Armageddon - Max Hastings [129]
The V2 was the world’s first ballistic missile, fuelled by alcohol and liquid oxygen, impossible to intercept and destroy because it travelled at supersonic speeds. The first V2 crashed on Chiswick in west London on 8 September 1944, killing three people and injuring seventeen. By 27 March 1945, some 1,050 rockets had fallen on England, killing 2,700 Londoners. A further “wonder weapon,” the V3 long-range gun designed to fire on London, was used only briefly in the winter of 1944 against Antwerp and Luxembourg, to little effect. The V-weapons caused great apprehension and misery among the civilians of England and Belgium, but it should have been evident to the rulers of Germany that dumping small payloads of explosive with indifferent accuracy on the enemy could not conceivably justify the slave labour, materials and commitment of highly skilled personnel and technology necessary to create the delivery systems. The technology was extremely advanced, but it was futile, as even Hitler seemed to grasp in the last months. On the night of 17 December, a V2 crashed into the Rex cinema in Antwerp during a crowded show. When Hitler was informed that 1,100 people including 700 soldiers had been killed or wounded, by a characteristic irony he was reluctant to credit the report. “That would finally be the first successful launch,” he observed sarcastically. “But it is so fairytale that my scepticism keeps me from believing it. Who is the informer? Is he paid by the launch crew?”
Had Hitler forsaken the propaganda rewards of raining V-weapons on England—to negligible military and industrial effect—and concentrated his firepower on the Channel ports, the consequences could have been serious for the Allied armies. Yet there was never the remotest possibility that any of the “wonder weapons” could change the outcome of the war. The Germans had made no significant progress with developing the only device that might have done so—an atomic bomb. The folly of persisting with the V-weapon programme, which drained Germany’s shrinking resources merely to torment the enemy’s population, highlighted the irrationality of Nazi behaviour as defeat beckoned.
Three forces determined Germany’s ability to sustain the war. The first was the organizational genius of Speer. It was ironic that the most cultured member of the Nazi leadership, and the only one to display practical concern for the fate of the German people in the midst of defeat, alone provided the means to enable Hitler to fight on until May 1945. The second factor was the effectiveness of the machinery of internal repression, for which Himmler was responsible. One of the bleakest lessons of modern history is that while half-hearted dictatorships often collapse, those willing to sustain policies of implacable ruthlessness, slaughtering all enemies real or imagined, frequently survive until the natural death or military defeat of their principal. Himmler’s task was made easier by the fact that hundreds of thousands of his agents knew that their crimes irretrievably committed them. Goebbels’s contribution was also vital. His programme of national indoctrination, maintained over a decade, perverted the reasoning processes of one of the best-educated societies on earth. Here was a significant difference between the German and Soviet tyrannies. Whatever the Russian people’s commitment to the war, many were privately cynical about Stalin’s rule. By contrast, a formidable proportion of Hitler’s subjects retained their belief in his policies. The self-delusion of the German people flagged only when the fabric of their society literally collapsed about their heads.
The third force in enabling Hitler to continue the war was the support of the Army. The