Operation Crossbow

from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Operation Crossbow ( English for crossbow ) was the code name of a series of Anglo-American operations against all phases of the German long-range weapons programs , against the research and development of weapons, their manufacture, transport and their launch sites and against missiles in flight in the Second World war . The original name was Operation Bodyline . The new code name was set on November 15, 1943. The operation forms the historical background for a British war film of the same name .

history

Aerial view of the V2 test stand test stand VII in Peenemünde

The first news of a German missile program reached Great Britain in November 1939 as a result of the " Oslo Report ". However, it was not until the winter of 1942 to spring 1943 that the Allies gradually realized that the Germans had set up a secret rocket test facility in Peenemünde on Usedom (cf. Army Research Institute Peenemünde and Peenemünde-West ). For this purpose, aerial photo evaluations carried out on RAF Medmenham by allied specialists from the Central Photographic Interpretation Unit , as well as the wiretapping results of two captured German generals, were of great importance. On April 12, 1943, the problem was presented to the British Chiefs of Staff Committee , which decided to have the question dealt with by a special committee headed by Duncan Sandys , Parliamentary Secretary of State in the Ministry of Supply and Winston Churchill's son-in-law . In the period up to the summer of 1943, the following other suspicious systems were identified in northern France:

The first and most obvious step in combating the threat was the destruction of the facilities in Peenemünde, which was carried out as Operation Hydra on the night of August 17-18, 1943 . Shortly beforehand, in September or August 1943, the Allied General Staffs were given precise location sketches or plans for V-1 and V-2 production via the Office of Strategic Services through the Maier-Messner resistance group , which confirmed and supplemented information obtained elsewhere. Further attacks were directed against the IG-Farben works in Leuna and Ludwigshafen , where the production of the special fuel was suspected, and against the Luftschiffbau Zeppelin in Friedrichshafen , which manufactured parts of the control electronics.

V-weapons test and production sites as well as launch areas

In autumn 1943, the relocation of a German special unit, the Flak Regiment 155 (W), from Zempin to northern France was established. On October 28, the first report about a so-called ski site , a launch pad for V1 cruise missiles , was received in a forest near Abbeville . The orientation of the system, which aimed directly at London , was striking . By mid-November, the investigation had progressed so far that Richard Stafford Cripps was able to declare the existence of German V weapons to be probable in a report to the war cabinet . On November 18, responsibility for countermeasures was transferred to the Deputy Chief of the Air Staff, Sir Norman Bottomley , who was advised by a sub-committee of the Joint Intelligence Committee . By the end of November, aerial reconnaissance had discovered 72 other ski sites in the Pas-de-Calais department and seven on the Cotentin peninsula , all within a radius of around 200 kilometers from London. At the same time, the assumption was confirmed that the "short-winged aircraft" already identified on aerial photos of Peenemünde were the expected long-range weapons, which were probably powered by a jet engine.

After the larger bunker systems ( heavy sites ) had been bombed by US aircraft (including the V3 bunker Mimoyecques , the exact purpose of which was still unknown to the Allies at the time), the attacks on the so-called Noball began on December 5, 1943 - Goals, as the ski sites were now called. Aircraft of the RAF Second Tactical Air Force , the RAF Bomber Command and the American Eighth and Ninth Air Force , which operated from January 1944 under the command of Air Chief Marshal Arthur Tedder , were involved. The United States Army Air Forces formed its own Crossbow Committee on December 29, under the director of the New Developments Division of the War Department, Stephen Garrett Henry , and set up a training facility for attack techniques on the ski sites at Eglin Field , Florida . In the first months of 1944, attacks on Noball targets, alongside those on transport targets, became one of the most important tasks of the Allied aircraft operating over France. At the request of the British War Cabinet, the Allied Commander in Chief for Operation Overlord , Dwight D. Eisenhower , decided on April 19 that Operation Crossbow should be the highest priority in Allied air operations after Operation Pointblank . By the eve of Overlord at the end of May, 103 of around 140 ski sites had been destroyed by air raids. Previously, however, it had been determined that the Germans were starting to build new types of launching systems, called modified sites by the Allies , which were more difficult to detect and attack. Often these were disguised as agricultural buildings.

A Spitfire crashes a V1 with its wing
The bunker near Watten after a bomb attack, taken on July 23, 1944 from a low-flying reconnaissance aircraft

On the morning of D-Day , June 6, 1944, Colonel Max Wachtel , commander of Flak Regiment 155 (W), received the order to initiate "Operation Lumber Chamber". The first V1 attacks did not take place until June 12th. After more than 150 V1 fired were counted on the nights of June 15 and 16, the British leadership decided to take countermeasures. The fighters of the No. 11 Group were instructed to operate in three patrol strips south of London against approaching V1. In addition, there was a strong concentration of anti-aircraft guns south and south-east of London and a balloon barrier. The Allied bombing raids were expanded further in July 1944 to include targets such as the loading station in Nucourt (main transhipment point for rockets), the Volkswagen works in Fallersleben (production facility for the V1), the hydrogen peroxide plant in Peenemünde and intermediate storage facilities for rockets in France. On July 21, the newly formed Anglo-American Crossbow Committee held its first meeting, at which further costly attacks on the modified sites were largely discarded, as they proved to be far less effective than operations against the German production and logistics system had.

Duncan Sandys announced to the press on September 7, 1944 the end of the V-arms threat to London. Next to him are William Gell (Balloon Command), Frederick Pile (Anti-Aircraft Command), Brendan Bracken (Ministry of Information) and Roderic Hill (Air-Defense of Great Britain).

By early September the battle of northern France was won and the worst threat to London passed, after most of the launch pads had been captured by Allied ground forces. On September 16, a new, much smaller wave of V1 attacks followed, this time the cruise missiles were fired from bombers of Kampfgeschwader 53 of the Luftwaffe . These attacks continued until January 14, 1945. In March 1945, attacks on London followed from ramps in the occupied Netherlands; the last attack on England was recorded on March 29th. In the period from June 1944 to March 1945, a total of 3,957 V1 cruise missiles were destroyed by countermeasures by the Allied air defense, including over 1,800 each by anti-aircraft guns and fighter planes.

Against the offensive started on September 8, 1944 with the ballistic missile V2 ( unit 4 ) there was no defense - the allies only had to try to prevent the launching of as many of the missiles as possible. The fact that the Germans had relocated their missile test center to Blizna in the Generalgouvernement had been hidden from the Allies for a long time. In the summer of 1944, they received information from the Polish resistance (including parts of the wreckage) that suggested the continuation of the ballistic missile program. In addition, the remains of a V2, which was fired on June 13 in Peenemünde and exploded over Bäckebo , could be acquired by Sweden. A little later, V2 deposits in northern France and small soils were identified. It was assumed that the bunkers in Mimoyecques, Watten, Siracourt and Wizernes were supposed to be used to launch the rockets. In reality, only the bunkers in Watten and Wizernes were intended for the V2. All four locations were subjected to heavy bombing attacks (some with " Tallboy " bombs) several times until ground troops reached them. In addition, several so-called Aphrodite missions were carried out against the facilities with decommissioned bombers filled with explosives. Attempts to interfere with the missiles' suspected radio control signals proved unsuccessful - although initially planned differently, an inertial navigation system was eventually used on the V2 .

Allied hopes to get the missile launch site under control in the western Netherlands at an early stage faded in September 1944 after Operation Market Garden . The reconnaissance of the main production site of the V2 in the Harz ( Mittelwerk GmbH ) did not bring the Allies any advantage, as the underground facilities were practically unassailable. As an alternative, attacks on transport targets in the Netherlands, carried out by the 2nd Tactical Air Force, were chosen. However, the British government long shied away from attacking the densely populated areas of the Netherlands where the missiles and their crews were suspected to be housed. Bad weather and the Battle of the Bulge also prevented many missions. It was not until the end of January that the British achieved greater success with the destruction of the liquid oxygen production facilities in Alblasserdam and Loosduinen by fighter bombers. The V2 attacks on England finally ended on March 27, 1945 when the last of 1,115 rockets was counted. The last attack on Antwerp took place three days later .

See also

literature

  • Christopher Campell: Target London: Under Attack from the V-weapons during WWII. Little, Brown, London 2012, ISBN 978-1-4087-0292-5 .
  • Basil Collier: The battle of the V-weapons 1944–1945. Hodder and Stoughton, London 1964.
  • Wesley Frank Craven, James Lea Cate: The Army Air Forces in World War II. Europe: ARGUMENT to VE Day, January 1944 to May 1945. Office of Air Force History, Chicago 1951 ( online version ).
  • Heinz Dieter Hölsken: The V weapons: development, propaganda, war effort. Deutsche Verlags-Anstalt, Stuttgart 1984, ISBN 3-421-06197-1 .
  • Hilary St. George Saunders : Royal Air Force 1939-1945, Volume III: The Fight is Won. HMSO, London 1954 ( online version ).
  • Roy M. Stanley: V-weapons Hunt: Defeating German Secret Weapons. Pen & Sword, Barnsley 2010, ISBN 978-1-84884-259-5 .
  • Allan Williams: Operation Crossbow: The Untold Story of Photographic Intelligence and the Search for Hitler's V Weapons. Random House, 2013, ISBN 978-1-4090-5173-2 .

Web links

Commons : Operation Crossbow  - collection of images, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Benjamin King, Timothy Kutta: Impact: The History Of Germany's V Weapons in World War II. Da Capo Press, 2009, ISBN 0-7867-5167-3 , p. 124 f.
  2. ↑ Generals Ludwig Crüwell and Wilhelm Ritter von Thoma who were captured in North Africa , cf. Sönke Neitzel : German Generals in British Captivity 1942–1945. In: Vierteljahrshefte für Zeitgeschichte , 52nd volume (2004), pp. 289–348, here p. 294.
  3. ^ Peter Pirker: Subversion of German Rule: The British War Intelligence Service SOE and Austria . Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht , Göttingen 2012, ISBN 978-3-89971-990-1 , p. 253 ( limited preview in Google Book search).
  4. ^ Saunders: The Fight is Won , p. 153.
  5. ^ John F. Kreis (Ed.): Piercing the Fog: Intelligence and Army Air Forces Operations in World War II. Air Force History and Museums Program, Washington DC 1996, ISBN 0-16-048187-2 , pp. 222 f.
  6. ^ Saunders: The Fight is Won , p. 169.