Just Finished Reading: Target London – Under Attack from the V-Weapons by Christy Campbell

I remember as a pre-Teen making models of V-1 flying bombs and V-2 rockets and playing Spitfire Vs V-1 intercepts over the fields of Kent as the bomb headed towards London and the plucky pilot in the Mk X fighter literally pulled out all the stops to catch and kill the robotic killer. I’m sure that I wasn’t the only kid doing this back then. Even in the 60’s and 70’s the Blitz and the V-Weapons were still very much in the imaginations and memories of the British. After all I was born a mere 15 years after the last V-2 fell on London.

I’ve read a few books over the years that touched on the V menace and at least one rather thin book that concentrated on the British response. And of course there have been various movies about the events surrounding these events – notably Operation Crossbow which was a somewhat fanciful telling of the real operation to find and destroy the rocket sites and their manufacturing facilities. I was hoping for something similar from this book but was a little, though only a little, disappointed to discover that this was very much about the British government response rather than the technical and tactical response to these weapons. The author obviously had access to declassified wartime government documents – particularly meeting minutes by the impressive detail in many parts of the book – which gave substance to the palpable anxiety and almost a sense of panic as to the fear of the weapons being used (not exactly aided by misunderstanding and false exaggeration of the bombs and missiles warheads) and then exactly what to do about them. This is actually the bit that fascinates me most – the shear brilliance of the response to the V-1 in particular which accounted for the vast majority being destroyed long before they reached their targets. Of course once the V-2 left its launch pad there was nothing the combined military forces of the UK and US could do about it. Think how difficult it was to stop Saddam’s Scuds being launched during the Iraq War and then imagine the difficulties of doing something similar with 1945 technology and experience! For the time the V-2 was an awesome weapon and was technically years ahead of its time – which was, of course, its major flaw. Because it was so brilliant it stayed in development long after it should have been abandoned as a practical weapon system. But, fortunately for the Allies in many ways, the German high command thought that it was cool so poured ridiculous amounts of effort into its production. In bang-for-bucks terms it was pretty useless. Sure it had lots of terror effects but the practical damage was limited. If the resources wasted on the V-2 had instead going into Me262 production, for example, the Allied air forces would’ve had a much more difficult time bombing Germany into submission.

The only sure way to defeat both types of weapon was, in the final analysis, to over run their launch sites which the Allies did when they eventually took Holland, delayed by the disastrous Operation Market Garden (of ‘Bridge too Far’ fame) which was intended to significantly shorten the war. As the noose tightened around the dying regime the scientists and technicians who designed and built the world’s first cruise missiles and IRBM’s tried their best to surrender to the American forces rather than the undoubtedly less sympathetic Russians. Inevitably they were whisked away to build the weapons of the early Cold War and lay the foundations of the Space Race and man’s landing on the Moon in 1969.

This was a detailed and often fascinating study of a technically and tactically very interesting period of WW2. The exotic weapons pouring out of the German factories in the closing years of the war still have the power to fascinate and horrify in their implications of a potential German victory if they had been available earlier or in greater numbers. The V Weapons where Germanys last gasp but no less frightening or impressive because of that. If you’ve ever wanted to know the detail of what went on then this is an excellent place to start. Recommended.