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Hitler’s Terror Weapons
The Price of Vengeance
Roy Irons
This book is dedicated toErica Roe IronsandRebecca Ann Irons
Contents
Part I. Development and Dreams
Part III. Fear and Intelligence
6. Terror, Strategy and a Poison Cloud
9. Attack from Airless Space – The final Preparations
Part V. Evaluation and Hindsight
14. Hitler’s War and the Terror Weapons
15. Germany’s War and the Terror Weapons
2. ‘The Hubertus Train, the live whip of the German Armament Industry’
4. Four Allied Analyses of the flying Bomb
On June 16 1944 Joseph Goebbel’s Propaganda Ministry sent out a directive to the German press announcing that the first attacks on London with weapons ‘of a new sort’ would take place that night. It was to be the ‘event of the day’ for the following morning’s front pages. Eight days later the press was told that the weapon would be called the ‘V 1’, the ‘V standing for Vergeltung or vengeance. Thus did the German public learn of what soon became the V-weapons campaign.
Ever since the onset of heavy bombing on German cities in 1942 Adolf Hitler had sought some form of terrible retaliation that would force the British and Americans to stop. In the winter of 1943–4 the German Air Force launched the so-called ‘Baby Blitz’ on London, but there were too few bomber aircraft to achieve anything of significance against well-organised air and passive defences. Instead Hitler threw his dictatorial weight behind the development of long-range missiles, first the V-1 flying bomb, then the V-2 rocket. Plans were developed to produce them in vast numbers using simple work methods and slave labour supplied by Heinrich Himmler’s concentration camps. Some evidence suggests that Himmler was planning to fill the warheads with radioactive waste, but this came to nothing. Instead each missile became an expensive way of transporting modest quantities of conventional high explosives.
The story of the German V-weapons has two sides to it. The British were aware that German scientists were pioneering weapons at the cutting edge of modern military technology. They imagined the worst, and prepared for a new apocalypse, just as they had done in the 1930s in anticipation of German conventional bombing. Until now little has been written about just what the British did to understand,
