Hitler's Terror Weapons by Brooks, Geoffrey (the best books of all time TXT) 📕

writing in the Swedish journal Expressen, Mr Hewins reported that the new robot bomb was a hybrid of the V-1 and V-2. It could fly at very high altitude and was very fast. It could be steered better than the V-2, but did not fly as fast or as high as the V-2. It was a flying bomb of the rocket type and could be steered from the ground to a certain extent – “German experts have for long been interested in radio-steering instruments and have been carrying out research in this field”. All very true, but of this advanced flying bomb, a cross of two different species of missile, no evidence exists.

In any case, none of this talk of robot flying bombs in Norway makes sense. Germany had impregnable mountain tops in the Harz, Tirol and other alpine areas. The logical place to try out a new remote-control system, no matter how sophisticated, was Peenemünde. The manufacturing centres of the V-1 were in underground factories dotted around the Reich proper. Supplying even a few dozen V-1 flying bombs by sea to Oslo, and thence by mule and cable-car, to remote mountain peaks in Norway for experimental flights in late 1944 seems ludicrous. As for teleguidance systems, as has been mentioned, serious experiments were made using the Radieschen homing radar and Sauerkirsch radio remote for the V-1 in the last few months of the war. The American peacetime project to build a pilotless bomber based on the V-1, the Martin B-61 Matador, probably with all the German preparatory design papers in front of them, still took a full five years from its inception in 1946.

Of several things we can be tolerably certain. The excavation of the emplacement on a remote mountain peak, and the stringent security measures in force, indicate a project of the highest secrecy, and the two great radio and radar masts in the vicinity suggest a remote-control system. The contents of the hangars could be concealed as easily at ground level as in the clouds: what altitude and cloud provided was secrecy for whatever emerged from the innards of the mountain and took off – either the form of the aircraft or something peculiar about its mode of ascent – which nobody alien to the project could be permitted to see.

The Germans were never going to manhandle their special aircraft even once up that huge mountain: obviously it would fly there under its own power and land on the small apron before the ‘firing hall’. Accordingly, the aircraft can only have been a Fieseler Storch, a helicopter or a flying disc or crescent. Since neither a Storch nor an orthodox helicopter could fly at 40,000 feet and faster than the latest jet fighter, we are left with only one possibility, and all the claims made for it seem true. Overflying Swedish airspace on a north-easterly heading would eventually bring the flying disc or saucer across the polar seas towards – Spitzbergen.

As to whether the proposed Swedish diplomatic protest was ever made in Berlin we do not have the information. What we do know is that in the latter half of 1946 thousands of ‘ghost’ flying bombs described as a cross between a V-1 and V-2 appeared in the skies over Sweden. Newspaper accounts of the time described them as ‘cigar-shaped’ with orange flames issuing from the tail. They were generally seen at night, at low altitudes up to 1000 metres, and estimates of their speed varied “from that of a slow airplane to 500 mph”. Over the period 9 to 30 July 1946, for example, the Swedish military received more than 600 reports. The matter was taken extremely seriously. It was concluded that it must be Germans working for the Russians at Peenemünde who were responsible and it was to help investigate the phenomenon with Swedish Intelligence that USAF General Doolittle arrived in the summer of 1946. As was mentioned earlier in the chapter, his immediate interest was a visit to Spitzbergen, where it was rumoured that the wreckage of a flying disc was to be found, and actually was found.

The ghostly V-1s over Sweden could sometimes be picked up on radar, were not meteors, weather balloons, Venus or any other such natural phenomena and half the Swedish population appears to have seen them. The furore died down once it was clear that these “robot flying bombs” were not doing anything aggressive, they were merely interested in overflying Sweden’s airspace which of course was nothing new. Ten per cent of Sweden’s land surface is under fresh water, and it was not possible to get hold of a single ghostly rocket flying bomb because “all of them fell into the lakes”, although curiously nobody thought that was strange.

This is German humour, and the coincidence here is so great that if the apparitions were not UFOs we would immediately suspect that the Germans had put on the show for a laugh at the Swedes. If, in fact, the Germans were responsible for the UFO activity, the whole thing would become clear.

The German flying saucer assertion quoted earlier in this chapter was made by Senior Engineer Klein, former special adviser to Reich Minister Speer. The curious fact that neither Speer nor Hitler’s Luftwaffe ADC Nicolaus von Below, who was also Speer’s direct liaison officer to Hitler, nor General Koller, last Chief of the Luftwaffe General Staff, ever once mentioned in their copious memoirs the subject of helicopters, of which the German Reich was the world pioneer and had at least sixty operational models, or flying discs, underlines the fact that even on the German side the whole subject was for some reason still taboo decades later.

We require no great stretch of the imagination to see that if a four-foot diameter remote-controlled turtle-shaped object can change into a glowing sphere visible but intangible at altitude, then the same must also be possible for a giant manned VTOL disc. The Germans might not have reached the stage of constructing interplanetary UFOs, but