As we have come to expect from the author, great events are leavened by telling vignettes and anecdotes. He ends the book with the story of a German farmer's wife who was picked up in Paris having smuggled herself aboard a train bringing French deportees back from Germany. It turned out that while her husband was away at the front she had begun an affair with a French prisoner of war who had been put to work on their farm. The poor woman had risked everything in an attempt to be reunited with him. It is a tale that the late Richard Cobb would have relished, a welcome reminder of the power of good old love over rotten ideology.
From the macro to the micro. Christy Campbell's Target London is a meticulous, archive-driven account of the V-1 and V-2 campaign that began in the summer of 1944. Both weapons were innovative; the V-2 particularly so. Allied scientists found it hard to credit their sophistication. But they were, as their name declared [V stood for Vergeltung-retaliation], essentially instruments of reprisal. Many Germans, from Hitler downwards, nonetheless deluded themselves that they would prove the salvation of the Reich. The mood was catching. Instead of interpreting them as a grand gesture of despair, the British political and military establishment regarded them with something approaching dread.
The story is a fascinating blend of drama and symbolism and Campbell has concocted a narrative mix as rich as the ethanol and liquid oxygen cocktail that blasted the V-2 heavenwards. Much of the tale concerns Allied efforts to determine exactly what the German army and air force were up to at a mysterious research site set amid the sandy heathland of Peenemünde on the Baltic coast. There was a fair amount of information to go on, from Enigma decrypts downwards and no shortage of boffins and intelligence experts to interpret it. Campbell has fun recounting the rivalries of a cast of strutting egotists led by the appalling "Prof", Churchill's pet scientist Lord Cherwell, who seemed more intent on preserving his monopoly of his master's ear than countering the V-weapon threat.
There was little amusing about the back story. The V-weapon programme was a microcosm of the Nazi project. The feats of construction and production were achieved by slave labour. Campbell evokes the ghastliness in a single image of human robots, worked to death in their thousands, collapsing at night into tiers of bunk-beds "slithering with excrement".
The effort soaked up a vast amount of desperately needed resources. What were the Germans thinking? The V-weapons flew in the face of their understanding of the utility of air power in which aerial bombardment was linked intrinsically with manoeuvre on the ground. The rationale was that saturation bombing would not only punish the British for the industrial bombardment of German civilians, but also produce a collapse of public morale that would force Britain out of the war. The Luftwaffe, though, had already tried that in the winter blitz of 1940-41, and got nowhere. The Nazis had only to look at their own cities to see that the theory that populations could be bombed into submission was rubbish.
