ROUND TWO: THE V–1 BOMBARDMENT

CROSSBOW operations from December 1943 through June 1944 had been carried out with a short-term military objective and a long-term political one. The immediate goal was to prevent the Germans from using Vweapon bombardment to disrupt or otherwise interfere with Operation OVERLORD, the invasion of Normandy. Politically, Allied leaders hoped to prevent any V-weapons from hitting London and demoralizing the civilian population. When Allied troops landed on the French coast on June 6, 1944, without an attack on London or the southern coast of England, the short-term objective was fulfilled.

Ironically, this achievement may have been less a result of the Allied air campaign than of Hitler’s preference for massed retaliation strikes. The “massed” strategy probably accounted for the decision to delay the V–1 bombardment past April when only limited quantities of the pilotless aircraft had been distributed to undisturbed modified sites. Massed attacks were useful possibly because of the tactical value of surprise or to overwhelm interceptor and antiaircraft defenses, but more probably because of their ability to stun a war-weary population with a sudden, devastating attack.

In retrospect, what was probably a political delay on Hitler’s part proved a blunder, but he made his decision in part because he expected the Wehrmacht to contain an Allied invasion and eventually smash any beachhead. That was the chief danger confronting the Allies from mid-June through August. CROSSBOW would not be a military success until ground troops broke through the German Seventh Army and destroyed or captured V-sites in Cherbourg and Pas de Calais. The long-term political threat remained as long as V–1s and V–2s could reach London.

Germany’s massed V-weapon offensive was set to begin on the night of June 15–16, ten days after American, Canadian, and British troops stormed ashore at Normandy. Instead, it began sporadically on the night of June 12–13. Even V–1s were mistakenly fired toward London, and four of them hit the target. The Allies knew that this signaled a second Battle of Britain. On June 15–16, the Germans fired roughly 300 V–1s. Some of the buzz bombs ran out of fuel or veered off course, some were shot down by antiaircraft fire, and some were downed by interceptors; seventy-three fell randomly on London.

The Allies were not sure how best to respond. The need to maintain overwhelming air support for the Operation OVERLORD beachheads and to interdict German reinforcements to Normandy precluded using much air power in a continuing counteroffensive against V–1 modified launching sites. On June 13, Allied air leaders settled on a strategy of destroying V–1 supply depots, but sent only thirty-six sorties against them in three days. After the June 15–16 bombardment, Churchill and other British war leaders, relieved that the enemy was using conventional explosives instead of poison gas or biological weapons, asked Eisenhower to direct whatever aircraft he could spare to lessening the V–1 threat. Meanwhile, Britain’s Air Defence did the best it could to counter the pilotless bombs, using radar for early detection and fighter interceptors, antiaircraft fire, and even barrage balloons to destroy the missiles in flight.

Eisenhower recognized the V–1 as a political threat best countered by political means (Allied strategists evaluating a counteroffensive seriously considered a massive air raid against Berlin). The V–1s posed no great military threat: they were aimed against London, not against Allied troops or the artificial ports that had been towed to the Normandy beaches to supply and reinforce the invasion. But it was necessary to convince the British populace that the Allies were trying to stop the V–1 attacks. If the people of London kept faith in the war effort and in their leaders, the V–1 attacks would fail strategically no matter how much structural damage they did.

On June 17, Eisenhower directed the Eighth and Ninth Air Forces to attack V-sites and V–1 supply points. He gave first priority to the immediate tactical needs of OVERLORD, with CROSSBOW missions second, much to the annoyance of U.S. air commanders who still hoped to cripple Germany’s industrial production with POINTBLANK missions. U.S. heavy bombers from the Eighth Air Force began attacking V-sites on June 19; the Ninth Air Force medium bombers began on the 23d. RAF Bomber Command, which until June 16 had played a supporting role in Operation OVERLORD, switched immediately to flying as many CROSSBOW missions as possible. On June 16–17, the night after the massive V–1 strike against London, British heavy bombers flew 315 sorties and dropped almost 1,500 tons of bombs on large sites and suspected supply depots in France. The RAF kept up this pace through the end of June, flying nearly 30 percent of all its sorties against V-targets and dropping more than 15,900 tons of bombs. Thus, in the last two weeks of June, Allied bombers delivered almost 23,500 tons of bombs against CROSSBOW targets.

The British Air Ministry had identified the following targets, in order of priority: large sites, whose purpose was still unknown; supply depots where V–1s were being stored and distributed; ski sites; and modified sites. Most V–1 launchings were coming from modified sites, but these were small, well-hidden targets. In bad weather, Allied bombers had to use radar bombing techniques, which were inefficient against the modified sites. In general, of the four kinds of targets, only the supply depots made sense to the bomber commanders.

The main concern of Allied air commanders who argued against the renewed CROSSBOW counteroffensive was the inconclusiveness of its results. No one knew if the Allied strikes were succeeding. Every night the Germans launched one hundred V–1s against London. Air commanders could not dismiss civilian morale as irrelevant, but it seemed to them that they jeopardized men and aircraft in missions with dubious outcomes. Other missions promised more to speed the invasion’s success, and once Allied troops occupied the French and Belgian coasts, the V–1 attacks would end.

In the days after the Normandy invasion, Air Chief Marshal Sir Arthur Harris of RAF Bomber Command and Eighth Air Force Commander Doolittle both complained to SHAEF Deputy Supreme Commander Air Chief Marshal Sir Arthur Tedder about the shift in priorities and requested permission to attack more targets in support of Operation OVERLORD. The commander of the British Second Tactical Air Force, Air Marshal Sir Arthur Coningham, also sought Tedder’s approval to switch from CROSSBOW operations to missions in the Normandy theater. As it stood, only immediate support for the frontline troops could supersede the ongoing CROSSBOW missions. Tedder refused.

General Spaatz of U.S. Strategic Forces introduced some other novel ideas into the CROSSBOW debate: because the large sites—whatever their purpose—could not function without electricity, why not knock out Pas de Calais power generators and transformers? Or, against large sites that apparently had their own generators, why not load old bombers slated for the spare-parts junk hangars with 20,000 pounds of explosives and fly them by radar right into the target? (That idea would later come to fruition as Project AP.)

Spaatz also argued in favor of different targets. Heavy bomber raids against the modified sites were not producing the desired results. He suggested bombing the source of V–1 production and assembly, rather than concentrating on the launch sites. The Allies had identified the factories that made the guidance components (gyrostabilizers)—attack them, Spaatz urged. In effect, he concluded that the Allies needed to return to the objective of the Combined Bomber Offensive: destruction of the German air force and German industry in Operation POINTBLANK.

At the end of June, Eisenhower once again considered the advice and recommendations of his generals to change operational priorities and he made his decision: except for immediate support of the troops in Normandy, CROSSBOW would “continue to receive top priority.”

In July and early August 1944, as ground troops and armored vehicles slowly fought through the Normandy peninsula and prepared to make a devastating break past the German Seventh Army and into central France, the Germans fired a continual barrage of V–1s against London at a rate of roughly one hundred every twenty-four hours. RAF Bomber Command continued to fly about 30 percent of its bomber sorties against CROSSBOW targets: some 5,800 sorties dropped nearly 24,300 tons of explosives in July and 5,700 sorties dropped more than 25,300 tons in August. Other Allied air forces pitched in. The Eighth dropped almost 10,900 tons of bombs in CROSSBOW missions; the Ninth flew 400 sorties; even the Fifteenth Air Force based in Italy attacked the V-weapon manufacturing plant at Ober Raderach in southern Germany with more than 750 tons of bombs. In those two months, the Allies used about 20 percent of their total heavy bomber strength against V-sites and V-weapons targets, but as far as anyone could tell, the aerial campaign had no effect. By mid-August, the V–1 launch rate was no lower than it had been when the Germans began bombing London two months earlier.

The Allies could do little more. They rejected proposals for using poison gas against the V-sites; once started, that kind of warfare might escalate and give the enemy an excuse to do the same thing against London. Another proposal called for saturation bombing of German cities in retaliation for the London bombardment, but air leaders dismissed this as a further diversion of air power from the strategic POINTBLANK missions.

In mid-July 1944, Allied air commanders tried to tie CROSSBOW more closely to the general objectives of the Combined Bomber Offensive, or at least to organize the attacks in a more economical and efficient way. Spaatz, in particular, pushed Air Chief Marshal Tedder to establish a joint Anglo-American CROSSBOW committee comprising an equal number of British and U.S. air staffs. Tedder set up a Joint CROSSBOW Target Priorities Committee, but he was not about to relinquish real authority to make the final decision; the committee was an advisory group only and Tedder was not obligated to follow their recommendations. When the Joint Committee recommended abandoning heavy bomber sorties against launching sites in favor of attacks against V–1 storage depots in France and Vweapons production factories in Germany, Tedder ignored them.

In return, some Allied air commanders began to ignore Tedder. Air Marshal Harris agreed with the objectives of the Allied air commanders and he protested as much as he dared, but he could not easily ignore the wishes of the British War Cabinet or the chiefs of staff. He recommended as a CROSSBOW target the V-weapons production plant at Ruesselheim, which RAF Bomber Command attacked with almost 700 sorties and more than 2,500 tons of bombs in two night raids. Eighth Air Force Commander James Doolittle, on the other hand, expressed his displeasure with Tedder’s decisions by increasingly reserving Eighth Air Force aircraft for OVERLORD or POINTBLANK missions first. By mid-August, with the Allied breakout well under way, Doolittle decided that the best way to defeat the V–1s was for Allied ground forces to overrun launch sites and his highest air priority went to supporting the breakout. When Tedder insisted on direct CROSSBOW attacks, Doolittle complied but kept the attacks relatively light. Tedder was annoyed, but he could not give Doolittle direct orders and he had little institutional leverage against the USAAF general. It was a bureaucratic stalemate.

Events on the ground ultimately changed the nature of the CROSSBOW campaign. In mid-August 1944, in the path of advancing Allied forces, German units responsible for firing V–1s began to pull back from the northern coast of France to avoid capture. The V–1 firing rate against Britain decreased to roughly eighty per day—still more than 1,100 launches every two weeks. The Allied advance was so swift, however, that by September 1 the Germans had been pushed out of range and forced to air-launch V–1s from the underbellies of Heinkel He–111s, an inferior method that caused inaccurate missile flight. For a short time, the V–1 offensive was over, although the Germans planned to introduce an improved, longer-range version of the V–1 from new launch sites in Holland. Between June 12–13 and September 1, the Germans fired more than 6,700 cruise missiles against England.

Believing the worst to be over, British Air Defence officials breathed a collective sigh of relief. On September 3, 1944, many air commanders were even happier to hear that all CROSSBOW offensive countermeasures, especially the detested heavy bombing raids against modified sites, were suspended. Three days later, the British Chiefs of Staff agreed to halt the diversion of air power from more crucial operations in favor of CROSSBOW targets, except for raids against the airfields used by the Heinkels that were still launching the V–1s from the air. The next day Duncan Sandys, the War Cabinet spokesman on the V-threat, felt confident enough to announce publicly the end of the V–1 bombardment.

Within twenty-four hours, falling without warning out of the stratosphere, a V–2 ballistic missile exploded in London.