Wars and ConflictsΒ permalink
Peenamunde
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Message 1.Β
Posted by Pete- Weatherman (U14670985) on Wednesday, 10th November 2010
Just read an article that states we knew about Peenamunde as early as 1939. It say that a package was left on the window ledge of the Naval Attache in Oslo. From there it was passed to MI6 who agreed it was the real thing.
Bombing raids started in 1945 delaying production and forceing the plant to move to the Harz Mt. Unfortunetly 100s of polish slave labourers were killed in the raides.
What gets me is that the arttical implies we not only knew about the V1 andV2 but there work on Jets, yet they still delayed Whitle and his development of the Jet, seems odd. -
Message 2
Posted by Mutatis_Mutandis (U8620894) on Wednesday, 10th November 2010
Keep in mind the time lines. The Oslo Report arrived in early November 1939, and most of the delays in Whittle's project occurred before June 1939. The biggest cause of the delay was that his design ran counter the conventional wisdom on the efficiency of centrifugal compressors and turbines, as embodied by the expert in the field, A. A. Griffith. Whittle's design was indeed sub-optimal, and he aware of that, but it had the advantage of being easier to develop than more advanced designs with axial compressors.
But in November 1939, the pace had already picked up. A flight-ready engine had been ordered from Whittle in March 1938, and in August 1939 there was sufficient progress to ask Gloster's George Carter to build an experimental aircraft around it, the Gloster E.28/39. It would fly in May 1941. Meanwhile, work was progressing at a fair pace: Whittle was teamed up with Rover to start jet engine production, and in November 1940 the Air Ministry also produced a specification for a jet fighter. That would fly in March 1943.
By the standards of the time that was a credible rate of progress, and delays were mostly due to the state of development of the jet engine and the need to focus all resources on fighter production in the run-up to the Battle of Britain. German progress was no much faster. -
Message 3
Posted by Pete- Weatherman (U14670985) on Thursday, 11th November 2010
Thanks for setting me straight. I was always led to beleve it was after 1940 that he was delayed becuses of the demands of war. But I suspect there was a little of the right hand not knowing what the left hand was doing in there as well. As with Enigma, Garbo and other Top Secret work.
If you know what I mean.
Again Thanks
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Message 4
Posted by TimTrack (U1730472) on Thursday, 11th November 2010
Bombing raids started in 1945Β
I presume this is a typo, but Peenamunde was bombed in August 1943. -
Message 5
Posted by Pete- Weatherman (U14670985) on Thursday, 11th November 2010
Yes its a typo sorry you are right.
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Message 6
Posted by MB (U177470) on Friday, 12th November 2010
I think the Oslo Report gets more detailed coverage in R V Jones other book "Reflections on Intelligence".
MB -
Message 7
Posted by CASSEROLEON (U11049737) on Tuesday, 16th November 2010
Re Peenamunde and the remarks about Whittle
.. I think it needs to be borne in mind that there were many avenues being explored in the science and technology of the time.. especially in Germany which as people like Julian Huxley argued had seized the initiative in the Revolution that would decide the age... Since the fall of Communism it seems that some of the scientific work that fell into the hands of the USSR has become more widely known- including Nazi sponsored work on the helicopter and the Flying Saucer, and other concepts too.
From what I remember the VI and V2 were developed by competing sections of the German Armed Forces, but Hitler dismissed their short-term military significance believing that Blitzkrieg would win the day in this war..so that their development was not given much priority. When deployed they were not really targetted and so there is the whole question of Total War..
I forget now at what stage Winston Churchill referred to contact from the Third Reich suggesting that the war should be fought according to some rules.- "No". I told Herr Hitler, "You do your worst. We will do our best".. Goebbels then asked a rally whether they were prepared for "Total War" and got a standing ovation with the Nazi salute. What followed was the carpet bombing of German and German occupied cities.. In the last few weeks they have found unexploded 2ww bombs in Rheims and Dijon, most likelly Allied ones.
The V stood for Vengeance not in this case Victory.. and when Hitler did decide to bring them into operation in was really more in hope or hatred than in expectation.. It was a desperate hope that perhaps the British morale might crack; though the devastation of places like Dresden did not seem to produce that result. The lesson of mass bombing of civilians seems to be to make them feel and act like the Front Line combatants they suddenly become.
The question of the bombing of Peenamunde, with Polish slave casualties, has been raised by some people, I think, in the context of why the Allies did not bomb Auschwitz as well, for information had been smuggled out about exactly what was going on there.
Cass -
Message 8
Posted by Mutatis_Mutandis (U8620894) on Tuesday, 16th November 2010
Since the fall of Communism it seems that some of the scientific work that fell into the hands of the USSR has become more widely known- including Nazi sponsored work on the helicopter and the Flying Saucer, and other concepts too.Β
In general the Soviets appear to have been, for obvious reasons, less lucky than the Western nations in recruiting German engineers and scientists for their own projects. They transferred, more or less forcibly, a large number of technicians, but most of the top people had managed to make their way west. There were exceptions, such as Ferdinand Brandner, who spent eight years developing jet and turboprop engines in the USSR before he was allowed to leave.
However, in Arkhip Lyulka the USSR had its own jet engine pioneer, a contemporary of Whittle, whose work was interrupted by the German invasion in 1941 while his jet engine was still under development. Until 1944, when the Soviets finally discovered that jet fighters were becoming operational in Germany, Lyulka's work received a low priority. Hence his first jet engine did not run until 1945, and the USSR filled the gap by copying German and British designs.
Since the fall of communism, some fascinating information has indeed been released, for example about the further development and testing of the German DFS 346 rocket-propelled experimental aircraft in the USSR. As for Soviet interest in German "Flying Saucers", we are talking about unsubstantiated rumors about unsubstantiated rumors. Even Bill Rose, whose work on "flying saucer aircraft" is very generous in giving unlikely stories the benefit of the doubt, qualified some claims as ridiculous. A Soviet team lead by Sukhanov experimented with disc-shaped vehicles in the 1950s, but there is no evidence that they were influenced by German research. The Soviets were more than capable of investigating unusual aerodynamic configurations on their own.
Similarly, not much German influence is apparent in the helicopter designs of Kamov and Mil. Heinrich Focke worked for the French after the war, and they indeed built an improved version of the German Fa 223. Anton Flettner went to the USA and his work probably influenced the helicopter designs of Kaman.
From what I remember the VI and V2 were developed by competing sections of the German Armed Forces, Β
Yes, the V1 was an air force project, the V2 and army project.
I forget now at what stage Winston Churchill referred to contact from the Third Reich suggesting that the war should be fought according to some rules.- "No". I told Herr Hitler, "You do your worst. We will do our best".. Goebbels then asked a rally whether they were prepared for "Total War" and got a standing ovation with the Nazi salute. Β
Goebbels gave that speech in February 1943, making it rather late in the day as a response to whatever discussions had been ongoing with Britain. In fact it was mainly a response to setbacks on the Eastern Front (and it preceded the heavy RAF attacks on the Ruhr.) And what Goebbels meant when he spoke of Total War was the total mobilization of Germany. Every single man or woman in Germany would, by a decision taken in January 1943, be registered at labor exchanges and assessed for their fitness to do war work. In 1944 Goebbels became, with the backing of Speer, "Reich's Plenipotentiary for Total War" with a brief to mobilize the "home front".
What followed was the carpet bombing of German and German occupied cities..Β
While attacks on factories and transport hubs in occupied cities did a fair amount of collateral damage and killed a number of civilians, I know of no case in which an occupied city was subjected to area bombing... Virtually all major German cities were subjected to area attacks with a mixture of high-explosive and incendiary bombs, designed to cause as much damage to city centers as possible. Occupied cities were not targeted in this way. For example, for the attacks on railway centers in and near French cities that preceded the invasion of 1944, a limit of 10,000 French casualties were set by the Allied leadership, and by their own calculation the bombers caused less than half of that. The Free French leadership had accepted the risk. -
Message 9
Posted by CASSEROLEON (U11049737) on Tuesday, 16th November 2010
Mutatis
Thankyou for your reply.. My comments about the bombing of occupied cities had France very much in mind.. as I mentioned my family's Dijon.. My father-in-laws family was based on Longvie where there was an airfield that presumably was the main target of the Allied Bombing that they endured.. Though there was also a railway depot nearby as well.
But a school trip to Caen with some pupils nearly 20 years ago made me very much aware of the widespread destruction wrought there- not by the Bomber Harris campaign, but in the pursuit of the D Day invasion.. I was thinking of the French citizen of Caen whose body was dug out of the rubble covering the cellar in which he had taken shelter-- along with a note that he had written showing his approval of the fact that the Allies were coming at last- even if it meant his own death.
As for the Flying Saucer programme I think that the scientist involved was a Czech. I seem to recall some actual film evidence on the programme on the Arte Channel, the same place that I saw an exposition of the contribution of Nazi Science to the rotary blade mechanism that was developed into the helicopter. Was there some kind of flying device associated with the U-Boats, rather like the man-carrying kites used by the Royal Navy around the time of the First World War?
Cass -
Message 10
Posted by CASSEROLEON (U11049737) on Wednesday, 17th November 2010
Mutatis
Further to my last-
Perhaps I should add that my comments about the carpet bombing were really directed at the fact that the V1 and V2 were not targetted and so could not be aimed at military targets..
Hitler's "Stab in the back" theory about the First World War would suggest that he did not think that a "proper" Army would stop fighting because of a problems on the Βι¶ΉΤΌΕΔ Front. Hence attacks should be aimed and targetted.
There was, however, the theory held by some that the bombing of civilians would destroy morale. The evidence of the 2WW suggests that it created a polarisation. "When the going gets tough etc.". John Steinbeck 's book "Once There Was A War"- a collection of his war journalism- includes a report on Dover, which was subjected to artillery bombardment across the Channel. One man was incensed because the Germans had damaged the prize roses growing in his front garden.. And a female ambulance worker told him how she had slapped about one of the people she was called out to save. This man had cracked and had tried to commit suicide. It totally outraged her, and she lost her temper with the man screaming at him that, at a time when so many people were giving their lives or having them taken away from them, he had absolutely no right to try to destroy his own.
Re the Flying Saucer - Such Arte programmes make exceptional demands upon my French vocabulary.. From what I could grasp, and have retained, the idea was that the shape of an upturned saucer would make it possible to generate an electro-magnetic force that would operate like one of those garden water features. From a central point the force would trickle down equally, so that the energy flow would create an anti-gravity thrust llifting the "saucer" off the ground. Then by changes in weight distribution the saucer could be tilted producing a backward thrust that would impell the craft forwards.
The piece of film reminded one of the first Flying Bedstead at Farnborough, only less performant
However one has to keep in mind the context of a Nazi Germany that also produced film of the "archeological discoveries" of the "Ancient Nordic Civilization". But, in this case, who might have been fooling who? There was that extreme example of Schindler's list where it is suggested that Schlinder managed to fool the authorities into believing that his Jews were doing vital war work in order to maintain a situation in which , if work did not actually make people "free", at least it kept them alive.
Cass -
Message 11
Posted by Mutatis_Mutandis (U8620894) on Wednesday, 17th November 2010
Hitler's "Stab in the back" theory about the First World War would suggest that he did not think that a "proper" Army would stop fighting because of a problems on the Βι¶ΉΤΌΕΔ Front. Hence attacks should be aimed and targetted.Β
I would think that it suggests the reverse: That it made him understand, and perhaps exaggerate, the impact of problems on the home front. The Nazi regime was always sensitive to public opinion, remarkably so, and its initial reaction to the heavy Allied bombing was to expect that the German people would rise up in protest and call for an end to the war. It was a surprise to them that this did not happen. Hitler's emphasis on willpower as the deciding factor in warfare -- and as a free substitute for the ever-scarcer men, weapons, ammunition and fuel -- also makes a link with attacks on enemy "morale".
But by 1944 it hardly mattered any more. The Nazi regime was increasingly desperate and clutched at a series of straws that were expected to bring at least the Western Allies to the negotiation table: The V-weapons, the Ardennes offensive, the death of Roosevelt, and so on. Given that Hitler's alternative was suicide, he was strongly motivated to fool himself.
The reality for those on the receiving end was that bombing did not induce, as Douhet and other theoreticians had claimed, a wish to surrender. But neither did prolonged bombing stimulate the energetic anger claimed by the propaganda machines. The most widespread reaction to prolonged bombing was fatalistic resignation, apathy mixed with dark jokes. Frequent alerts, crises and suffering exhausted a population, achieving at least some of the desired effect in the form of worker absenteeism and low productivity. The V-1 attacks of 1944 did have enough impact on the British people to cause the government serious concern, because the people were already war-weary.
the idea was that the shape of an upturned saucer would make it possible to generate an electro-magnetic force that would operate like one of those garden water features.Β
Research in so-called electrohydrodynamic drives is real enough, although any connection with flying saucers is rather far-fetched
Ionized molecules flowing between two electrodes do generate a certain amount of thrust. The biggest problem with this kind of device is that it doesn't produce enough thrust to lift the weight of its own power supply, so -- apart from tethered models supplied by wires -- concepts have to rely on supplying power to a flight device with microwave or laser beams, and/or using them in combination with a lighter-than-air airship.
Anyway, as far as I know the first attempts to find useful applications for the concept were in the USA in the 1950s, and I have never seen anything to suggest that the Nazis were particularly interested.
There was that extreme example of Schindler's list where it is suggested that Schlinder managed to fool the authorities into believing that his Jews were doing vital war work in order to maintain a situation in which , if work did not actually make people "free", at least it kept them alive.Β
Not such an extreme example. It appears that a lot of late-war German projects were pursued primarily as a method for technicians, engineers and scientists to avoid being sent to the front. Hence, for example, the rich post-war harvest of advanced aircraft designs and aerodynamic research. Most of the people who developed these knew perfectly well that it was highly improbable that the Reich would ever be able to build any of them, but as long as they could convince the authorities otherwise, it was a lifeline for them. -
Message 12
Posted by CASSEROLEON (U11049737) on Wednesday, 17th November 2010
Mutatis
Thank you for your replies.
(a) Re the Βι¶ΉΤΌΕΔ Front revolt.. though Hitler may have been worried about such things, I believe that he would have believed that his "will" enforced by his enforcers should have prevented such a second Stab in the Back.. No doubt like much else in pre-Nazi Germany he may have ascribed that to Germany's "Jewish Problem"..And whatever he thought about contempary Great Britain, he knew that historically the British were a formidable foe, with a history of effective Government repression going back to the Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars..
(B) I agree with your observations on the propaganda about the bombing, and have referred many times to the War Cabinet meeting in 1940 when Churchill set Harold Nicholson the task of drawing up some war aims that would help to bolster morale and persuade the population that it would all be worth it... The Second World War "Reparations" consisted as a Labour Minister observed in cutting of the wealth of the wealthy, rather than their heads, in order to pay for a massive experiment in the redistribution of wealth in order to placate long-term anger and grievance.
(C) Far-fetched or not, the programme that I saw did involve some serious thinking and practical research into this possibility of a flying saucer.. And I only mentioned it as an example that has come to my notice of just one other line of research struggling for funds in Nazi Europe- just to put the OP question of the funding of Peenamunde into context.
(D) Your last point puts me in mind of Goebbels pet project of an ambitious colour feature film about the heroic end of the Prussians in their unsuccessful defence of Kolmar (?).. Tens of thousands of German troops were withdrawn from combat for this in the last 12 months of the war, in order to re-enact the battle-scenes.
Regards
Cass -
Message 13
Posted by Grumpyfred (U2228930) on Wednesday, 17th November 2010
I must remind everybody of the line when the USSR beat the US into space. "That is bacause our German scientists are better then your German Scientists." It does seem that indeed Russia did capture the better ones.
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Message 14
Posted by CASSEROLEON (U11049737) on Wednesday, 17th November 2010
Grumpyfred
Further to that the USSR-who missed out on Reparations after the 1ww- decided to help themselves and asset strip its zones of Germany and Eastern Europe in a rather different way from the West.. From the programme that I watched I got the impression that they just seized as much research material as they could "just in case".. I am not sure that some of it had ever really been looked at properly before the end of the USSR [ and its asset stripping- by the mafia?]
Cass -
Message 15
Posted by Grumpyfred (U2228930) on Wednesday, 17th November 2010
They also lifted the motorbike (BMW?) factory and continued to produce them combinations for their army. In the 70s, they tried their first venture into selling transport to the UK. Among the first was the Russian made Motorbike Combo's These were as made for the army, complete with the holes drilled to take the machine gun mounting. Sadly being built for Russia, the sidecar was on the wrong side for the English roads. I still say their venture would have had more success if they had sold them complete with machine gun.
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Message 16
Posted by CASSEROLEON (U11049737) on Thursday, 18th November 2010
Linking back to the OP and the knowledge of what was going on in Peenamunde as early as 1939, I think it is important to be aware that from the 1860's scientists had come to think of themselves as members of an international brotherhood on a crusade- many or perhaps even most of them- convinced that they were part of a Crusade that would create a better Future.
And during the Nazi era some of them had become convinced that actually the Nazis were likely to try to exploit their science and technology for evil purposes.. And so it became necessary to match evil with evil.
Another extract from my recent "Work In Progress":
Of course some German scientists saw the danger of the way things were going. Jacob Bronowski tells of his friend Leo Szilard, a Hungarian scientist whose university life was spent in Germany. He left Germany in 1933, when the Nazi take over seemed inevitable, and he set himself to thinking about a remark made that year by Lord Rutherford to the effect that atomic energy would never become real. One day walking to work at Bart's Hospital he "realised that if you hit an atom with one neutron, and it happens to break up and release two, then you would have a chain reaction. He patented the idea in 1934: but wished to keep it a secret. ..But meanwhile war was becoming more and more threatening. The march of progress in nuclear physics and the march of Hitler went step by step, pace by pace, in a way that we forget." (page 369)
Eventually in August 1939 Szilard wrote a letter to President Roosevelt, that was signed by Albert Einstein. "In the course of the last four months it has been made probable -through the work of Joliot in France as well as Fermi and Szilard in America- that it may become possible to set up a nuclear chain reaction in a large mass of uranium by which vast amounts of power ..would be generated...[This]could be achieved in the immediate future..[It] would lead to the construction of bombs, and it is conceivable-though much less certain- that extremely powerful bombs of a new type may thus be constructed." Research being carried out "within the limits of the budgets of university laboratories" should be speeded up. And the letter ends with the sinister information that the Germans have stopped the sale of the uranium produced in the Czech mines they have taken over while the science institute in Berlin was repeating "some of the American work on uranium". (page 371)
Cass -
Message 17
Posted by Mutatis_Mutandis (U8620894) on Thursday, 18th November 2010
"That is because our German scientists are better then your German Scientists."Β
IIRC the remark, which may be apocryphal anyway, was about generals, not scientists.
While the Soviets did capture V-2 technology and produce copies, their lead in rocket science was largely their own doing. The USA relied very much on former German scientists because the pioneering work of Robert Goddard had been ignored and investment in rocket technology had been low. The USSR had more know-how in rocket development, also because of the legacy of the theoretician Tsiolkovsky, and in the 1930s was probably on an equal level with German developments -- the Germans pulled ahead during the war.
But slower US development was partially due to a focus on militarily useful missiles, while the USSR invested in hugely complex and rather impractical designs that were mainly suitable for the prestigious space race. -
Message 18
Posted by CASSEROLEON (U11049737) on Friday, 19th November 2010
Re Pennemunde
I am just reading a 1955 biography of Group Captain Cheshire and it mentions the War Cabinet in 1943 making an attack on Peenemunde a number one priority for Bomber Command because intelligence had picked up the creation of lots of launch sites right along the other side of the Channel in Occupied France.. Peenemunde was seriously damaged by a two wave attack using the two methods of targetting being contested at that time, and it calculates that this delayed the deployment of Vengeance weapons by a year..
But I rather thought that Peenemunde was particularly associated with the V2: and that it was the V1 that was launched from those sites that were detected.. Surely V2 launches were from deeper into Germany... or was that just dictated by the state of the war?
Cass -
Message 19
Posted by Grumpyfred (U2228930) on Friday, 19th November 2010
The V 2s were launched from mobile launchers that could towed and be set up quite quickly, where as the V 1s required a fixed site and therefore could be destroyed. as the allies advanced, so the V2 launchers pulled back into Germany. They had a max range so at first their targets were the south coast and London, Later it was Antwerp. I remember reading that there was only one aircraft on V2 attack. A Spitfire attacked the launcher, and as it did, the V2 rocket launched, and the pilot switched his attack to the rocket as it lifted off.
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Message 20
Posted by CASSEROLEON (U11049737) on Friday, 19th November 2010
Thanks Grumpyfred
That rings a bell
Cass -
Message 21
Posted by dmatt47 (U13073434) on Friday, 19th November 2010
There were a number of V2 launches from near The Hague which the Allies tried to destroy in March 1945. Unfortunately one set of bombs ended up killing many Dutch civilians and making many more civilians homeless. This led to an official complaint by the Dutch Government in Exile in London to Winston Churchill and an apology in Parliament and is regarded as one of the worst errors (if not the worst) of the war.
You may recall that Raymond Baxter (ex Tomorrow's World) took a pot-shot across the bows of a rising V2 whilst on patrol in his Spitfire. -
Message 22
Posted by CASSEROLEON (U11049737) on Friday, 19th November 2010
dmatt47
That does not surprise me in the light of the section that I am just reading that has a great deal to do with the various ideas about bomb-aiming, and the devices like the "Oboe" Mosquito that guided Cheshire to a Ski-site. Cheshire under orders to bomb from altitude wiped out the place marked. But photo reconaissance showed that the mark had been 100 yards or so away from the ramp.
The Pathfinders proved quite effective for area bombing but not for taking out specific targets like launchers.
Cass -
Message 23
Posted by MB (U177470) on Saturday, 20th November 2010
The RAF used the BIG BEN system to identify V2 launch points from Chain Βι¶ΉΤΌΕΔ radar stations. An operator would see a launch, set a cine camera filming the track and shout "Big Ben". The films was quickly developed and the track calculated to find the launch point but even doing this at speed would result in bombing somewhere the launch vehicles had left. I think one resulted in Dutch casualties so it was decided that it was not practical to attack V2 launch sites and they concentrated on attacking the production, distribution and storage of the rockets and fuel.
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Message 24
Posted by CASSEROLEON (U11049737) on Saturday, 20th November 2010
Continuing my reading- large reinforced concrete silos were detected in Northern France.. These were thought to be for the V3 a rocket gun --and were destroyed by Cheshire's 617 Squadron by pin-point bombing...
When I drive along the motorway towards Calais these days I always pass a picture-sign indicating a tourist feature- a rocket in a silo.. So perhaps they were in fact intended for V2s.
Cass -
Message 25
Posted by RedGuzzi750 (U7604797) on Saturday, 20th November 2010
"Red Star In Orbit" by James E Oberg and "The Space Race" by somebody else give a good acount of the early years or the Soviet programme. Certainly SOME German scientists worked for them for a little while, but IIRC it was in parallel with the Soviet teams, and quite soon Korolev and his team had outstripped them by a huge amount..... Korolev & Glushko were indeed equal to anyone in the field, and in little need of help...just roubles and labour and land. And freedom, in Sergei Pavlovich's case......
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