Wheeeeee . •
Max Hastings
Doodlebugs Norman Longmate (Hutchinson pp. 549, £12.95) What is it about an unmanned explosive projectile that makes it seem, to those in its path, so much more terrible than a bomb dropped by an aircraft pilot three miles high? `There is something very inhuman about death-dealing missiles being launched in such an indiscriminate manner', wrote no less than Queen Elizabeth to her mother-in-law in June 1944, when the German V-1 assault began. Churchill briefly considered using poison gas against the Germans in retaliation, until he was dissuaded by Eisenhower and Tedder. The doodlebugs,the British agreed, had introduced a new and sinister element into warfare, infernal machines worthy of the cowardly monsters who devised and dispatched them.
In reality, they killed fewer people in the months of their assault on Britain than Bomber Command was eliminating in a single average night raid on Germany. For more than two years the RAF had been conducting its area offensive against the industrial regions of Germany, designed to kill and 'de-house' Germans in the largest possible numbers.
Norman Longmate writes that `few weapons have been so brilliant in conception, so swift in development, or had so brief an operational life'. The V-1's seemed to promise Hitler the means to overcome the Luftwaffe's inability to bomb Britain. The bombs themselves were extraordinarily cheap — the author suggests about £150.a time. In 1943, Berlin had hopes of launching 8000 of them a month against Britain. As Germany's chances of victory by any logical yardstick receded her leaders exhorted their people to keep faith, and wait for the 'wonder weapons'.
British Intelligence picked up hints of the V-weapons at a very early stage. The oft-told story is here repeated: how R.V. Jones, RAF Photographic Interpreters and scores of very brave agents in Occupied Europe and Germany pieced together the nature of the Crossbow threat for Churchill and Duncan Sandys, handicapped by scepticism from Lord Cherwell and outbreaks of panic from Herbert Morrison, whose Ministry of Home Security had to cope with the threat. The British were very alarmed indeed, and began devoting immense efforts to bombing the development station at Peenemunde and the 'ski-sites' in France from which the V-1's were to be launched.
French civilians suffered severely. It is hard to accept H.E. Bates's report of conversation with Frenchmen, apparently taken at face value by Longmate: 'Yet again and again the observer talking to them in the days immediately after their liberation, heard them say, "We did not mind . . . however often you came and however much you bombed us. . We knew that it had to be done, and that it had to be done to us".' In reality, there was intense French bitterness about the pre-invasion bombing in the areas that suffered.
Early on the morning of June 13th 1944, an Observer Corps post on the Romney Marshes gave the long-expected code warning: Nike-Two, Diver! Diver!' and the first V-1 rattled throatily overhead, to crash in a vegetable patch near Gravesend, where it damaged an oak tree and many young greens and lettuces.
The first Sunday brought the worst horror of the offensive: the 500th bomb to be launched exploded in the Guards Chapel at Wellington Barracks during matins, killing 119 people, seriously injuring 102, and much distressing the rulers of Britain, almost all of whom knew someone at the service. A passer-by that afternoon, James Lees-Milne, gazed upon the ruins of the chapel and wrote that 'a rage of fury welled inside me. For sheer damnable devilry, what could be worse than this awful instrument?'
The Prime Minister responded characteristically: 'Winston was in very good form', wrote Alan Brooke after the next War Cabinet meeting, 'quite ten years younger, all due to the fact that the flying bombs have again put us in the first line'.
Much of Longmate's book is concerned with the response of civilian Britain to the doodlebugs, recounted after scores of interviews with eyewitnesses. 'The picture given by the newspapers, of a battered population cheerfully enduring each new affliction laid upon them, was false', he writes. 'For the rest of the country in 1944, the scent of victory may well have filled the air. For people in London . . . it was a drab, depressing time, the hallmarks of which were dirt, dust and damp. There was no eager acceptance of sacrifice, merely an unwilling realisation of the need to stick it out'.
Britain was very weary by the summer of 1944, and had little stomach for a renewal of the Blitz. After years of struggle to erase the worst scars of 1940-41, it was heartbreaking now to see 137,000 buildings damaged, 6184 further civilians and 2917 servicemen killed, many thousands more being injured by the new affliction.
Yet the British got the measure of the doodlebugs. The bombs flew slowly enough to be intercepted by fighters at maximum speed and by anti-aircraft guns. By huge and hasty exertion to redeploy the guns and to create a standing fighter screen to meet the incoming bombs, the defenders began to shoot them down in hundreds over the sea and the coast. Within a fortnight of their inception, the menace had receded.
Longmate's account is a solid collation rather than an imaginative analysis. Hitler's faith in his 'wonder weapons' -was always absurd. It reflected the same obsession with delivery sytems rather than actual destructive power that caused so many Allied politicians and airmen to overrate strategic bombing. For all their ingenuity, the V-1's and 'those damn silly rockets', as Sir Arthur Harris called the V-weapons when he argued with Churchill against diverting Bomber Command's strength to attack their factories and launching sites, never possessed the potential to do serious damage to Britain. They could only inflict a new surge of fear and misery. They were weapons of spite rather than victory.
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