let 'em eat amotal

[Paul Mackin]

Haven't read Irving's _The Mare's Nest_, but does anyone find it
slightly puzzling that the Allies would risk the use of  
doctored feedback on V-2 hits (made possible by having cracked the 
German code and turning agents) to attempt a dubious retargeting of
V-2s? Even that late in the war, the cracked code was still the Allies
most important secret, wasn't it?

As important as the rocket program was to our favorite novelist, and
in real life to the post- and cold-war worlds, the short-term effect of the 
V-2s on winning the war was trivial according to accounts I have read. 
(Assuming you weren't the poor soul who got hit.) This was well appreciated
at the time by the military and civilians alike, not just in retrospect.
I personally remember its being discussed. 

Michael J. Neufeld's _The Rocket and the Reich_ (1995) sums up
the V-2s as mainly a nuisance to the war effort even though in some
horrible instances a hit would kill a hundred persons.

Neufeld does make an exception to the only-a-nuisance theory in the case
of East London (and Antwerp), though even there it was never a threat to 
final victory. Could Allied authorities have thought that by some kind of 
near miraculous fine tuning they could hold the damage mainly to the East 
End and avoid more than a nuisance to May Fair? And would it have been worth 
possibly tipping off the Germans about Enigma and their turned spies?

Just wondering, no strong opinion.

Incidently, Neufeld did much of the original research that went into
his book, but at the same time not infrequently cites Irving's book as a 
source. For example, with regard to German expeditures on the program
(proportionally about equal to the Manhattan Project), use of slave 
labor, and reaction to Allied air attacks on Peenemunde.

With regard to slave labor, Neufeld says this was the one uniquely
Nazi apect of the rocket program. Not clear whether this would have
been Irving's view. Would love to know what is on pp. 56-58 of _The
Mare's Nest_.
 
Neufeld is not an ideologue of any stripe. Maybe Irving is considered
reliable and indispensible on certain factual, German matters.

				P.   


On Wed, 27 Mar 1996, Dennis Jones wrote:

>         Seeing the rockets, falling predominantly "all over the fucking East 
> End" Thomas Gwenhidwy gives us and a disbelieving Pointsman his vision of 
> the City Paranoic: a  buffer zone of preterite lives "meant to go down 
> first".[GR p.173 Pelican Ed.] "what if the city were a growing neoplasm, 
> across the centuries, always chang-ing, to meet exactly the chang-ing shape 
> of its very worst se-cret fears? The raggedy pawns, the disgraced bish-op 
> and cowardly knight, all we condemned, we irreversibly lost, are left out 
> here, exposed and wait-ing. It was known, don't deny it - _known_ Pointsman! 
> that the front in Eu-rope someday _must_ develop like  this? move away east, 
> make the rockets necessary, and _known_ how , and where , the rockets would 
> fall short." 
>         There are strong reasons for suspecting that even TP may have fallen 
> short on  the paranoia here. David Irving(e?), in his 'The Mare's Nest', 
> points out that, thanks to their cracking of the Enigma code and using 
> turned agents, the powers that be were able to feed the Germans doctored 
> feedback on rocket explosion sites and thereby convince them that they were 
> overshooting London. Co-ordinates were duly adjusted and the rockets began 
> to rain down on the "east and south of the river too, where all the bugs 
> live"[GR]. They would no doubt argue that, in order to be plausible, the 
> disinformation had to be fairly close to the truth, but was the alternative, 
> undershooting, ever considered? " I say chaps, why don't we tell Jerry that 
> The Great Unwashed are taking a pounding. That way they'll drop the wretched 
> blighters out West in suburbia." A chill silence falls in the Ops Room. 
> "...Um, just an idea,you know."
>         d.j.
> 
> 
>