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This Day in Alternate History Blog | Is Moscow Burning? Part 4 By Chris Oakley
Summary: In the first three parts of this series we reviewed the chain of events leading up to the first Nazi V-weapon attacks against Moscow and Leningrad in late 1941; the Allied reactions to those attacks; and the first Japanese experiments with ballistic missile technology in the months leading up to Pearl Harbor. In this chapter, we'll look back at the British government's installation of an auxiliary rocket test site in the Australian outback and the first operational use of the Soviets' Red Star ballistic rocket. ****** Since the end of World War II there's been an intense running debate among historians about which was the more significant early turning point in the Eastern Front campaign: the maiden Red Star rocket attack against German army positions in occupied Russia in the spring of 1942 or the Red Army's attack on and eventual victory over the German 6th Army during the winter of 1942-43. But regardless of which side of the debate one stands on, both sides agree the former helped to hasten the latter. Besides the heavy material damage the first Red Star bombardment inflicted on German troops and bases, the realization that the Soviets could now fire rockets of their own against the Reich was a sharp kick to the collective guts of the German armed forces. The previously unassailable morale of the Reich's soldiers, sailors, and airmen took a direct hit-- and so did the Führer's confidence in ultimate German victory over the Soviets, although he would never admit to feeling even a slight twinge of doubt on this score. Up until the accession of Nikita Khrushchev to the Soviet premiership in 1955, the official Communist legend about the Soviet rocket campaign in World War II claimed Stalin himself had personally launched the first Red Star rocket against the Germans. Like most of the other legends regarding Stalin's life, the truth was far different; not only had Stalin not fired that historic first shot, but recently discovered reports in the archives of the modern Russian defense ministry suggest Stalin wasn't even aware of the launch until a Red Army general staff courier notified him of it three and a half hours after it happened. Not until after Stalin's death in 1953 did the truth about the first Red Star missile attack start to emerge, and even today there's still a great deal of uncertainty regarding some of the most crucial details about the debut rocket bombardment of German soldiers in Russia. This much is true beyond a doubt: the first Red Star missile attack happened on April 23rd, 1942 at 5:30 AM Moscow time and was directed at a Wehrmacht forward position northwest of the Soviet capital. A Munich man who was a sergeant with a grenadier battalion on the Russian front at the time of the attack would later remember that “the sky itself was on fire” as the rockets started exploding around him and his comrades. This wasn’t an exaggeration, or at least not a significant one-- some of the Red Star rockets fired at the German lines that day were carrying gasoline warheads meant to burst open above the German positions and start fires that would theoretically burn the German soldiers out of their positions. Stalin had decreed that the “fascist hordes” ought to get a dose of their brutal and grotesque medicine, and the Red Star development team had been more than willing to comply with his demands on that score; one can only imagine the carnage that might have ensued had they been able to harness atomic power for their rockets’ warheads. As it was, Wehrmacht field hospitals quickly filled to near-capacity with victims of the Soviet rocket strike, many of them suffering second-degree or even third-degree burns. Impressed by the results of the first rocket attack against the German forces, Stalin immediately authorized a second wave of Red Star strikes on Wehrmacht positions outside Moscow. Knowing that images of the Red Army's newest weapon wreaking havoc on the German fascists would be an invaluable boost to civilian morale, he arranged to have propaganda film shot of this second series of rocket bombardments. The cameramen who made these movies were risking their lives to do so, but nonetheless they created a valuable historical record by shooting the earliest known rocket launch footage to be screen for a mass audience. A shortened version of the film was created for screening to foreign audiences and played to massive audiences in much of the Allied world; Orson Welles attended its New York City premiere and proclaimed himself “duly impressed” with the work that went into producing the film. *****
In public Joesph Goebbels dismissed the propaganda film as “garbage”,
but in private he ruefully acknowledged it was bound to give a substantial
boost to Soviet civilian morale. And he was right. Civilian workers threw
themselves into their manufacturing jobs with renewed zeal while Red Army
soldiers became even more aggressive than usual in taking on their German
foes on the battlefield. Sergei Korolev received commendations from Stalin
and Red Army senior commander Marshal Georgi Zhukov and a massive(at least
by Soviet standards) cash bonus for the work he had done to date in making the Red Star Operational.******
While all this was going on, British military engineers had started
to converge on the Australian Outback for the purpose of laying the first
building blocks for an auxiliary rocket testing complex. While Operation
Sealion might have been thwarted, there was still a genuine fear among the
ranks of Churchill's cabinet that the Germans might yet figure out a way
to either destroy or overrun the main development facility. Accordingly, a
secret pact had been signed between Britain and Australia permitting the
British military to construct a secondary test base near the Outback city
of Woomera. Even in the early stages of the Woomera base's construction it
was clear the site was going to be a massive affair; a Japanese diplomat
who toured the Woomera facility in the early 1960s just before it was set
to be decommissioned would express genuine astonishment it had never been
discovered by his country's military intelligence agents during the war.It took an army to get the Woomera base operational-- or to be a bit more precise, two battalions of Australian Army engineering corps troops. The construction of an installation designed explicitly for the testing and firing of rockets was something altogether new in the history of the British Commonwealth, but the engineers proved more than up to the task; most of the major groundwork was already completed by the time a British Ministry of Defence inspection team arrived at Woomera in July of 1942 to check on the progress of the base's construction. The rest would be done just as Soviet troops were beginning their attack on von Paulus’ 6th Army at Stalingrad. German intelligence officials had no more idea about what was going on in the Australian Outback than their Japanese cohorts did. Indeed, it might be accurately said in some cases that they had even less idea than the Japanese. A confidential Abwehr report to Hitler drafted in September of 1942 gave a wildly off-the-mark assessment of the state of the Allied rocket development program, stating not only that the Allies were months or even years away from producing a viable ballistic missile but that if Britain's main research facility could be located and destroyed it would effectively spell the end of Allied rocket research. It wasn't the first time the Abwehr had misjudged Allied scientific capabilities, nor would it be the last, but it did eventually prove the most fatal of all of Berlin's miscalculations in regard to Anglo-American rocket development. Once the Woomera complex was fully operational, the development teams stationed there wasted no time getting down to business on perfecting the next generation of ballistic weapons. Out of the sight of whatever prying eyes might seek to learn their secrets, the researchers dived head-first into the twin tasks of creating more accurate guidance systems and making it possible for surface-to-surface missiles to travel longer and faster. The first fruits of their labor blossomed in mid-January of 1943 with the debut test flight of what would later become known as the “Vanguard”(thus dubbed because its main designer expected it to be in the vanguard of the Allied assault on Hitler’s Festung Europa someday). In spite of having an unfortunate tendency to veer off course in mid-flight the initial Vanguard prototypes did well enough in early trials to persuade Churchill to order additional test launches; after some minor revisions to the design of the tailfins, the veering problem largely disappeared and the rocket scored an impressive 90% percent accuracy rate in hitting simulated targets. *****
Back on the Eastern Front, events were moving toward a climax both on
the ground and in the rocket war between the Soviets and the Germans. Even
though they'd spotted the Nazis a considerable head start in the ballistic
weapons arms race, the Soviets had quickly caught up with Germany and were
even starting to pull ahead of Berlin in some respects. Stalin's engineers
were constantly working to improve the Red Star's range and accuracy along
with its destructive power; successors to the Red Star were already on the
drawing boards at Soviet design bureaus and would be ready for preliminary
flight testing by the time the Battle of Kursk was fought in July of 1943.
Among the smaller-scale classes of military rocket in the Soviet inventory
a tough little job known as the Katyusha was exposing German panzers’ most
critical vulnerabilities as almost nothing else had since the Second World
War began. And a particularly ingenious team of ballistics experts working
under Red Air Force supervision was experimenting with the notion of using
air-to-air rockets to knock down enemy fighters. The idea of using rockets
as anti-aircraft weapons, which only a few years earlier had been regarded
as the stuff of Buck Rogers fantasy, was now being taken very seriously by
combat aviation designs in both the Allied and Axis countries; however, it
would ultimately be the Soviets who devised the first practical method for
downing enemy planes utilizing rockets.Test work on the prototype for the first working air-to-air rocket, nicknamed the "Hedgehog" by its creators, began in late July of 1943 at a remote airfield in Kazakhstan. Early results didn't look promising as the pilots conducting the test firings missed at least half of their shots at simulated targets. Stalin, not the most patient of men in the first place, flew into a rage over these setbacks and threatened to have every last one of the unlucky pilots court-martialed for their failure. Given that Soviet military court-martials often ended with defendants being sentenced to die by firing squad, the pilots were understandably desperate to avoid meeting such an unpleasant fate....
To Be Continued
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