David Irving The Mare’s Nest The War Against Hitler’s Secret ‘Vengeance’ Weapons [UNCORRECTED PROOF, UPLOADED 29.3.01] “Lord Cherwell still felt that at the end of the war when we knew the full story, we should find that the rocket was a mare’s nest.” Defence Committee (Operations) 25 October 1943 F FOCAL POINT Panther Books Granada Publishing Ltd. Grafton Street, London WX LA This revised edition published by Panther Books First published in Great Britain by William Kimber and Co. Limited Copyright © William Kimber and Co. Limited Copyright © David Irving , Electronic edition © Focal Point Publications ISBN --- All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publishers. This book is sold subject to the conditions that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser. David Irving is a military historian who has written a number of highly original books about the Second World War, including the controversial Hitler’s War and The Destruction of Dresden and The Destruction of Con- voy PQ. This revised edition of The Mare’s Nest includes a hitherto un- published chapter. “David Irving is the forensic pathologist of modern military history. He dissects, analyses and describes with an unflinching, unsqueamish surgical skill. His knife exposes the tumours, the cancers and horrors of war. The reader becomes a spectator in an operating theatre. Coolly de- tached himself, Mr. Irving spares him nothing.” The Economist Contents Acknowledgements 7 Prologue 9 Introduction 13 Programmes of Revenge 16 The Intelligence Attack 32 Operation Hydra 84 The Bodyline Investigation 122 The Rocket in Eclipse 146 Retribution 186 The A4 Ascendant 214 Account Due 244 Appendix 257 Index 258 The author of this work was given access to official documents; he alone is responsible for the statements made, for the conclusions drawn and for the views expressed in this work. In accordance with established practice in these circumstances he was not permitted to identify official documents of which he made use. 6 David Irving The Mare’s Nest 7 Acknowledgements No book of this nature would be possible without the unselfish co-opera- tion of several hundreds of people who, having participated in the events portrayed, are able to assist in establishing the circumstances, successes and failures of the Allied Intelligence attack on German secret weapons in the Second World War. It is not possible to give all their names: many have asked that their names should not be recorded in these pages, and others I am not at liberty to identify – the brave army of Allied agents who channelled back to London the raw material upon which that Intelligence attack was based. My greatest thanks are due to Sir Donald MacDougall for allowing me access to certain records of which he is the trustee, and to Professor R. V. Jones for adding a large part of the unknown details of this story. Sir Alwyn Crow, Sir William Cook, the Earl of Birkenhead, Marshal of the RAF Sir Arthur Harris, Air Marshal Sir Robert Saundby, Sir Frank Whittle, Air Commodore J. S. Searby, DSO, DFC, Colonel T. R. B. Sanders, Dr. Barnes Wallis, Mr. G. J. Gollin, Brigadier Charles Lindemann, Mrs. I. H. Lubbock, Mr. Jules Lubbock, Mr. P. A. Coldham, Squadron Leader E. J. A. Kenny, Mr. W. R. Merton, Mr. T. A. Stewart, and many others have provided me with material and personal records upon which much of the British side of the story has been based. I wish to express particular thanks to Dr. Albert F. Simpson, Chief of the US Air Force Historical Division, through whose kindness a volume of in- terrogation reports of former Peenemünde scientists was made avail- able to me. A further great volume of material was provided for me by the National Archives in Washington. the library of the Deutsches Museum in Munich, and its director, Profes- sor Klemm, generously provided me with copies of documents held by them, and permitted me to study their unparalleled collection of Peenemünde documents; I wish to record my gratitude to Dipl.-Ing. Ernst Klee, curator of the Peenemünde archives at the Deutsches Museum in Munich. I am indebted to Dr. Wernher von Braun, to Colonel Leo Zanssen, former military commandant of the Peenemünde establishment, and to: Herr Walter Barte; the Landesarchiv Berlin; Herr Eckart von Bonin; Dr. K. Diebner; Herr Horst Diener; Herr Fritz Hahn; Professor Walter Hubatsch; Professor Friedrich Kirschstein; Dr. J. Krinner; General Emil Leeb; Herr Hans Meissner; 8 David Irving Herr F.-K. Müller; Dipl.-Ing. Walter Riedel; Herr Hans Ring; Herr Rudolph Schlidt; Herr Peter Spoden; Dipl.-Ing. Detmar Stahlknecht; Colonel Max Wachtel; Herr Wilhelm Henseler; Colonel Hajo Herrmann; General Kammhuber; the Deutsches Wetterdienst; General Paul Deichmann; and the staff of the West German Staff College, Hamburg-Blankenese, for the assist- ance that all have rendered. I wish to thank Messrs. Collins (London) for permission to reproduce the brief quotations I have used from Sir Arthur Bryant’s Triumph in the West (). I also acknowledge the permission of the Controller of Her Majesty’s Sta- tionery Office to quote from publications and all official records in which the Copyright is vested in the Crown. David Irving The Mare’s Nest 9 Prologue Like all manuscripts based in part on official files, this book was submitted by the author, then aged , to the government for clearance. In July the GCHQ security officer wrote to him: “The new chapter beginning, ‘Just as the analysis of inconsistencies...’ must not appear in any shape or form.” With the official rev- elation of the Ultra secret and the Enigma story in this prohibition no longer applies. ust as the analysis of inconsistencies has led to the most unexpected Jdiscoveries in the field of applied science, so the examination of appar- ently inexplicable contradictions in terms can illuminate history’s more jealously guarded secrets. The genesis of this particular story was a process developed and ap- plied by a consortium of Intelligence officers in an establishment forty- seven miles from London, a process of such secrecy that neither Cabinet Ministers nor Commanders-in-Chief nor even our most gallant Allies could be entrusted with the burden of its knowledge. Three inconsistencies will be found to occur in the story which fol- lows, of which only one is significant; these are the documentary clues which we can best label “the petrol form,” “the radar plots,” and “the bills of lading.” The three clues are to play significant parts in this narrative as they, respectively, established that Peenemünde was genuine and the sec- ond most important research station; identified certain structures in France as flying-bomb catapults; and established the probable existence of , German rockets. Of the three, the alleged existence of the “bills of lading” is the most questionable. Ostensibly, the bills were thrown up like chaff as the grind- ing mechanism of an efficient network of SIS agents meshed momentar- ily with the machinery of Germany’s secret weapon development pro- gramme. In fact, their provenance was rather different. On th November , after Peenemünde had been devastated by RAF Bomber Command, firing trials of the A long-range rocket, operation- ally to be termed V-, were resumed at the SS training ground at Blizna in Poland. Intelligence learned of this in London. In a report to the Cabinet in mid-July , a senior Air Intelligence officer claimed that from cap- tured “bills of lading,” referring to the traffic between Peenemünde and 10 David Irving Blizna, serial numbers of certain objects, shown by photo-reconnaissance of Blizna to be rockets, had been extracted. The serial numbers ranged in part from , to well over ,. This evoked consternation in the Cabinet, as will be seen in a later chap- ter. But what is even more revealing is an analysis of their provenance. The Intelligence officer suggested to the Cabinet that the “bills of lad- ing” had been secured by an SIS agent operating in Poland. This is impos- sible: on th January , the chief of Major-General Walter Dornberger’s rocket transport staff had directed that “in virtue of a special dispensa- tion from the Reich Transport Ministry, no conveyance papers, either military tickets or bills of lading, are to be filled out for A traffic.” This regulation came into force on st February, five days before the trainload of ten A rockets, of which number , was one, emerged from the exit-tunnel of the Nordhausen factory, and several weeks before it was fired at Blizna.* The “bills of lading” do not therefore exist. So what was the Intelligence officer’s true source? Long before the on- set of the war, Intelligence had made strenuous efforts to break into the German ciphers intercepted by the United Kingdom’s radio monitoring organisation. No one underestimated the gains which would derive from successfully cracking the high level ciphers used by the German High Command, while at no time permitting the enemy to become aware of this. “Correct information about the enemy does not by itself win wars,” one Intelligence officer observed. “But it can stave off defeat a very long time, and allow one to strike just when and where it hurts most.” The Germans had by that time developed one particularly reliable ma- chine cipher named Enigma.