King, Benjamin and Timothy Kutta. Impact: The History of Germany's V-Weapons in World War II. Rockville Centre, NY: Sarpedon, 1998

ISBN 1-885119-51-8
358 pages

Preface; Introduction; maps; photos; drawings; Notes; Bibliography; Index

While the tired, dirty, and bloody infantrymen fighting in Stalingrad, at Anzio, in the jungles of Burma, and on Pacific atolls might not have realized it -- or cared very much about it -- World War II brought together science and warfare to an unprecedented extent. The resultant high-tech weapons of the time included hardware that would forever change the face of battle. Among the most important of those engineering successes were the German V-1 "flying bomb" and V-2 rocket, direct ancestors of today's cruise missiles, SCUDs, and ICBMs.

Benjamin King and Timothy Kutta in their new book, Impact, do a thorough job of explaining how these weapons came to exist and how they were employed. Only the V-1 and V-2 (originally Fi 103 and A-4) are examined; related German weapons such as the V-3, submarine-launched missiles, and the surface-to-air C-2 AA rocket are mentioned only in passing. For the V-1 and V-2 the authors cover four principal threads:

• The scientific and engineering evolution of the two weapons
  
• The political, strategic, and bureaucratic dimension of their deployment
  
• Allied intelligence and counter-measures
  
• The complete operational history of the V-weapons campaign

Taking each in turn....

The scientific and engineering evolution of the two weapons

The authors survey the history of rockets as weapons from the earliest Chinese experiments to "Congreve rockets" in the War of 1812 through the experimental wire-guided flying bombs built by the Zeppelin Company at the end of World War I. In the inter-war years the German "Society for Space Travel", innocuously aiming to develop the rudiments of technology for putting man into space, attracted the attention of the German Army. Impact charts the successes and failures of German rocketry as the scientists and engineers soon became employees of the Third Reich and moved to Peenemunde where development continued at an accelerated rate. Much engineering detail is provided, such as widening jet nozzles, shortening combustion chambers, and analyzing competing guidance systems for the V-2.

Similar material is provided for the parallel Luftwaffe development of the Fi 103, conceived partly for its advantages as a weapon and partly for its value as a symbol of power and prestige to counter-balance the Army program.

The political, strategic, and bureaucratic dimension of their deployment

Such political considerations played a huge role in the Third Reich. King and Kutta explain how again and again bureaucratic in-fighting threatened the scientific and engineering work. Hitler was not originally too impressed with the V-2, but Albert Speer convinced him to keep the program alive. Even so, the fluctuating levels of priorities for raw materials -- particularly for actual production facilities -- continued to hamstring the project.

As the tide of war turned against Germany, its leadership groped for miracles to salvage the worsening situation. As the A-4 and Fi 103 programs finally evolved from promising technologies to deployable weapons, the struggle for control over them intensified. This led to such bizarre events as the brief arrest of Wernher von Braun by the SS for allegedly spending too much time working out equations for rocket designs that would reach the moon rather than London. In the end, the SS took complete control of both V-1 and V-2, but -- not surprisingly -- completely failed to provide the kind of unifying vision of technology and strategy that could have maximized the effectiveness of the weapons.

Allied intelligence and counter-measures

Meanwhile, before the first V-weapon was launched in anger, the British began to realize the Germans were developing new and unexpected hardware. From forced laborers at Peenemunde, from the Polish Home Army, from Ultra intercepts, from crashed rockets recovered in Sweden, and from photo-intelligence the Allies gradually pieced together many parts of the puzzle. R.V. Jones emerges from the book as the most alert and competent of British scientists, but he was forced to engage in his own turf war with Duncan Sandys (Churchill's son-in-law) to continue investigating the mystifying German weapons. Other important figures, such as Churchill's personal scientific advisor, Lord Cherwell, insisted that such unmanned flying weapons were preposterous and amounted to no more than an enemy disinformation campaign.

As the truth of the matter slowly emerged, the Allies began to divert more and more resources to understand and counter the new threat. Peenemunde was bombed, but the Germans dispersed much of the facility and little long-term damage was done beyond accidentally killing large numbers of forced laborers. When the massive concrete launch sites were detected under construction in occupied France, Allied bombers flew repeated missions against them. The Germans repaired the sites only to draw the bombers back while the real effort of constructing launchers was shifted to much smaller and easily camouflaged sites.

The complete operational history of the V-weapons campaign

On 13 June 1944 the first V-1 was launched against England. From that time, with only a few pauses, the Germans maintained a steady stream of V-1s, later joined by V-2s, against Allied targets. Joseph Goebbels christened the Fi 103 and A-4 "Vengeance Weapons" and Hitler directed they be used only against London. As the "buzz bombs" began falling on their capital, the British frantically redeployed anti-aircraft batteries and fighter squadrons. The defensive results were at first meager, but eventually shifting AA guns to the Channel coast and realigning zones for fighter interception brought about high kill rates. Meanwhile, Allied aircraft attempted to hunt down and bomb the launch sites on the continent. The British also fed the Germans through compromised agents systematically misleading reports on the accuracy of missile strikes in an attempt to convince the Wehrmacht launch crews to reduce their range. None of these efforts, however, could completely halt the V blitz from raining down destruction on London.

Only the eventual Allied breakout from the Normandy beachhead and the withdrawal of V-1 units from France brought temporary relief to London. The onslaught was renewed with V-2s and air-launched V-1s firing against London while Antwerp also became a prime target of daily launchings. While morale suffered in England, greater military results came from the campaign against Antwerp. King and Kutta present statistics for firings over various periods of time and enumerate Allied successes -- including the spectacular "flipping" maneuver used by some fighter pilots to knock down V-1s -- as well as the most tragic incidents of hits on crowded streets, markets, and cinemas.

Impact does a good job of weaving together all these threads. The main participants, such as von Braun, Dornberger, and Jones, are sketched by their actions rather than their thoughts and beliefs. The book avoids deeper issues such as the extent of Nazi enthusiasm among the top scientists and their culpability in the deaths of forced laborers. King and Kutta also avoid the issues of the post-war race to collar leading German scientists and engineers for continued rocket research in the United States, the United Kingdom, and the Soviet Union. Instead, they focus on the uncontroversial aspects of science, technology, bureaucracy, strategy, and operations.

In summary, the authors claim the V-weapons achieved much more than generally realized, citing the diversion of Allied air missions, retention of AA manpower in England, naval steel taken for construction of civilian bomb shelters, direct affects on Allied ground strategy, damage to infrastructure, and serious reduction in the capacity of Antwerp as a port and supply center. They also view the German New Year's air assault of 1945, Operation Bodenplatte, as explicable only in terms of an attempt to destroy the airfields and aircraft with which the British carried out missions against launchpads in the Netherlands and Germany.

While the V-1 and V-2 programs were costly both in terms of the resources they consumed and the resources they diverted from other weapons production, King and Kutta point out that they never significantly interfered with the number of fighter aircraft available to the Luftwaffe: "The fighters were there. All the planes needed was maintenance, pilots and fuel." Further, without those three commodities, the buzz bomb and the rocket were for the Luftwaffe the only alternative to a long-range bomber force. Finally, the authors say, had they been available for deployment as early as originally planned or had the war lasted significantly longer, the V-1 and V-2 could have been even more valuable to the German military effort.

It would have been nice to see a comprehensive table of V-weapon totals by week or month broken down according to geographic region of launch and intended targets with sub-totals for successfully hitting target, missing target, shot down by AA, downed by enemy aircraft, and misfirings. That, however, is one of the few elements lacking in Impact. All in all, it's a fuller account than most other histories. For example, Neufeld's The Rocket and the Reich covers only the V-2 and only the German side, with little on operational employment; Garlinski's Hitler's Last Weapons focuses on intelligence-gathering and sabotage by Resistance groups; Collier's The Battle of the V-Weapons takes mostly the British perspective and leaves out almost all the scientific and technical information.

Despite some rough sections, some uneven writing, and some lapses in editing, this is probably the best all-around history of the V-1 and V-2 yet published. Certainly it is worth reading by anyone even remotely interested in this aspect of the war. Recommended.

Available from online booksellers, local bookshops, or directly from Sarpedon.

Thanks to Sarpedon for providing this review copy.