had Germany in Russia, and the Japanese had not felt obliged to join in on that occasion. Nevertheless, Hitler thought that the United States and Germany were effectively at war anyway. By this act of folly he solved what might have resulted in a serious dilemma for President Roosevelt; with the American public fired to anger about the Japanese attack, might it not have been harder to spare both forces and production for the British war against Germany? And a German declaration of war against the United States could have been used as a bargaining counter for a Japanese attack on Russia. Hitler could now expect a build up of activity in the west. The German economy, already flat out30, would need to have its priorities right.
Yet Hitler’s war situation in April 1942 did not, despite the active intervention of the United States, appear to him to be alarming. He expected to defeat the Soviet Union in one more summer campaign that would penetrate to Baku and capture the huge oilfield there. He already had the resources of all Europe at his disposal. The British were under attack from German submarines, the U Boats, aided by Focke Wulf Condor aircraft and mines. He was sinking more merchant ships each month than were being built31. By April 1942 the British had lost 2915 ships in the war, of which 1282 had been sunk by submarines; (509 had been sunk by Condors and 362 by mines to the end of 1941).32 The U Boat fleet, starting the war with a total of 59 boats, now had 130 operational.33 German cryptographers had broken the Admiralty’s codes in 1941, and were reading the planned routes of convoys. The British lost the ability to read the German Navy code shortly afterwards.34
The German surface fleet had not fared so well; a pocket battleship (Graf Spee) and a battleship (Bismark) had been sunk while attempting commerce raiding, while the battle cruisers Scharnhorst and Gneisenau had been deterred from attacking convoys by escorting battleships.35
In the air, the situation certainly should have given the Germans much cause for concern. Total Luftwaffe strength had fallen from 3692 in March 1940 to 3582 in March 1941 and 2872 in March 1942.36 In 1941 Germany had made only 11,776 aircraft; British production was 20,094 with 2135 received from North America.37 The Soviet Union made 15,735. But here again German intelligence was faulty, estimating Russian production at 5000 per annum in 1939 and 1940, when in fact it was over twice as much38; and calculating it to be 1150 per month (13,800 per annum) in March 1942, when in 1942 the Soviet Union produced over 25,000 aeroplanes.39 The German air ministry had aquired a new technical director, field Marshal Erhard Milch (1892-1972) in November 1941, and he desperately sought to increase production; however, between January and the end of April 1942 only 4645 aircraft were produced, of which 1460 were fighters. These were being destroyed at a high rate in Russia, the Mediterranean and in the west; and in these four months Britain produced 8118 aeroplanes, and in addition received 671 from North America.40 Of ominous import for Germany’s cities and industries, 390 of these were the new four-engined heavy bombers, the Stirling, the Halifax and the Lancaster.
The desperate situation of Russia had, together with the introduction of new navigational aids, prompted a renewal of Bomber Command’s offensive against Germany. Something – everything – had to be done to keep Russia in the war. Britain, however, was in no position to invade the continent and open a ‘second front’. Only in the air could she do anything to relieve Russia’s agony. On February 14th 1942 a new directive, to bomb the ‘industrial areas’ of Essen, Duisburg, Dusseldorf and Cologne, was issued to the command by the air staff.41 The attempt at ‘precision’ bombing was abandoned. This was the commencement of ‘area’ or ‘carpet’ bombing, in which hundreds of thousands of men, women and children were made homeless, blasted and incinerated, and the industrial infrastructure of Germany was dislocated. Nine days later, Arthur Harris took over as Commander in Chief. He began to plan a raid on a German city by a thousand bombers. In the meantime, the Billancourt Renault factory, which it was estimated produced 18,000 lorries per annum for the German army, was bombed on March 2nd/3rd by 235 aircraft; some 300 bombs hit the factory, causing an estimated loss of production of nearly 2300 lorries. In a series of attacks on industrial areas, Kiel (5 times), Wilhelmshaven, Essen (8 times), Cologne (4 times), Lubeck, Hanau, Lohr, Hamburg (twice), Dortmund (twice), Emden, Augsberg and Rostock (4 times) were attacked by the end of April. Lubeck and Rostock were both utterly devastated by fire, Goebbels reporting that community life in Rostock had ended. The word ‘Terrorangriff’ was used for the first time.42 Altogether, between February 14th and the end of April, RAF Bomber Command conducted some 86 operations in seventy-five nights, including mine-laying, shipping attacks and major industrial raids, losing over 230 aircraft – considerably less than production. An Empire air training scheme meant that trained aircrew would be available to man the bombers which the factories were beginning to pour out; by the end of the war, Britain would have trained nearly 300,000 aircrew, of which some 120,000 were pilots, after commencing the war with an output of only some 5800 pilots per year.43 Although, of course, the British training and production figures were unknown to the Germans, they knew the rate of British losses over Germany, and they knew that the attacks were on an increasing scale of weight and accuracy. And they knew that the United States was making preparations to enter the war in the air over the Reich. Clearly, they needed to do something.
But it was the German army that was most obviously in need of the iron fruits of production. Despite the armoured force that had terrorised the west, the vast majority of the army consisted of infantry, marching on foot with horse drawn guns. The losses in Russia had ‘demodernised’ the army further, and it would fight the rest of the war in the east with insufficient tanks and guns. Tank production was 5290 in 1941, but none were as good as the soviet T34 or heavy KV tanks, of which 6243 were made in 1941.44 Hitler would not be aware of this until the great clash at Stalingrad later in the year.
Thus by April 1942 Germany had entered into a war of grinding attrition; of submarines, aircraft, tanks, guns, lorries, bombs, shells, explosives, cartridges, bullets and boots; of picks, shovels, gauges, instruments, radio and radar equipment, and optical lenses; of maintenance fitters, skilled and unskilled factory workers, of gunners, sailors, pilots, tank crew and infantrymen; and of housing, bedding, cooking utensils and even crockery. All were being consumed on a huge scale. Her war production was flat out, but inefficient; there were many faults in organisation and leadership, with the armed services competing with each other for capacity. By April 1942 prioritised, efficient production had become a life and death problem for Nazi Germany.
In that April of 1942, and amid these stringencies, came a proposal by Oberst Walter Dornberger, chief of weapons testing unit 11 (Wa Pruef 11), and in charge of German rocket development, which he hoped would gain his project top priority in production and development. Dornberger’s booklet, entitled ‘Proposals for the Operational Employment of the A4 Rocket’, was distributed to ‘the highest authorities civilian and military’.1 It called for 5000 rockets a year to be launched from northern France against industrial and supply areas and communications in ‘southern England’. Dornberger provided details of the firing organisation, the basic unit of which was to be the ‘abteilung’. Each abteilung was to be divided into 3 batteries,