New, daily updating edition

Headlines | Alternate Histories | International Edition


Home Page

Announcements

Alternate Histories

International Edition

List of Updates

Want to join?

Join Writer Development Section

Writer Development Member Section

Join Club ChangerS

Editorial

Chris Comments

Book Reviews

Blog

Letters To The Editor

FAQ

Links Page

Terms and Conditions

Resources

Donations

Alternate Histories

International Edition

Alison Brooks

Fiction

Essays

Other Stuff

Authors

If Baseball Integrated Early

Counter-Factual.Net

Today in Alternate History

This Day in Alternate History Blog


View My Stats

Is Moscow Burning?

Part 2 By Chris Oakley

Summary: In the first part of this series we reviewed the chain of events leading to the first Nazi V-weapons attack on Moscow in the autumn of 1941. In this chapter, we'll look back at the first V-1 strikes against Leningrad and President Franklin Roosevelt's reaction to the news of the Moscow attack.

******

    Nazi propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels couldn't suppress his glee at the outside world's panicked reaction to the first German V-1 attack on Moscow. In his official radio announcement about the rocket bombardment he boasted Germany's enemies would “tremble in absolute fear” at the power of the revolutionary weapon the Reich had unleashed on the Soviet Union; as if to validate Winston Churchill's grim belief these lethal devices would be turned on Great Britain sooner or later, Goebbels closed his statements with the words “Today we strike at the Kremlin, tomorrow Whitehall!” And as if that wasn’t enough to rattle a few nerves in the Allied camp, Goebbels also darkly hinted the Reich was taking its first steps toward developing a longer-range rocket to hit targets in the United States and Canada. So impressed had Goebbels been with the results of the first V-weapons raid against Moscow that he actually proposed to Adolf Hitler November 7th be declared a national holiday in tribute to Werner von Braun’s development team.

    Goebbels’ idea for a ‘Raketetag’(“Rocket Day”) didn’t come to pass, but just the same it reflected the high stock he and Hitler placed in the V-1 and V-2. And even as bodies were being pulled from the rubble in Moscow following the initial V-1 bombardment of the Soviet capital, the Nazis were already preparing to inflict similar levels of ruin and death on the U.S.S.R.’s second-largest city, Leningrad. The Wehrmacht had already had Leningrad under siege for weeks even before the idea of a rocket attack on the city had been broached, and Hitler was convinced a steady onslaught of V-1s against its citizens would hasten the day of the city's inevitable(at least to him) fall to German troops. From that point it was only a question of time before Moscow too was overrun, and then the war with the Soviet Union would be over and Hitler could focus his energies back on crushing the obstinate British.

    The V in V-1, in fact, came from the word Viktoriawaffen(“victory weapon”), a term personally coined by Hitler because he was convinced the new rockets would guarantee the Reich's triumph over its enemies. Once the Soviet Union and Great Britain had been subjugated, the Führer intended to turn the V-weapons' wrath on the United States. Even as the first V-1s and V-2s were coming off the assembly lines at factories in Germany and German-occupied Europe, in fact, he ordered the Peenemunde development team to begin work on the prototype for the next rocket in the V-weapons series, the V-3.

      The V-3 was as far above the V-1 and V-2 on the weapons evolution scale as the V-1 and V-2 had been above conventional artillery weapons. Some modern military historians credit the V-3 as the true ancestor not only of the intercontinental ballistic missile but also of the rockets which carried American and Russian spacemen into orbit during the race to the Moon between the superpowers in the 1960s. As envisioned by the Führer, the V-3 would serve as the ultimate siege weapon, the bluntest of blunt instruments with which to cow the Americans into capitulating to his will. At the very least Hitler believed it could inflict no end of devastation on American cities using regular explosive warheads; if German scientists could produce a working atomic bomb before the Allies did, the V-3 could effectively cut America off at the knees.

******

      Barely 48 hours had passed since the first rocket strikes against Moscow when V-1 warheads began exploding in the streets of Leningrad, a city already under siege by regular Wehrmacht troops. At 5:30 AM on the morning of November 9th, 1941 German launch crews began what would prove to be an all-day bombardment of the beleaguered city, firing rockets at it until there were no more left to fire. For Hitler's Finnish allies, who had lost a good deal of territory to the Soviets in the Winter War of 1939-40, there was more than a little satisfaction in watching these lethal new machines roar into the sky and then hearing them detonate in the heart of the town named for the founder of the hated Soviet Union. Some Finnish soldiers inscribed anti-Soviet slogans on the rockets just before they were launched.

      The city's mass transit system was utterly crippled by the German rocket strikes and the town library was nearly reduced to rubble; only a stroke of luck-- or bad German aim --kept the city's famed Hermitage museum from also becoming a casualty of the rocket attack. However hard they tried or however many V-1s they sent up, the Nazis simply couldn't knock the Hermitage down. Soviet propaganda writers and the citizens of Leningrad would later gloat over this failure on the Germans' part.

      In the meantime, however, there was considerable anxiety over the V-1 strikes-- and not just among the citizens of Leningrad and Moscow or in Churchill's war room. At the White House President Franklin Roosevelt had been studying reports from the U.S. embassy in Moscow about the V-1 attacks, and he was worried some particularly ingenious German engineer might devise a way to fire a V-weapon from a U-boat against U.S. cities on the East Coast or the Gulf of Mexico. Even worse, that same engineer or one of his comrades could modify the design to accommodate an atomic bomb.

    Within less than 48 hours after the initial German V-1 attacks on Moscow Roosevelt had ordered the War Department to begin a crash program to develop a ballistic missile for the United States’ own armed forces; with the Neutrality Acts having long ago been repealed, it didn’t take much time before the British government joined the missile development project, code-named Mjolnir after the mythical hammer used by the Norse god Thor. In keeping with his concern that the Germans might attempt to adapt their V-weapons' basic design to be capable of carrying an atomic warhead, Roosevelt subsequently directed the Mjolnir team to work hand in glove with the staff of the Manhattan Project to make future American ballistic rockets able to deliver their own atomic payload. Roosevelt's decision to launch the Mjolnir project came just in time: not only were things in Europe becoming more harrowing for the Allied cause with every passing day, but U.S.-Japanese relations were steadily deteriorating by the hour and it looked to objective observers like the United States and Japan might go to war at any minute.

    The U.S. War Department chose New Mexico as the main site for their Mjolnir test launch facilities; the central test site was based at what is today the White Sands Missile Range. Thousands of workers came out to the desert to build a rocket test complex from scratch, pulling off what Time magazine would later describe as “the most significant construction job to happen in a desert since the Pyramids”. The construction efforts would take increasing urgency with every inch of ground the German army gained on the road to Moscow and every threat of war issued from Tojo’s regime in Tokyo.

******

    Hitler wasn’t the only one who believed in the V-weapons’ strategic value as an instrument for bringing about the Allies’ final defeat. Even as the Imperial Japanese Navy was gearing up to attack Pearl Harbor, an Imperial Army research team in Manchuria was working at Tojo’s behest to produce a Japanese adaptation of the V-1, believing such a weapon could be highly useful for future campaigns in the Pacific Basin or Southeast Asia....or even, some of Tojo’s generals hoped, on the West Coast of the United States. In Imperial Japanese Army nomenclature, the experimental rocket was known as “the Fiery Lance of Death”; the nickname was highly appropriate given the devastation its German ancestor had already rained down on the Soviets and its potential to wreak havoc on U.S. defense and industrial complexes in Hawaii and the West Coast.

    The initial Japanese rocket tests were conducted in Manchuria, where a compliant puppet government set up by the Imperial Army following the 1931 Japanese invasion of the country unfailingly kowtowed to its master in Tokyo and made absolutely no protest when Imperial Army troops seized hundreds of acres of farmland to serve as the test site. Despite efforts by Chinese partisans to infiltrate the area and disrupt the new rocket’s development process, the Japanese were able to carry out the first series of test firings for the Lance of Death largely without incident. During those test firings the launch crews achieved an 85 percent success rate in hitting simulated targets-- a statistic that duly impressed the generals in Tokyo. The Imperial Navy also took a strong interest in the Lance of Death project, believing that with the right modifications the new weapon could add considerable punch to the already devastating firepower of its main battle fleet.

    Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto, the Imperial Navy’s top naval aviation specialist at the time, had a different vision for the Lance of Death program. He believed the weapon’s true value lay not in supplementing the guns of the battleship but in augmenting the destructive powers of the long-range bombers then in service with the various air branches of the Japanese military. While it was doubtful that such rockets could be available in time for the impending IJN air attack on Pearl Harbor, the admiral and his staff thought they could well come in handy for future naval operations-- not to mention, once the war was over, acting as an effective strategic deterrent against any attempts by the Western powers to recover their lost territories or bases.

      The Soviets for their own part, were taking a decidedly different approach to the development of rockets as a strategic weapon. Stalin, in his typical sledgehammer approach to solving problems, had decreed that the Red Army should assume full control of the Soviet rocket development program and that any ballistic weapon which emerged as a result of that program should be deployed first and foremost to clear out the hordes of Nazi troops that were attempting to seize Moscow. This was not to say he was totally unaware of what ballistic missiles could potentially do to a city-- on the contrary, from the minute the first V-1 attacks had rained fire and death on Moscow he'd resolved to return the favor and inflict a similar terror on Berlin....

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

comments powered by Disqus

To Be Continued

Site Meter

View My Stats