- yesterday
Category
📚
LearningTranscript
00:00:00In October 1942, on a remote German island in the Baltic Sea,
00:00:25the first successful launch of a rocket into the stratosphere took place.
00:00:30Originally, all the scientists had wanted to do was go to the moon, but instead they had
00:00:38created Hitler's most advanced weapon of terror.
00:00:42Hitler had the idea that maybe the rockets could help him to win that war.
00:00:50In its last desperate attempt to turn the course of World War II, Nazi Germany unleashed
00:00:55an arsenal of sinister weapons against the Allies.
00:00:58In the next few months, more than 60,000 people would be killed or seriously wounded.
00:01:06One of their children came in to us and said, Mummy hasn't come home.
00:01:11And actually, Mummy never did come home.
00:01:14Following rare archive film and colour re-enactments, Battle Stations enters the world of rocket
00:01:20scientists, secret weapons, and the race to seek and destroy two of Hitler's most elusive
00:01:26and devastating weapons of war.
00:01:41Germany's fascination with rockets and the idea of interplanetary travel dated back to
00:01:46the 1920s, when a wave of rocket fever swept through the country.
00:01:58Germany's army decided to involve itself in rocket research out of its desire to circumvent
00:02:02the harsh terms of the Treaty of Versailles, which Germany was forced to sign after its
00:02:07defeat in World War I.
00:02:10The treaty imposed severe limits on the armaments Germany could produce, but contained a loophole.
00:02:15It made no mention of rockets.
00:02:17To the German army, this meant that rockets, if developed in secrecy, would be a viable weapon.
00:02:25But building rockets was still predominantly done by civilian enthusiasts.
00:02:32Our idea was to carry mail from one place on Earth to another one.
00:02:37Particularly in Germany, we have a lot of small islands in the North Sea, and even in the Baltic
00:02:43Sea.
00:02:44And in bad weather, of course, you couldn't even send the mailman over there.
00:02:47He didn't want to get on a ship and maybe we get stranded.
00:02:51And of course, if you did it by ship, it took you a week to get your mail there.
00:02:56With the rocket, we had figured out already it would take about half an hour.
00:03:00So it was a big advantage.
00:03:07During this period, a brilliant young aristocrat named Werner von Braun became interested in
00:03:12rockets.
00:03:13He'd been obsessed with the idea of space travel ever since his mother had given him
00:03:17a small telescope as a child.
00:03:22Werner von Braun was actively developing his own rocket designs when he approached the German
00:03:27army for funding.
00:03:29They liked his practical ideas and enthusiasm and offered him a job.
00:03:34He was just 20 years old.
00:03:36in 1932, he began working at the army experimental station under the direction of Colonel Walter
00:03:42Dornberger, the man responsible for army rocket development.
00:03:45It was the start of a long association that would last for over 30 years.
00:03:55When Adolf Hitler came to power, he poured money into a massive expansion of the armed forces and
00:04:03granted additional funds for the army to build a new rocket research facility.
00:04:08The location chosen for the new site was Pinamunda, an isolated island on the western edge of the
00:04:14Baltic Sea.
00:04:18In 1936, construction crews began turning the forested island into the most modern research
00:04:24center in the world.
00:04:44Pinamunda was an ideal location for a secret rocket base.
00:04:48Heavily forested, it could hide workshops, power plants and test lands.
00:04:53The whole facility was self-sufficient.
00:04:57My first impression in Pinamunda was that it was a huge enterprise.
00:05:02The area was great on the island.
00:05:05There was a little railroad connecting the different points.
00:05:09There were big hangers, big halls, big laboratories, manufacturing halls, test stands.
00:05:16It was a very great impression.
00:05:20Within three years Pinamunda expanded to include shops and living quarters for the community
00:05:25of 4,000 skilled workers living within its perimeter.
00:05:32A railway brought in another 11,000 employees who lived in nearby towns.
00:05:37The security was very tight and you normally had to stop at the gate and show your pass.
00:05:43And even the people who came with the railroad, they were normally even checked twice.
00:05:47They were checked once when they got on the railroad and they were checked again when
00:05:51they finally entered the main area of the facility.
00:05:55The people working at Pinamunda developed a real sense of community.
00:06:00Its sea and long sandy beaches were ideal for recreation.
00:06:04For 20-year-old mathematician Ruth Kraft, it was a perfect place to work.
00:06:12It was a very attractive location on the Baltic Sea.
00:06:19This was a dream holiday destination for people from middle Germany like myself back in the
00:06:2530s.
00:06:26I soon sensed that the facility was consciously designed as a kind of ghetto for scientists.
00:06:33The German Army's first two experimental rockets, designated the A1 and A2, were very small and basic.
00:06:46But the A3, which was 20 feet in length, was a practical research device.
00:06:53Its purpose was to improve the steering by the use of gyroscopes and to develop the thrust
00:06:58of the motor which would propel the missile through the sound barrier.
00:07:01In 1937, encouraged by the success of the A3, the German High Command issued specifications
00:07:14for a new rocket.
00:07:16The missile should have a 200-mile range, a one-ton warhead and be transportable by railway.
00:07:22Von Braun came up with the A4 design.
00:07:29But before the A4 combat rocket could become a reality, another test model was developed,
00:07:35the A5.
00:07:37On this new model, fins were added to improve stability.
00:07:46Test launches over the Baltic Sea were encouraging.
00:07:50Fenner Von Braun, seen here helping to recover a rocket, was to use the A5 as the standard test
00:07:57model until the A4 could be completed.
00:08:02But on the outbreak of war in September 1939, Hitler reduced funding for long-term rocket research.
00:08:13Hitler had initially not assigned high priority to rocket work.
00:08:17He figured that maybe in a way he was right.
00:08:20He figured that it would take longer than, in his opinion, the war would last.
00:08:25Hitler had been present at one of the early rocket tests and was not impressed.
00:08:31Most people who saw a rocket firing with a lot of noise and a big flame coming out of your
00:08:37rocket engine were really quite impressed.
00:08:40But Hitler just shook his head, turned around and walked away without saying anything.
00:08:45And, of course, Dornberger and Von Braun were quite disappointed.
00:08:49But Werner Von Braun had faith in what was happening at Pinamunde.
00:08:53Given more time, a bigger and more powerful missile would be within his grasp.
00:08:58He feared, however, that time was running out.
00:09:03And without Hitler's support, long-range rocket development in Germany would come to an end.
00:09:13The development of secret weapons at Pinamunde had once again become a priority for Adolf Hitler.
00:09:22Two years of war had stretched his forces to the limit.
00:09:26By late 1941, Hitler ordered Werner Von Braun, Germany's top rocket scientist,
00:09:32to go ahead with production of the A-4, the world's first long-range combat rocket.
00:09:40Although Werner Von Braun was the technical director of the A-4 project,
00:09:44the logistics for its production fell to Walter Dornberger, Pinamunde's military chief.
00:09:49The friendship and common aim of the two men would prove vital to the project.
00:09:54Along with Dornberger, Von Braun had assembled a team of brilliant scientists and engineers to produce the A-4 rocket.
00:10:04Augusta Friede was Von Braun's secretary in those early years.
00:10:09Dr. Von Braun was very relaxed, never strict, or the way one imagines a boss to be.
00:10:19In the evenings, we would write down all the results of the tests.
00:10:22We were enthusiastic about the idea and how to put it into effect.
00:10:26We never really thought of it as a weapon. It was always a research project.
00:10:31Werner Von Braun worked tirelessly on the many technical problems of his design.
00:10:41Dr. Von Braun was obsessed with his idea.
00:10:45Otherwise, he would not have been able to inspire his colleagues the way he did,
00:10:49and they wouldn't have been so devoted to him.
00:10:52He also drew the right people closer to him,
00:10:55and they really worked hard to continue his line of thought.
00:11:00It was always most impressive to listen to him.
00:11:10He was an excellent speaker.
00:11:12He could formulate his ideas very beautifully and convincingly.
00:11:17Von Braun was extremely patient to tell and explain his standpoint,
00:11:21and to listen to the other one, and to bring forth his arguments,
00:11:26not with overwhelming power or with authority also, but just with technical reason and logic.
00:11:36The A4 would travel at roughly four times the speed of sound, a velocity unheard of at the time.
00:11:42The aerodynamics of the weapon were a critical factor in the early stages.
00:11:48We had a big wind tunnel at Peenemünde, and we had wind tunnel measurements at various Mach numbers,
00:11:58from subsonic to Mach 5, roughly.
00:12:02We were trying to build a supersonic airplane, and that's not that easy.
00:12:08That was when I understood what it means to design and develop a projectile that can go beyond the Mach number,
00:12:18that is supersonic speed.
00:12:20I realized something special was going on there, or something special was being developed.
00:12:32This early filmed diagram shows the technical achievements of the A4.
00:12:37The rocket is driven by the reaction of a jet of high-speed gases,
00:12:41produced from the combustion of nine tons of liquid oxygen and alcohol in the space of 60 seconds.
00:12:53The man responsible for this revolutionary breakthrough in the rocket motor was Dr. Walter Thiel.
00:12:59Walter Thiel was in a way parallel to Von Braun.
00:13:02He was reporting to Von Braun, so Von Braun was definitely the overall boss,
00:13:06but Thiel had pretty much his own field.
00:13:10He was not really a designer, he was in fact a chemical engineer himself,
00:13:14but he was in charge of the development of the rocket engine.
00:13:21The capacity of one fuel tank was four and a half tons of liquid oxygen.
00:13:26Keeping the fuel tanks empty until the launch made the A4 easier to transport.
00:13:31Located above the fuel tanks were two gyroscopes which controlled the rocket.
00:13:37These operated the large graphite vanes placed behind the jet
00:13:41to deflect the exhaust gases and so steer the rocket.
00:13:48The first assembled A4 was finally ready for testing by March 1942.
00:13:53It was a spectacular failure.
00:14:08When another test failed, the A4 critics in Berlin wanted the project cancelled.
00:14:13It was costing billions of marks with nothing to show for it.
00:14:17Von Braun was worried.
00:14:21When the tests failed, he came into his office.
00:14:25Although he was very angry, he kept it to himself.
00:14:29It was terrible for him because each time it was a setback,
00:14:33and he couldn't make any progress.
00:14:38The second launch failed at about that point.
00:14:42So again, many people said, we told you so, you just can't make it.
00:14:46And then fortunately with the third one, which was really the last one which had been permitted by Hitler.
00:14:53Hitler wanted to cancel the whole operation.
00:14:56And he insisted you at least have to show us in one good launch that you can make it,
00:15:01that you can obtain a reasonable distance with your missile.
00:15:05On October the 23rd, 1942, an improved A4 was fired.
00:15:19Once the 25-ton engine thrust kicked in, the rocket accelerated skyward,
00:15:24breaking through the sound barrier in 40 seconds.
00:15:28Von Braun had made his first major breakthrough.
00:15:32After a very successful launch and a big party we had, everyone was drunk.
00:15:39This is the first time that a human-built article has used a part of outer space
00:15:45to get from one place on Earth to another place on Earth.
00:15:49And so that's for me really the beginning of the space age.
00:15:54But the work at Pinamunda was far from over.
00:15:57Another secret weapon was now being developed
00:16:00that would be the prototype of the modern cruise-bazaar.
00:16:09While rocket scientist Werner von Braun was developing
00:16:11the world's first space rocket at Pinamunda for the German army,
00:16:15the Luftwaffe was planning its own secret weapon.
00:16:18By spring 1942, the war was going badly for the Luftwaffe.
00:16:33Having failed to win the Battle of Britain,
00:16:35its commander-in-chief Hermann Göring had lost credibility with Hitler.
00:16:39The second in command of the Luftwaffe was Erhard Milch,
00:16:49a ruthless and ambitious man who before the war had built Lufthansa,
00:16:53Germany's national airline, into one of the world's finest.
00:16:57Hitler liked Milch.
00:16:59The fact that he had a Jewish father did not matter.
00:17:02Milch was determined to restore the Luftwaffe in Hitler's eyes
00:17:06and proposed a new weapon, a flying bomb.
00:17:09Milch maintained that unmanned flying bombs
00:17:14offered numerous advantages over conventional bombing.
00:17:17They were cost effective, had large payloads,
00:17:21and there was no risk to aircrew.
00:17:23Unlike the rocket, which was taking years to develop,
00:17:29the Luftwaffe wanted a quick solution
00:17:32and decided to adopt the pulse jet engine for its flying bomb,
00:17:35now designated the Fi-103.
00:17:38The early designs showed that the pulse jet
00:17:42was in fact a primitive jet engine
00:17:44that worked on the principle of forcing air through a narrow tube.
00:17:48The Fi-103 was launched by placing it on a sled,
00:17:54mounted on steel rails on top of a long ramp,
00:17:57similar to a ski ramp.
00:18:01A rocket booster then catapulted the flying bomb
00:18:03several hundred miles per hour in a matter of seconds.
00:18:09The Luftwaffe tested the Fi-103 at Pinamunde,
00:18:13although this was kept totally separate from the Army's rocket tests.
00:18:17The first flying bomb only flew for 60 seconds
00:18:21and subsequent launches failed miserably.
00:18:28But Hitler saw enough potential in the weapon
00:18:30to let development continue.
00:18:32The Fi-103 was in fact the prototype
00:18:35of the modern cruise missile.
00:18:43Some new photos here, sir.
00:18:45The activities on Pinamunde also began to attract
00:18:48the attention of the Allies,
00:18:50especially British intelligence.
00:18:53The British knew the Germans had been working
00:18:55on secret weapons even before the war,
00:18:57but never knew the type of weapons they were.
00:19:01But by 1943,
00:19:03enough intelligence had been gathered
00:19:04for Prime Minister Winston Churchill
00:19:06to take the threat seriously.
00:19:08He established a committee codenamed Crossbow
00:19:11to review all the evidence of German long-range weapons.
00:19:17Top secret reports compiled by British intelligence
00:19:20were taken by special courier to the Cabinet war rooms
00:19:23deep underground in London,
00:19:25where the Crossbow Committee met.
00:19:27The committee was headed by Duncan Sands,
00:19:31a politician and Churchill's son-in-law.
00:19:35The other leading figure was Lord Cherwell,
00:19:37the British government's scientific advisor
00:19:39who strongly argued that the Germans were not capable
00:19:42of building a rocket which would pose a threat to the country.
00:19:45In simple terms,
00:19:50Cherwell believed the solid-fuel rocket
00:19:52would be too large to be a practical proposition
00:19:55and that any alternative,
00:19:57particularly the use of liquid fuel,
00:19:59was beyond the technology of the time.
00:20:04Sands did not agree.
00:20:06Cherwell insisted that talk of a rocket was a hoax
00:20:09to conceal some other weapon, possibly a flying bomb.
00:20:15Sands, always the shrewd politician,
00:20:18believed the Germans probably had both a rocket and flying bomb
00:20:22and immediately ordered an increase
00:20:24in aerial reconnaissance missions.
00:20:29A great deal of the evidence
00:20:31for the German long-range weapons
00:20:33had so far been obtained by photographic reconnaissance.
00:20:39Looking for secret weapons was a new field
00:20:41for the photographic interpreters
00:20:43who had been trained to look
00:20:44for conventional military hardware and movement.
00:20:49You always checked in case
00:20:51there was something there that wasn't there before.
00:20:54And that's when you found,
00:20:56oh, there's a new road there
00:20:58or there's a new building there.
00:21:00What's that?
00:21:01So you get out the old cover and look that up.
00:21:03No building.
00:21:04So what are they putting up there?
00:21:06It just worked from checking over and over again.
00:21:13The breakthrough came when interpreters
00:21:15found a small pilotless aircraft
00:21:17sitting on the end of a firing ramp at Pinamunde.
00:21:20A possible flying bomb.
00:21:23Then on June the 23rd, 1943,
00:21:30another sortie produced a photograph
00:21:33where a rocket could clearly be seen.
00:21:38The British were stunned.
00:21:40It was now obvious
00:21:42the Germans were planning a rocket attack on Britain.
00:21:45Duncan Sands immediately requested
00:21:47a massive bombing raid on Pinamunde.
00:21:50On the night of August the 17th, 1943,
00:21:57the Royal Air Force amassed 500 heavy bombers
00:22:02to attack Pinamunde.
00:22:04Their mission was not simply to destroy the base
00:22:07but to kill the scientists
00:22:09and key people whose work threatened England.
00:22:11The raid was launched in complete secrecy.
00:22:14The true nature of the target
00:22:16was not revealed even to the RAF bomber crews.
00:22:20The inhabitants of Pinamunde
00:22:22were used to hearing enemy bombers
00:22:24fly over on their way to bomb Berlin.
00:22:31We did not take any notice of the sirens wailing.
00:22:34We did not even get out of bed for that
00:22:36because we were used to reconnaissance planes in the air
00:22:39but we always thought they would not see us.
00:22:45High explosive and incendiary bombs began falling.
00:22:48Pinamunde was caught unprepared
00:22:50and soon became a sea of flames.
00:22:56And that particular night,
00:22:57I remember that very well.
00:22:58We went into the ditches and lie down
00:23:01and the bombs came.
00:23:03There were a number of hits by bombs in buildings
00:23:06and fires began to burn.
00:23:09It was a very gasty situation.
00:23:17Due to the phosphorus and the air pressure from the bombs,
00:23:21everything including the debris, the sand, pine needles
00:23:25were flying around.
00:23:28And then we saw all the bodies lying there, torn to pieces.
00:23:40A total of 735 people were killed,
00:23:44including many scientists,
00:23:45among them the man responsible for the A4 motor,
00:23:48Dr. Thiel.
00:23:50Thiel's family, his entire family was completely wiped out.
00:23:55And there were, of course,
00:23:56a number of other key people,
00:23:57but Thiel was probably the most important man.
00:24:01And in that sense,
00:24:02probably the air raid obtained its objective
00:24:06to kill the German workers
00:24:08so that the work could not continue in Pinamunde.
00:24:13The raid had severely damaged Pinamunde
00:24:15and set the A4 project back by several critical months.
00:24:20It also prompted the Germans
00:24:21to shift some of their experimental activities
00:24:23to an SS artillery range
00:24:25near the village of Blitzna in Poland,
00:24:28beyond the range of Allied bombers.
00:24:32Despite the setback to the A4 rocket,
00:24:34Hitler's other terror weapon,
00:24:36the deadly flying bomb,
00:24:38was at last ready to be unleashed against the Allies.
00:24:41Although the devastating RAF raid on the German base at Pinamunde
00:24:51was a serious setback to German rocket development,
00:24:54it had not affected Hitler's new flying bomb.
00:24:58By 1944, these terror weapons
00:25:00were now being secretly transported to their launch sites.
00:25:04A series of aerial reconnaissance missions by the Allies
00:25:11along the French and Belgian coast
00:25:13had identified a number of possible launch sites
00:25:16for long-range weapons against Britain.
00:25:23Gradually, one was able to build up
00:25:25that there was something going on.
00:25:27So then we managed to plot the whole of that coastline.
00:25:31There must have been over 100 sites
00:25:33and alarm bells rang
00:25:35because it was much bigger than anybody expected.
00:25:39And all the sites were pointing to London.
00:25:45On June the 13th, 1944,
00:25:47exactly one week after the Allied invasion of Europe had begun,
00:25:51the first German flying bomb
00:25:53was launched across the English Channel.
00:25:56It landed in the east end of London
00:25:58where it killed six people.
00:26:03Nazi propaganda minister, Josef Goebbels,
00:26:06announced to the world that
00:26:07Wergel Tungsweifer 1,
00:26:09Vengeance Weapon 1,
00:26:11had been used in retaliation
00:26:12for the Allied invasion of Normandy.
00:26:15The weapon was now known as the V-1.
00:26:21Over 3,000 V-1s would be launched against London
00:26:24in the next few weeks.
00:26:36The British knew little about the V-1.
00:26:38The blind, impersonal nature of the flying bombs
00:26:41made people on the ground feel helpless.
00:26:43There was no human enemy to shoot down.
00:26:46We did know they were coming
00:26:48because they made a very distinctive sound
00:26:50and it was a sort of vroom, vroom, vroom, vroom, vroom.
00:26:53And then suddenly it would stop
00:26:55and you'd just dive for cover wherever you were.
00:26:59There was this terrible silence.
00:27:01It just seemed like the whole world stopped.
00:27:08The V-1s were launched day and night,
00:27:11the one-ton warhead of high explosives
00:27:13causing enormous damage in built-up areas.
00:27:15Cyril Demarn was a chief fire officer at the time.
00:27:27I was on many a job within minutes
00:27:30before the smoke had gone down.
00:27:32It was horrific, really.
00:27:34And you'd have people, members of the family,
00:27:38or possibly neighbours and people they knew
00:27:41seeing dismembered bodies laying all over the street.
00:27:44And there were scenes of terrible distress.
00:27:49I saw so much of it that I hardened myself.
00:27:55You know, I couldn't afford to be emotional about it,
00:27:59otherwise I wouldn't have been doing my job.
00:28:03Nobody escaped the effects of the indiscriminate bombing,
00:28:06although London schoolboys like Tony Maas
00:28:08felt it was an adventure.
00:28:10I suppose I didn't fully sense the danger,
00:28:12being only about 13 years of age.
00:28:15We got used to them.
00:28:16We even used to go out into the garden
00:28:18and watch these noisy things go over.
00:28:20They sounded like a motorcycle going across the sky.
00:28:23And eventually, of course, they became known as flying bombs
00:28:26and then buzz bombs, and then people nicknamed them the Doodlebug.
00:28:33The British authorities were stunned
00:28:35by the magnitude of the bombardment.
00:28:37It had been difficult to plan
00:28:39how best to defend London against the V-1
00:28:41without knowing the precise nature of the weapon.
00:28:48The main defences were based on dealing
00:28:50with conventional bombers.
00:28:52Huge gas-filled barrage balloons were erected.
00:28:55Their thick cables were designed to rip the wings
00:28:58off any flying machine that flew into them.
00:29:00They eventually accounted for 232 flying bombs.
00:29:08The anti-aircraft guns found it difficult
00:29:10to stop the smaller, low-flying V-1s.
00:29:13The British soon realised the best way to combat the V-1
00:29:23was to concentrate their guns
00:29:24and destroy the flying bombs long before they reached London.
00:29:30Two new American defence weapons were also introduced.
00:29:33A radar system which plotted the course of the flying bombs,
00:29:36giving the gun crews more accuracy,
00:29:38and a new close proximity fuse in the gun shells,
00:29:42which exploded when it was within range of the target,
00:29:45turning a near miss into a hit.
00:29:47The new strategy worked,
00:30:12and V-1s were being shot out of the sky at an increasing rate.
00:30:15The Royal Air Force also had considerable success
00:30:21shooting down V-1s.
00:30:23They deployed specially adapted Spitfires
00:30:25and the Hawker Tempest, their fastest fighter.
00:30:28However, because of its speed and size,
00:30:30the V-1 was a difficult target.
00:30:33If you saw a flying bomb coming towards you,
00:30:39it was no good to say,
00:30:40oh, I'll get in behind it and shoot it down,
00:30:43because, in fact, you would never have caught it in that way.
00:30:47We had to have an entirely different technique
00:30:49of getting up above them,
00:30:50then diving with an aileron turn,
00:30:53so that we dived virtually on top of them
00:30:56and then flattened out behind them,
00:30:59and then you were in a position to shoot it down.
00:31:04If you got directly behind it,
00:31:05you had the heat haze from the jet,
00:31:08and all you could see was a couple of wing tips.
00:31:10But you'd pull up, pull into about four or five hundred yards
00:31:14and give it a burst.
00:31:30If an aircraft ran out of ammunition,
00:31:32some pilots adopted the highly dangerous tactic
00:31:34of tipping the wings of the V-1 to send it off course.
00:31:40I put my port wing underneath the starboard wing
00:31:43of the flying bomb,
00:31:44and I'm afraid that that didn't work.
00:31:46It just skidded away from me,
00:31:48and I thought, well, this is no good.
00:31:50So, a change of technique.
00:31:53Next time, I put my wing under
00:31:56and then immediately flicked my stick over,
00:31:59and the thing just catapulted into the ground
00:32:01into a wood just in the ground.
00:32:03It's just outside Sevenoaks.
00:32:08By the end of August,
00:32:09only one bomb in seven got through to the London area.
00:32:12It looked as if the V-1 had been mastered.
00:32:27Of the 8,000 V-1s that were launched against London,
00:32:312,400 reached their target.
00:32:34The price of Hitler's terror weapon was high.
00:32:37A total of 24,000 civilians were killed or seriously injured.
00:32:42Three quarters of a million houses were damaged.
00:32:48Although the V-1 campaign had failed,
00:32:50a second threat to England now drew near.
00:32:53A silent, deadly missile was about to be hurled at London.
00:33:01By 1944, German rocket scientist Werner von Braun and his team
00:33:05had made great strides in rocket technology
00:33:07since their first successful launch of the A-4 two years earlier.
00:33:11Yet problems with the A-4's propulsion system meant
00:33:17von Braun was still unable to give Hitler
00:33:20a fully operational combat rocket.
00:33:22In July, the A-4 project came under the control of Heinrich Himmler,
00:33:33head of the notorious SS
00:33:35and the second most powerful Nazi in Germany.
00:33:41Von Braun had repeatedly told Himmler
00:33:43the A-4 was not ready to use.
00:33:45But Himmler had convinced Hitler
00:33:47that the scientists were being far too cautious
00:33:49in firing Germany's new secret weapon.
00:33:56It was not yet fully reliable
00:33:58and it was always a particular effort on von Braun's part
00:34:02to convince Himmler particularly
00:34:04that our rocket is not yet accurate enough
00:34:07and not yet reliable enough
00:34:09to be used as a real good and successful weapon.
00:34:14When Hitler finally decided to really use it
00:34:16as a weapon and to eventually call it the V-2,
00:34:21it was not completely developed.
00:34:23So we should have had an extra two or three years
00:34:26to do final developments
00:34:28and then the V-2 would have been able
00:34:30to have really a very accurate,
00:34:32a pinpoint missile
00:34:35which can pick out a building
00:34:38in a city complex or ship at sea.
00:34:41After the RAF had bombed the original rocket testing site
00:34:46at Pina Munda in August 1943,
00:34:49tests of the A-4 were also being carried out
00:34:51at an artillery range at Blizna in Poland.
00:34:54The Polish resistance had been keeping a vigilant watch
00:35:03on the activities at Blizna
00:35:05when during a test flight
00:35:07an A-4 fell from the sky
00:35:09landing on the banks of the river Bug without exploding.
00:35:13The Poles found the rocket
00:35:15and before the German recovery team arrived
00:35:17managed to hide it by rolling it into the water.
00:35:19The Germans, unable to locate the A-4, gave up the search.
00:35:26Working under constant threat of discovery,
00:35:28Polish engineers supervised the dismantling of the missile
00:35:31before contacting British intelligence.
00:35:35The British desperately needed technical information
00:35:38about the mysterious A-4.
00:35:40and on July the 25th an RAF Dakota landed on a little-used airfield
00:35:48in Poland to collect the components of the stolen rocket
00:35:51and take them back to London.
00:35:57This vital new evidence confirmed the destructive potential
00:36:00of the Nazis' long-range rocket.
00:36:02Churchill was deeply worried.
00:36:05With the V-1 campaign still raging over London
00:36:09he decided to keep news of the new deadly weapon
00:36:12from the general public.
00:36:14With luck, the launch sites could be hunted down
00:36:17and destroyed before they could be used.
00:36:24With the collapse of the German forces in France
00:36:26the Allies would soon reach the borders of the Reich itself.
00:36:30Hitler hoped to counter this threat
00:36:32by unleashing his new secret weapon
00:36:35and on August the 29th he ordered the A-4 offensive to begin.
00:36:43The German army moved its A-4 launch crews to the Hague in Holland
00:36:47which was 200 miles from London, just within the missile's range.
00:36:53The Germans figured the Allies would be reluctant to bomb
00:36:55the Dutch capital known as the City of Peace.
00:36:58The mobile launchers were hidden in the surrounding woods
00:37:03and then driven out into the open for firing.
00:37:09On September the 8th, 1944,
00:37:11the first A-4 was launched against London.
00:37:15It reached a height of about 50 miles
00:37:17before falling at 3,000 miles per hour on its target.
00:37:20The whole flight took no more than five minutes.
00:37:23There was no warning.
00:37:25It came over and came down faster than the speed of sound
00:37:30so that you heard the explosion from the bomb
00:37:33and then heard it come in a second or two afterwards.
00:37:36And it used to sound rather like a tube train coming into a station.
00:37:40The Nazi propaganda machine quickly dubbed the A-4 the V-2,
00:37:47Vengeance Weapon 2.
00:37:49What made the V-2 unique among the weapons of World War II
00:37:53was the fact that it could not be intercepted.
00:37:55There was no defence against the rocket once it was in the air.
00:38:06Sixty days after the offensive began,
00:38:08the local Woolworths in Deptford, East London,
00:38:11was crowded with shoppers, mostly women and children,
00:38:14when a V-2 hit the storm.
00:38:25My school actually was more or less on the corner opposite
00:38:29where the bomb had gone off.
00:38:31It was a very devastating thing.
00:38:36We knew lots of the women that were in the shop.
00:38:39They were neighbours.
00:38:41And I can remember one of their children came in to us
00:38:49and said, Mummy hasn't come home.
00:38:51And actually, Mummy never did come home.
00:38:53We didn't know at the time, but it turned out to have been the biggest V-2 disaster in Britain.
00:39:04The shoppers never had a chance.
00:39:07240 of them were killed or seriously injured.
00:39:11In all, 1,100 V-2s struck England, causing over 9,000 casualties.
00:39:18Destruction of property was massive.
00:39:20In London alone, half a million houses were destroyed.
00:39:30As the final months of the war drew to a close,
00:39:33the Germans, who had stockpiled thousands of both the deadly V-1s and V-2s,
00:39:38continued launching their V-weapons.
00:39:41When the launch sites in France and Belgium were overrun by the Allied armies,
00:39:45the Luftwaffe began using bombers to launch V-1s.
00:39:48Over 1,000 were fired in this way.
00:39:58Hitler also launched a V-weapon campaign of terror against the Belgian city of Antwerp,
00:40:04in a desperate bid to stop its port being used by the Allies.
00:40:079,000 V-1s and 1,600 V-2s were fired on the city, causing 10,000 casualties.
00:40:17But time had run out for Hitler.
00:40:20The Allied forces were already advancing into the heart of the Third Reich.
00:40:24Yet both the V-1 and V-2 continued to be launched until six weeks before the war's end, on May the 8th, 1945.
00:40:38Although the V-weapons did not win the war for Hitler, they did have an immense effect on Allied resources.
00:40:44They forced the Allies to divert thousands of aircraft, 2,700 guns and a quarter of a million troops from frontline duties.
00:40:54After the war, conflicting opinions rose as to how effective the V-weapons had been to the German war effort.
00:41:04General Eisenhower, the Supreme Allied Commander, remarked that if Hitler had succeeded in using the V-weapons against English ports, instead of London, the invasion of Normandy might have been written off.
00:41:17On the other hand, Albert Speer, the German Minister of Supply, thought the V-2 had done the Germans more harm than the Allies, as the quantity of highly skilled men and scarce raw materials could have produced a large number of jet fighters which would have been decisive in the air war.
00:41:39With the war's end, there was a frantic race between the victors to capture as much information on the V-weapons as they could.
00:41:48The Americans took the V-1, renaming it the JB-2, which they planned to launch against Japan.
00:41:55One hundred V-2s and tons of spare parts were also seized and transported back to the United States.
00:42:07But the victors also wanted the scientists.
00:42:10Werner von Braun made a conscious decision to offer his services to the Americans, and on May the 2nd, he surrendered to the American army.
00:42:22Von Braun and his team of 118 German scientists and engineers went to work for the Americans at the White Sands Proving Grounds in New Mexico, developing guided missiles.
00:42:34Due to their new allegiance, it was considered unwise for them to take pride in the A-4 weapons system, which had been used as a means of terror against Allied civilians.
00:42:44In America, Werner von Braun's leadership qualities again shone through, and he was able to return to his original dream of putting men on the moon.
00:42:57He was a genius as an engineer, as an organizer, as a project planner, as a leader, as a person who could convince others of his ideas.
00:43:12I think with Werner von Braun, we would not have the space corps that we have today, we certainly would not have been on the moon, and we probably would not have an international space station going around the earth today.
00:43:34Werner von Braun had begun his career with the top secret rocket.
00:43:37But his dream was realized when, in 1969, the Apollo spacecraft landed men on the moon.
00:43:44It was just 27 years after the first successful launch of the A-4 at Pina Munda.
00:44:07When he came in the moon, he was talented members of the Moon.
00:44:09He was 7 years after the Moon's moon statue of a size ownedدheit.
00:44:10On the moon was only one big Smoke in the Shiite Empire.
00:44:11I was half rated back, Mark Learnwood, as a star tiếng-pedalINS fold- supplements do since Earth.
00:44:12Then Jeep met him on the moon on the moon.
00:44:13So we were really small andprochen and consistently, insane gymnastics, but he kept its speed by feet.
00:44:16We created an outstanding sale since mobile technology, allowing a meals상 that came out of opportunity to struggle to load it.
00:44:17AK470 IV.
00:44:18In any future of이고, during the third.
00:44:20He also decided to find a person who knew how you see that this panel was maximally accessible and the resisting power.
00:44:23While the team was in enter.
00:44:25After touching and moving like the sunset…
00:44:26The following app took place is almost pure light.
00:44:57In 1943, I was on the staff of the Chief Regional Fire Officer for London at Lambeth, Lambeth Headquarters, and the Chief Regional Fire Officer, Mr. Frederick Delft, later Sir Frederick, began by saying,
00:45:15you've been reading this story about Hitler's latest secret weapon, because he had secret weapons pretty well all through the war.
00:45:24And he said, well, it's no joke. The papers tended to make it a bit of a joke.
00:45:29He said, we know, in fact, that it's a pilotless aircraft, which has got a 10-tonne warhead, and it's directed and it's expected to be aimed at London in large numbers.
00:45:50The first one I saw was in Ilford, because I was stationed in Ilford, and it came across the sky in the early hours of the morning.
00:46:00There was a blackout, of course, which was very intense, and the first thing we saw was a glow.
00:46:09I read his glow, quite a light like a fireball, coming towards us, and there was a terrific noise.
00:46:16Like, I can only liken it to half a dozen motorbikes without exhausts running at top speed, to give you an idea of what it was like.
00:46:28It was a tremendous racket, and it came roaring towards us, flying moderately high.
00:46:36They normally flied at about between 3,000 and 4,000 feet, and this one would be about that, I guess.
00:46:43And I thought, first of all, wasn't used to these, the flying bombs, I thought it was an aircraft, German aircraft, which had been set on fire by the RAF when it was about to crash.
00:47:01But this row, I thought, was something to do with its condition.
00:47:06And then all of a sudden, there was a sudden halt.
00:47:10The noise stopped, like that.
00:47:13And then, we were just watching the thing, and the flame went out, and I couldn't see what happened after that, because it was in the dark.
00:47:25The next 10 seconds, I suppose, afterwards, there was a tremendous explosion of fire going up, and a tremendous roar.
00:47:34It wasn't so very far off.
00:47:36It had crashed in Ilford.
00:47:37And so, of course, we went on there, and we thought it was a crashed aircraft at the time.
00:47:45No fires were started, but a tremendous amount of blast damage had been done.
00:47:51Lots of people buried in the debris of their homes.
00:47:55And we just piled in, and got to work, and pulled them out, and sent them off.
00:48:01The Civil Defence people were there, the ambulances, Women's Voluntary Service, and all the ancillary people came around.
00:48:09And there was, as I said, 73 fell on London on that first, on that second night.
00:48:19And after that, they came at about the same number, in the same numbers.
00:48:24We used to be able to get home, round about breakfast time, and get the troops home, give them a meal, and put them to bed.
00:48:34And because we knew we were going to get a repeat programme the following night,
00:48:39and so they were able to get a good night's rest in during the day.
00:48:43And that was able to sustain us.
00:48:51But when the weapons came along, 24 hours a day, we never knew.
00:48:58Sometimes there'd be one, sometimes two or three or four in the sky at the same time.
00:49:06And we were continually on the run.
00:49:08And the damage, the blast, was much greater from each single flying bomb or rocket than it was from a 1,000-pound bomb.
00:49:22There was more physical damage from the blast of a V-1 and a V-2.
00:49:30So, the V-2 was a rocket, and in the case of the one of them I went to at Hughes Mansions,
00:49:41there was a block of three flats, each of 50 flats, side by side.
00:49:45And this rocket, about 7.30 in the morning, buried itself in the foundations of the centre block.
00:49:56I reduced that block to rubble and severely damaged the block on either side.
00:50:01So, that was a degree of the damage from a rocket.
00:50:10It died into the ground.
00:50:12Remember, it went 70 feet into the stratosphere, came over and came down, faster than the speed of sound.
00:50:19So, you heard the explosion from the bomb, and then heard it come in a second or two afterwards.
00:50:24And it used to sound rather like a tube train coming into a station.
00:50:29You know, that noise that you hear, that struck me as that was like.
00:50:35Anyway, the flying bombs and the rockets did much about the same, individually, same damage.
00:50:46Although, the flying bomb, because it exploded on impact and on the surface, had a wider effect of brass.
00:50:56The rockets did more serious damage closer in.
00:51:01But both of them were very...
00:51:03I would say that they were all serious explosions from the V-bombs,
00:51:10more serious than we'd had during the Blitz.
00:51:16It was at about 7.31 morning at Dagenham.
00:51:21I was serving in that particular area.
00:51:25Only got news of this flying bomb having come down.
00:51:27It was on there about 10 minutes, I suppose, after it had arrived.
00:51:34And I pulled up in my car and got out.
00:51:38It was my normal practice to pull up on the outside, and I'd go into the centre of the damage.
00:51:42And I saw a man running towards me.
00:51:48And presumably, it was the father, and he was carrying a child that he was clutching tightly to his breast.
00:51:56And as he ran, I realised that he was bereft.
00:52:03He'd just overcome with emotion.
00:52:07And I take it that this was his child.
00:52:09And he clutched this baby, two years old, I guess.
00:52:15And as he ran, I was conscious of two little fat legs jogging up and down as he ran.
00:52:25And as he got close to me, he was moaning.
00:52:28And I got two little girls to tow myself.
00:52:37And the sight and the sound haunted me for weeks after that.
00:52:44And at other incidents, you see, we were on the scene, because of our good fortune in having towers in each fire station yard,
00:52:59we were able to set up special observation posts for the V-weapon explosions.
00:53:06We put a cover over the top to give people a bit of protection, mounted a table, which was a compass card.
00:53:17And over the top, they got a telescope and a finger pointing down, so that they would see an explosion over there,
00:53:26and they would look through and look down, and they'd get a compass reading, 248 or whatever.
00:53:32And they'd pick up the telephone down to the control room, where they had an enlarged map of this sort,
00:53:39exactly the same in line with this.
00:53:42And they would say, explosion 248 from this OP, OP number 7 or whatever.
00:53:49And they would have the compass card with a piece of elastic from the centre.
00:53:55And they would taste the elastic with a drawing pin on the end,
00:53:58and stretch it out over that reading, 248, and stick it in the side,
00:54:02so you've got a line from this OP across 248.
00:54:07And within seconds, they would have a report from another fire station, somewhere over here,
00:54:13and they would give a different reading, and they would do the same there,
00:54:17and where the lines of elastic crossed, that would be it.
00:54:21And it was so accurate, and so swift, and so simple, that we could tell, within a minute,
00:54:28not only the street, we could almost tell you the number of the house.
00:54:32It was so accurate.
00:54:34And so the result was that the crews were all standing by, there were loads of being sounded,
00:54:38and the initial attendants was five pumps.
00:54:42That's 25 men, and 25 men, and they would, their main job, of course, was firefighting.
00:54:49But if there was no firefighting, they immediately go in and do rescue work.
00:54:53And if the officer in Charles wanted some help, he would just say,
00:54:58make pumps 10, 15, 20, whatever,
00:55:00and they would make the number of pumps at that incident up to that particular number.
00:55:08So that's how we used to get on.
00:55:11Well, we would be on there very quickly,
00:55:13and I was on many a job within minutes before the smoke had gone down.
00:55:19And it was horrific, really.
00:55:26Very often, you'd catch a lot of people in the street,
00:55:29and their bodies would be lying all over the place.
00:55:33And you'd have people, members of the family,
00:55:37or possibly neighbours and people they knew,
00:55:41seeing dismembered bodies lying all over the street.
00:55:44And there were scenes of terrible distress,
00:55:49especially if it was members of a family, you know.
00:55:53We saw so much of it, I saw so much of it,
00:56:00that I hardened myself.
00:56:04I, you know, I couldn't afford to be emotional about it,
00:56:08otherwise I wouldn't have been doing my job,
00:56:10wouldn't be thinking about other things and what I should be doing.
00:56:13So we used to accept things that normally I would find very emotional.
00:56:21But always, I suppose it was the fact that I'd got two little girls at home,
00:56:29but whenever I saw infants and toddlers pulled out the dismembered bodies,
00:56:36you know, smashed about,
00:56:36I very often found myself crying.
00:56:42Just couldn't help it.
00:56:44Not ashamed of it.
00:56:45It just happened.
00:56:47I didn't worry about adults when they were pulled out.
00:56:50It didn't affect me the same.
00:56:52But children was the same.
00:56:54And you would see this terrible distress
00:56:57about people who'd just seen the shattered bodies of their,
00:57:02members of their families laying there and being pulled out
00:57:06and perhaps maybe helping to pull them out themselves.
00:57:09And it was, it was very trying.
00:57:11That's why I say, what were the long hours,
00:57:14the lack of sleep,
00:57:17and the, um,
00:57:19the general atmosphere of these things
00:57:21that made this the most stressful period of the war for me.
00:57:32Some of them landed in the port.
00:57:37Many landed in the city.
00:57:40Life in Antwerp was transformed.
00:57:42Each bomb killed or wounded an average of 38 people.
00:57:47Old women, accustomed to a round of housekeeping and shopping,
00:57:50were suddenly crushed under tons of debris.
00:57:52The lives of children playing in the streets
00:58:01were violently interrupted.
00:58:10Homes became a ghostly setting for those who escaped death.
00:58:16Antwerp, its port, and its people
00:58:17would have been wiped off the earth
00:58:19were it not for the defense system known as Antwerp X.
00:58:26The story of Antwerp X began before the bombs came.
00:58:30Allied intelligence knew that the Germans
00:58:32had been building launching sites
00:58:34east and southeast of Antwerp.
00:58:36Counter preparations had been made.
00:58:38Under General Claire Armstrong,
00:58:40a combined organization of American, British, and Polish gunners
00:58:43were assigned to the defense of the city.
00:58:46It was their job to defend the city against the V-1.
00:58:49Against the V-2, which traveled too fast to be seen,
00:58:53there was no defense.
00:58:58We knew that the German attack
00:59:00could come from many directions.
00:59:02Our strategy was one of shifting defenses.
00:59:04When the V-1s began to come over from one direction,
00:59:14batteries would be shifted quickly
00:59:16so that several belts of anti-aircraft fire,
00:59:19one behind the other,
00:59:21could protect the city.
00:59:23To make this strategy a success,
00:59:25new lines of attack had to be expected,
00:59:27and anti-aircraft units had to move quickly
00:59:31from one position to another.
00:59:37The gun crews around Antwerp
00:59:39learned to meet the extraordinary demands
00:59:41made by their jobs.
00:59:43A move order was just a couple of points on a map,
00:59:47but to the men it meant something more,
00:59:49something vital and urgent.
00:59:50They had seen the damage and death
00:59:53that the V-1s could bring.
00:59:55They knew that lives in Antwerp were at stake.
00:59:58They learned the importance of moving quickly.
01:00:02At all hours of the day and night,
01:00:04the small towns of Belgium shuddered
01:00:06as heavy equipment rushed along the quiet streets
01:00:09on the way to new positions of defense.
01:00:11The men got to know their jobs so thoroughly
01:00:17that handling the guns became second nature to them.
01:00:21It was like walking or talking.
01:00:23It seemed they had done it always.
01:00:27They learned speed in setting up.
01:00:32Speed in getting the word through.
01:00:35Speed in firing.
01:00:36They learned accuracy.
01:00:51When the bombs first came,
01:00:52our gunners shot down
01:00:53only one out of every two bombs.
01:00:56Before the shooting was over,
01:00:57they were bringing down better than nine out of ten.
01:01:02It wasn't the gunners alone.
01:01:04At each step in the process
01:01:06of bringing down a bomb,
01:01:07there were men whose place
01:01:08in Antwerp X was vital.
01:01:10Observers moved far forward
01:01:12into front-line positions
01:01:13to spot the V-1s
01:01:15soon after the takeoff from Germany.
01:01:17From these forward outposts,
01:01:18they flashed the earliest warning
01:01:20of an approaching bomb.
01:01:25Back at the battery,
01:01:26the signal comes in.
01:01:29And the gunners go to work.
01:01:34In a matter of seconds,
01:01:36each man is at his post
01:01:37doing the job upon which
01:01:39all Antwerp was depending,
01:01:41a job of cooperation,
01:01:43a team of American and British troops
01:01:46blending its efforts.
01:01:49Through rapid estimations,
01:01:50the course of the bomb was plotted.
01:01:57Plotting was based on information
01:01:59received by radar units.
01:02:04Antennas scan the skies,
01:02:07listening, feeling, searching
01:02:09to discover the course of the bomb
01:02:11as exactly as possible.
01:02:13The bomb comes into range
01:02:14of the gun battery.
01:02:16And now the gun crews
01:02:18have their target.
01:02:19When one belt of guns
01:02:28failed to bring down a V-1,
01:02:30there was at least one other battery
01:02:31backing up the first.
01:02:33Sometimes four and five belts of guns
01:02:36guarded the bomb lanes to Antwerp.
01:02:38For 160 days,
01:02:52the men of Antwerp X
01:02:53were on duty every day.
01:03:08winter passenger rush
01:03:10and also do number ofculus.
01:03:12When one자를们
01:03:12lose their target.
01:03:13Of course booters
01:03:14are in various good
01:03:15times,
01:03:15and a significant
01:03:18section of milioni
01:03:19set up the�� Explorer's
01:03:20core.
01:03:21We don't lead theuten
01:03:22there at least two
01:03:23next steps
01:03:24that thrived
01:03:26yet.
01:03:27The European
01:03:28director
01:03:31in the 2014
01:03:32Japan
01:03:34colony
01:03:36него
Recommended
44:40
|
Up next
1:43:47
9:03
3:30:14
1:01:34