Dan Snow's History Hit - V2 with Robert Harris

Episode Date: September 21, 2020

Robert Harris joined me on the podcast to talk about Nazi Germany and the story of the V2 rocket.Subscribe to History Hit and you'll get access to hundreds of history documentaries, as well as every single episode of this podcast from the beginning (400 extra episodes). We're running live podcasts on Zoom, we've got weekly quizzes where you can win prizes, and exclusive subscriber only articles. It's the ultimate history package. Just go to historyhit.tv to subscribe. Use code 'pod1' at checkout for your first month free and the following month for just £/€/$1.

Hello, everybody. Welcome to Dan Snow's History Hit. We've got an absolute corker. We've got one of the, we've got a rock star, a global rock star of writing historical fiction. He's been doing it for 30 years. He's had monster bestsellers. They've made movies out of his books. They've made all sorts of things. He's famous for Fatherland, a book imagining what would happen if Germany had won the Second World War. He's Robert Harris. He's just written a new book, V2. It's out now. It's about the terror weapon, the V2, that pummeled London, the ballistic rocket,

carrying a one-ton warhead at three times the speed of sound that Hitler believed would win the war, but in fact did nothing of the kind. Probably hastened Germany's defeat in the war, for reasons you're about to hear. Robert Harris is a brilliant novelist, a brilliant commentator, brilliant writer. Enjoy this podcast. If you want to listen to other podcasts about the Second World War, of course, we've got lots in our back catalogue available at HistoryHit.tv.

You go to HistoryHit.tv, use the code POD1, P-O-D-1, and then you get a month for free, and then you get your second month for just one pound, euro or dollar. And that's got a whole season on there about the Battle of Britain at the moment if you want to watch programs listen to podcasts about the bombardment of London in 1940 and it has also got where it's got programs from all different periods of history more going on all the time so please go and check that out in the meantime everybody enjoy listening to Robert Harris. Robert, thank you very much for coming on the podcast. A pleasure, Dan. Lovely to be here. I have read two of your books this summer.

I obviously read very kindly you sent me your V2 book, but I also picked up your Papal Conclave book, and both of them left me feeling, you know, hugely inferior. Your grasp of such different periods and different vibes. How long is your, what is your research process? Well, for Conclave, it was about six months. And for V2, probably a little bit longer, because I've been thinking about writing the book for four years. I mean, I was doing other things. I'd just finished Conclave when I started, when I had the idea for it. But I immerse myself in everything that I can read and I go to places if I possibly can. And that's the pleasure of it, really. The research

is just going into another world. I don't know, it suits my temperament. And do you feel you're on pretty comfortable ground now with the Third Reich? I mean, you've written quite a few now. Is it easy to return and you have a sort of working knowledge of the SS and things? Or do you like striking out into new territory? Well, I certainly do know from fatherland days, which was a lot of research. I really, at that time, I think I did know quite a lot about the social structure of the Third Reich and how it worked. And yeah, the information has stood me in good stead. On the other hand, of course, this is quite a technical book, and I didn't know much about rockets and so on. I knew about Berlin, but I didn't know much about rockets. Yes, well, you get the word parabola in, which is one of the greatest words in the

English language. Yes, it's great. I mean, it reminded me of writing another of my earlier novels, Enigma, in that I had to try and get my head around mathematics, which is not something I'm particularly good at. But I briefly glimpsed how an Enigma machine works and how it was broken. And with this, I did briefly glimpse how you could calculate the trajectory of a rocket. Well, you made me briefly glimpse it, so I assumed you were fully on top of it. What I enjoyed about this book was learning the politics of the V2 programme. I mean, was it more expensive than the Manhattan Project?

It was, yes. And obviously because the German war economy was much smaller than the Americans, effectively the Germans spent far more on developing what was in the end a spectacular and astonishing technical achievement but of very little war-winning potential at all. In fact, none whatever.

So it was one of the great wasted resources of all time in terms of what was done. It repaid itself, ironically, 25 years later, when the Americans landed on the moon, because the Wernher von Braun obviously headed that technology program, and it was based on the V2 essentially to the victor so the germans successfully the third right put the first man-made object into space well by some by some definitions but then what i liked about it i didn't realize that actually even within the third right you you say that elements of the castapo and the ss were bloody furious about this waste but they could see that von braun had actually quite a different agenda he wasn't that interested in

winning the war he was very interested in putting someone in space. Yeah, that's absolutely right. One can be cynical about Von Braun, and he was certainly quite amoral. He reminds me rather of Albert Speer, who was a friend of his. I think they were quite similar men. But he was not really a Nazi. He was just a fanatic for getting into space. And yeah, the SS woke up in about 1942 to the fact that already this enormous project

was about to get even bigger because Hitler was about to back it as a response to Stalingrad. And from that point on, the SS took very close notice. And once the British had bombed Peenemonde, it was the SS who really took over because they built the factory and the new testing ground for it. And they had by that time already monitored von Braun and various other scientists talking disparagingly about the war, saying that they would lose it, the V2 wasn't a proper weapon, the main thing was to think about the post-war world. And von Braun and several others were arrested and held by the Gestapo for two weeks. And only Speer's direct intervention with Hitler managed to get them released. They were pretty lucky not to be shot, in fact, I would say.

And this, you know, this was a kind of get out of jail free card in a way for von Braun at the end of the war. He could always turn around to the Americans and say, well, look, you know, they came after me as well. Talk to me about von Braun, because he is not the narrator of your book, but in some ways a central protagonist. And he is aristocratic, he's glamorous, and obsessed with space from the cradle. Yes, I mean, he's a figure in the novel, and I invented my German rocket scientist as a close friend of his

from the age of 16 onwards, because that's really when von Braun started getting into rockets, fooling around with them. He had made a rocket-powered pram, I think, and sat in it and went hurtling down the street. And then they moved to a test facility, which they got, test facility really, just a scrap of waste ground to the north of Berlin where they used to play around with rockets. And von Braun's father had been Minister of Agriculture in the von Papen government just before Hitler came to power and was well connected. And he seems to have spoken to the army. And the army came and had a look at what these kids were doing. And they were interested enough to start putting money into it.

And then when Hitler came to power, and money was no object, essentially, for the Wehrmacht, then really, the Luftwaffe and the army put a huge amount of money into developing this facility at Peenemunde. And the thing about von Braun was that he was charismatic. He was good looking. He looked like a kind of archetypal Aryan superman, really. He was not only a good engineer himself, a dirty hands engineer, as they call them in Germany. That is, he worked in the Borsig locomotive factory. He knew how to put things

together but he was also a brilliant project leader I mean assembling a vast team and organizing them and a salesman and these this combination of qualities was really what powered the whole project so I I find him an absolutely fascinating figure lucky uh in the end not to be prosecuted for complicity in war crimes. But then he had the key to the technology that everybody wanted in 1945. I want to come to sort of crimes and his culpability in a minute. But you give the impression that he was very interested in going to space, and he didn't really care who he had to work with. Where do we get that impression from? And also, what was he thinking when he developed these rockets? He wasn't prioritising

a weapon that could destroy central London, was he? No, no, not at all. I mean, he was genuinely, even a fan of science fiction, the Fritz Lang Filmfrau in Monde, he said in, I think it was 1928, or certainly, he said, the man who will walk on the moon has now been born. And it was, in fact, about the same time that Neil Armstrong was born. He was a visionary, but he was more than willing to play the part to get the resources for the project. So he joined the Nazi party in 1937. He was given honorary rank in the SS. And Himmler certainly, I wouldn't say took him under his wing, but certainly inserted himself into von Braun's life. And von Braun, I think, simply regarded this as the price you had to pay

if you were going to get on in the Third Reich, just as you had to join the Communist Party if you were going to get anywhere in the Soviet Union. I don't think he was an ideological Nazi, but I think he was willing to turn a blind eye to the crimes. He was a technocrat, essentially, and in a way a genius, I suppose. And I think that geniuses regard themselves as not bound necessarily by ordinary human laws.

Well, I think we may have a few geniuses at work in the British political system at the moment, self-identified. Lasers are often said to be a sort of technology without a use. At what stage did von Braun kind of go, I know we can use rockets to deliver munitions? Like, you know, was there a sort of, was there a eureka moment? It was conceived as a weapon right from the start. I mean, you know, from the moment that von Braun and his team, small, very small, two or three to begin with, went to the Kummersdorf military

proving ground where the Germans tested ammunition. From that point, it was pretty clear that they were thinking about a weapon. The man who was put in charge of the programme, Dornberger, Walter Dornberger, was an old artillery man from the First World War. And his obsession was with the Paris gun, you know, that shelled Paris and I think flew about 60 miles, 70 miles, I'm not sure, but something like that. Lobbing projectiles. And so they sort of saw the V2 as this kind of extension of that from the beginning,

which was kind of crazy because it could never carry more than a one-ton payload and a Lancaster bomber could carry six tons, a single bomber. And they were limited with the size of rocket they could build because they needed it to be transportable on the roads and the rails so the British had a nightmare that the Germans were building a 40 ton rocket with a 10 ton warhead the V2 was a kind of fully laden 12 ton rocket with a one ton warhead and that was lucky for us but it was never going to be and I'm sure von Braun knew perfectly well it was never going to be a particularly effective'm sure von Braun knew perfectly well, it was never going to be a particularly effective weapon. It couldn't be radio guided because they worked out correctly

that the British might be able to jam the radio guidance system. So it was ballistic, which meant that although they had very sophisticated gyroscopes to control the flight, control the rudders and the fins and so on, it was a pretty crude weapon. They lobbed it at Charing Cross Station and anything within five miles of charing cross station was considered on target well you know they crashed into the north sea near albra they crashed in st albans they crashed you know it went all over the place and we were very lucky the british were very lucky that it didn't actually hit any of the great buildings in Whitehall or Westminster.

But fortunately, you know, it tended to either overshoot or undershoot. It was impossible to interdict. Yes, you couldn't do a thing. It was launched from mobile trailers. That was the stroke of real genius because the British thought it would be launched from a huge Hitlerite bunker, which is what Hitler himself wanted. But they made it, they put it on mobile trailers and it could be launched from woods, a small clearing in the woods. It only needed a platform five feet wide. So it was impossible to spot it from the air. It took about three hours to fuel it and for it to

take off. It took five minutes to hit London from the coast of Holland. It reached a height of 60 miles. It was travelling at 3,500 miles an hour. And by the time it hit London, it had slowed slightly, but it was still twice the speed of sound. So you wouldn't even see it from the ground when it was coming in. It was too fast. And there was no way of shooting it down. You had insufficient warning and there was no way you could hide

and you never knew where it was going to land in any case. So it was a terror weapon that it was impossible to stop. It had absolutely no impact whatsoever on the course of the Second World War. No, I think it's fair to say that the only impact it might have had is the diversion of resources, which the Germans might have been better put into tanks or aircraft. So it may even have shortened the war slightly because the resources were huge. I mean, five, six billion dollars worth of resources in the money of that time.

It didn't deliver a big enough payload to make a real difference. They fired 1,300 of them at London. Hitler had wanted to fire 10,000, although at one point they were building them on every 90 minutes they could still they could never reach such an arsenal an armada of v2s as that and it didn't kill many people relative to the effort it killed in london 2 700 people which is a lot of people but it's nothing compared to what bomber command were doing every night over over german cities it did do a lot of damage because it struck the earth so fast that the shock waves radiated out as much as a quarter of a mile. And it's said, an almost unbelievable figure, that 600,000 buildings were damaged by V2s and that it was a major contributory factor to the post-war housing shortage.

shortage. Land a Viking longship on island shores, scramble over the dunes of ancient Egypt, and avoid the Poisoner's Cup in Renaissance Florence. Each week on Echoes of History, we uncover the epic stories that inspire Assassin's Creed. We're stepping into feudal Japan in our special series, Chasing Shadows, where samurai warlords and shinobi spies teach us the tactics and skills needed not only to survive, but to conquer. Whether you're preparing for Assassin's Creed Shadows or fascinated by history and great stories, listen to Echoes of History, a Ubisoft podcast brought to you by History Hits. There are new episodes every week. Well, you mention it. There are people that killed on the ground in the UK. I mean, it may well have killed more slave labourers in the factories and conditions in which it was made

because by the end of the war, and you refer to this in your book, it was appalling scenes in the kind of underground factories where they were constructed. Yes, the plan originally had been to build a V2 at Peenemunde, where it was actually being developed. And they did have the first of three huge factories, assembly buildings, going up when the RAF bombed it. Well, it was clear that they'd have to move from there after the summer of 1943. So the

SS had access to this factory, or it wasn't then a factory, it was a mine with mine shafts about a mile long tunnels. And it was in the Harz Mountains, central Germany, completely impregnable for Allied attack. They built this factory by using maybe 40,000 slave laborers they simply brought people in from concentration camps all around gave them no accommodation no shelter of any sort and just made them work until they dropped until they had dug tunnels right the way through this mountain with galleries and these were giant these were these had to higher. The V2 was 46 feet high and these tunnel roofs were higher than that. They were 50, 60 feet high and as wide. So it was a giant project. And 20,000 men died, most of them during that construction process because they were worked to death and typhus ran through them all, and it was a really serious war crime. I should think the biggest slave labour project in modern European history. But it worked. I mean, raw materials came in one end on railway trains

and finished V2s went out the other. It was an astonishing achievement in the fifth year of the war to build a factory to build ballistic missiles from scratch, but at an appallingly savage cost. Four to five times as many people were killed building the factory as were killed by the rockets that the factory produced. And now let's talk about von Braun. I mean, he knew all that. I mean, he was... Well, he was head of production and he had an office at the factory. So it's pretty hard to

imagine that he somehow didn't notice 30 or 40,000 people building it. And so he is deeply complicit. In that case, at the end of the war, without, I don't want to give away the end of the book, but there's a sort of beauty parade where the poor old British, the poor old declining British empire thinks, oh, we might launch a massive rocket programme. And they try and convince him with a few dry sandwiches

to come to the UK, when it's obvious he's going to go to the US. Is that correct? Yes. In September 1945, the closing chapter of the novel, von Braun came to London with some senior engineers to be wooed by the British. They'd actually really already done the deal with the Americans. And it was pitiful. The Americans captured 100 V2s. The British had, I think, two or three. And as one of the characters says,

we have the craters. That's effectively the British share of the spoils. And they were lodged, the scientists flew from Munich. They were lodged in Wimbledon in an army facility and were driven through Wandsworth, which was very badly hit by the V2, to the air ministry. And they stopped at traffic lights next to a bombsite that had been caused by a V2. stopped at traffic lights next to a bomb site that had been caused by a V2. And von Braun was inquiring about the strike and regretful that all the debris had been cleared because he couldn't properly see how the V2 had hit London. And that's the sort of man he was, you know, quite dispassionately and coldly in a country that had been hit badly by this weapon, inquiring about it. And yes, he obviously turned down the British offer.

And von Braun and certainly more than 100 scientists went to New Mexico, to the proving grounds where they'd just tested the atom bomb. And their job essentially was to develop an American V2, which they could put an atom bomb on the end of, which is what he proceeded to do. But again, always with space in mind. His culpability, the Americans have said, well, that's them's the brakes. Well, I think, yeah, I think in those days, there was a totally different attitude to it. I mean, obviously, he would deny any knowledge of war crimes. There was quite a

well-attested case of him hitting one of the slave labourers who was standing on part of the fuselage or something or at least this I think he was a Frenchman claimed that von Braun had hit him but otherwise there was nothing there was no direct link and I think the Americans kind of shut it down I mean that you know they needed these guys the Russians were now the enemy the Russians have got captured Peenemunde itself and they had a man called Grotrup who was a communist when he was at Peenemunde who worked on their space program. So you know it was realpolitik and it wasn't until the 1970s that people really began to pay attention to what had happened at Nordhausen and the Dora facility and then von Braun might have been in trouble if things had gone on, but he died in the

1970s. Arthur Rudolph, who was a very senior man in the Peenemunde program, and then in NASA, did actually have to leave America to avoid extradition. So history caught up with them at the end, but interestingly, not until they had landed the man on the moon. You're very careful in the book to say that all the events you describe are true. I'm being sensitive, I don't want to ruin the book, but did they fire the V2s at the British team? Because I remember Rommel saying, please fire the V2s at places like Portsmouth,

where supplies are heading into France. But they just hammered London, did they? They were just a sort of terror weapon. It was a terror weapon, it was a crude weapon. I mean, you know, it's like barely hit a barn door with it, as it were. You know, you needed a huge area, something of the size of London, to be sure of getting, you know, missiles onto it. Interestingly, the one time they had to suspend the firing at London was during Operation Market Garden, when Camler, the SS man in charge, the general in charge of the whole thing, was very nearly caught by the Allies.

And they pulled out of the Hague and moved further up the coast. And they couldn't hit London. They were at the very extreme edge of the range as it was. And they fired at Norfolk. I mean, can you think of a more pointless thing to do with a 100,000 mark rocket than to lob it at Norfolk? But that's what they did. And then when Market Garden failed, they were able to move back into The Hague.

And that's really when the intensive bombardment of London started, which is what I reflect in the novel. That's when they were getting up to seven, eight, nine rockets being fired a day. And in response to that, the British came up with this scheme of sending eight WAF officers to newly liberated Belgium, which was 70 miles to the south of the point where the rockets were being fired from. Here they installed high-looking radars, which meant that very briefly, for a few seconds, they could plot the trajectory of the V2 after it had taken off.

And when they had the point of impact in London, they could use these two coordinates and calculate back the parabolic curve to the point where the rockets had been launched. That was the theory. And a description of that in an obituary of one of the women involved is what made me want to write the novel. I just thought that was a fantastic story. I'll be interested for you as a novelist. I find as a history broadcaster recently, I'm focusing more and more on the role of women in the Second World War. And I assume that I'm just being influenced by what's going on around me, the dialogue in our culture. Is that something that attracted you to about, attracted you about this story? The fact that you've got

forgotten, overlooked women doing a, you know, extremely important job very near the front line in a way that perhaps when we were growing up, didn't think about women in the second world war i think to some degree that's true most of my books are about people who are outsiders slightly in big organizations you know pushing against things finding it difficult and for me it's a i've never really written a book where the woman has such a strong role in it and for me, one of the attractions was that this would be a person who was pushing against the organisation as it were and that one is immediately sympathetic to someone in that position.

It wasn't that I had a political agenda that I want to highlight the role of women in the war. I was just naturally quite interested in a young woman with obviously quite a sheltered life, taken to a grass runway in Belgium, driven into this newly liberated town in the middle of winter, in the darkness, billeted on a strange family. The Germans had only just left

and there were still German sympathisers around. And then having to make these calculations in this bank vault vault they were told they had six minutes to make the calculations because if they could do that within six minutes then the RAF could scramble Spitfire bombers fighter bombers from Coltishall over the Dutch coast in time to attack the launchers before they would fully manage to get away clear that was the theory so I just thought that that was a very interesting role for a woman and the woman whose life story I or the insights into this I borrowed a woman called Eileen Younghusband my character bears no relationship to her not least because I have her as a photo reconnaissance officer

rather than a filter room WAF. But, you know, that was the inspiration for it. What's next for Robert Harris? I would quite like to get on with a new book, especially if we're going to have another winter of lockdown. Kate kept me sane slightly writing this one during the last lockdown. I have a few ideas. I only finished this in June, so, you know, it's early days to actually be starting something. But, you know, no, I'd like to get on with another one. Are you wedded to certain periods over others? Well, I'm seeing myself as a political novelist, perhaps above all. I deliberately wrote the novels about Cicero as a

means of writing about politics, the timeless laws of politics. And I see the Second World War as something that still influences our politics and our society today, the technology, that we live in the shadow of the war. And you can't really understand what's going on in the world that we now live in without some knowledge of the Second World War, whether it be Britain's relationship with Europe or whatever. So I don't see myself as writing novels about longbow men and that sort of thing. I see the sort of novels that I write being very much to do with the modern world, if you can understand what I mean. So I would love to find a historical subject that is some reflection or tells us something about how we're living today.

That's when the light goes off in my head. Well, I think your Officer and a Spy about Dreyfus was a great example of that. That sent chills through me with the sort of witch hunt and fake news and the populism and nationalism of the time. Yeah, nothing changes. I mean, I think that that's one of the lessons that I've taken over nearly 30 years of writing fiction, that humanity doesn't really change and the ways we fall into society and organise ourselves don't really change. And it's incredibly useful to go back to periods and look at them as a means of writing and thinking about the present.

I mean, you know, we've both been interested in the First and Second World Wars. We both remember how they both began with people saying it will all be over by Christmas. It's like a kind of human response to some cataclysmic upheaval in your own life. We've seen exactly the same phrases and exactly the same rhythms with this pandemic, you know, and now we're moving into the grim settling down phase which happened in those two wars. Well, thank you, Robert Harris. This one is called? It's called V2. It's published by Hutchinson, priced £20 and available from all good booksellers. There you go, everybody. Go and check out V2. It's a great book. Thank you very much for coming to the podcast,

Robert. Thanks, Dan. I enjoyed it a lot. Hi everyone, it's me, Dan Snow. Just a quick request. It's so annoying, and I hate it when other podcasts do this, but now I'm doing it, and I hate myself. Please, please go onto iTunes, wherever you get your podcasts, and give us a five-star rating and a review. It really helps, and basically boosts up the chart,

which is good, and then more people listen, which is nice. So if you could do that, I'd be very grateful. I understand if you don't want to subscribe to my TV channel. I understand if you don't want to buy my calendar, but this is free. Come on, do me a favour. Thanks.