The Avengers
IN The Destruction of Dresden, Mr. Dovid Irving has already given us one of the best and
most illuminating books that have come out of
the last war. One is tempted to say that The Mare's Nest is an even better one. It is, first of all, an admirably clear and thorough account of the development, production and operational deployment of the secret weapons with which, as the twelfth hour approached, Germany still hoped to avenge herself on Britain and even to win the war. It is also an account of the measures by which Britain tried to penetrate the mystery of the V-weapons and to counter the potential threat which they created; this seems to me one of the best descriptions I have ever read of how intelligence operations are actually conducted and their results assessed. Lastly, the book gives us a slightly nightmarish illustration of how, in war, decisions of critical importance may be deter- mined by factors, of ignorance, human fallibility, prejudice, egotism, which are hardly amenable to rational control.
These were of three kinds. There was the V-1, or flying bomb, developed by the Luftwaffe; there was the V-2, or long-range rocket, pioneered by the German army; and, potentially most dan- gerous of all, there was the V-3, or 'high-pressure pump,' a colossal gun designed to bombard London with 600 shells an hour from an under- ground emplacement near Calais which was vir- tually indestructible by air attack. Only the first two ever became operational, and when they did they had a material effect which in no way justified the enormous resources devoted to their production.
For this elaborate and deadly game, in which science, bluff, espionage, revenge, panic and ig- norance all played their part, Mr. Irving is able to assemble a cast of personalities which any writer of fiction might envy. It includes Churchill and Hitler themselves, Himmler, Albert Speer, Professor Wernher von Braun, more interested in space than in bombing London, Lord Mor-
rison, Mr. Duncan Sandys, Lord Cherwell, and the admirable Dr. R. V. Jones, FRS, the war- time head of scientific intelligence, whose investi- gations of the problem of the secret weapons were a model of how intelligence operations should be conducted; all in their way, together with a host of minor figures, contributed, by their weak- nesses as well as their strength, to the wonder- fully complicated plot of Mr. Irving's book.
What helps the fun along, as it were, is that science itself seems to add to the confusion. Lord Cherwell, for instance, had every justifica- tion for thinking that the secret weapons must carry a war-head of at least ten tons to justify their employment; he thought this was techni- cally impossible and that therefore the whole problem was non-existent, 'a mare's nest.' In fact, they only carried a war-head of one ton.
On the other hand, if the Germans had con- centrated on one, instead of three, types of weapon, all the resources, of labour, material, or- ganisation, scientific research and technological skill, which they devoted to the secret weapons programme, there seems little reason to doubt that they could have launched an attack, at a time, on a scale, and with accuracy.
Mr. Irving has succeeded in combining all the varied and complicated strands of his story into a single narrative which does not for a moment fail to hold our interest. Mr. Collier, in The Battle of the V-Weapons, tells the same story clearly and competently, but without the wealth of detail, the painstaking research, and the in- sight 'into the human factors involved, which make The Mare's Nest outstanding.
GORONWY REES
Previous page
