On this occasion the local volunteers arrived very quickly and disguised the almost intact wreckage so that the German search parties never found it. It was then dismantled and carried furtively to Warsaw where local university scientists examined it and reported that it was very much as suspected, literally a pilotless supersonic rocket bomb. The Allies in London asked for it to be sent for them to examine further and amazingly it was dismantled and then ‘smuggled’ to a remote spot at Motyl where volunteers prepared a temporary airstrip, to which a Dakota was dispatched from Brindisi in Italy to collect the heavily disguised evidence.
This was a complex and hazardous mission but it succeeded and the Allies in London were able to assess the threat posed by examining an actual V-2. They concluded that, unlike a V-1 which adept pilots could intercept, there was no likely potential defence against a supersonic weapon which arrived so swiftly and silently, and Churchill’s Government determined that Bomber Command should immediately concentrate on eliminating potential launch sites in the Low Countries and Germany. With the V2 campaign already having started, this was pragmatism because the Government accepted that there would be short-term damage and suffering but by early 1945 the threat from the V2s petered out because the achievements of D-Day were also beginning to be observed with the German retreat.
One particular insight which Guy Walters offers us is awareness of the efforts and effectiveness of the Polish underground network during the war. Using newly discovered personal memoirs and previously unobtainable government papers in both in Poland and Britain, we are introduced to a highly integrated and coordinated opposition which was determined to defeat the occupying powers, on such a scale that the retrieval of the failed V-2 via Brindisi could be achieved. This has broadened our appreciation of what other forms of opposition the Nazis faced.
Trevor James was the editor of The Historian from 2006 to 2019 and is the author of Patterns in Local History; Five Case Studies.
