pulverized. The Japanese, however, routinely built bunkers that resisted anything but a direct hit from a 16-inch naval gun. Bigger than the LCT (R) and less specialized was the LSM (Landing Ship Medium) which was armed with guns as well as rockets and could also carry troops.
Some landing craft were truly amphibious. One of these was the DUKW or Duck (nobody today is sure what the initials originally stood for). The Duck was a three-quarter-ton truck — an amazingly surefooted vehicle itself — surrounded by a boat hull. The Duck could take equipment, supplies or infantry from ship to beach and continue on to the firing line. A few Ducks are still running. One of them takes sightseers on the roads and waterways of Washington, D.C.
Even more impressive was the LVT (Landing Vehicle Tracked), better known as the Alligator. It was a modification of the original Alligator, a swamp rescue vehicle developed in 1935. The Alligator was an amphibious tank and the star of many U.S. Marine Corps landings in the Pacific. It was propelled by scores of small paddles on it tractor treads. Alligators performed a variety of chores.
Some carried infantry, some carried supplies, some acted as light tanks, and others as self-propelled guns. Some were armored, some were equipped with turrets and the 37 mm gun of the M 3 light tank (Stuart tank to the British), and others carried a 75 mm howitzer. All of them, in spite of the guns and armor, were light enough to float and seaworthy enough to make a sometimes lengthy trip from an anchored troop ship to the beach of a Pacific atoll.
The expertise and weapons the United States had been developing in the Pacific were applied to the Mediterranean and Europe between the end of 1942 and 1944. The landings in Vichy French North Africa, being practically unopposed, presented no big problem. The landings on Sicily the next year, though, brought a demonstration of amphibious warfare technology new to the European continent. There had been sea landings there before, of course. The Germans had landed in several places in Norway in 1940, but given their overwhelming air superiority, they had no need for anything fancy. The British had been working on specialized landing craft for some time, but their raid on the French port of Dieppe in August 1942 was a disaster. More than half of the attacking force was killed or captured and they were never able to achieve their objective — taking and holding the port for a limited time.
June 6, 1944 saw The Big One — the D-day landing in Normandy. In addition to the aerial bombardment and bombardment by both U.S. and British naval ships, the landing craft were supported by four LCGs (Landing Craft Gun) firing 4.7 inch guns and 17 LCT(R)s blasting the beach with rockets.
D day in Normandy saw the largest amphibious operation in history, made possible by the swarm of specialized landing craft that had been developed. It seems unlikely that a larger such operation will be needed in the foreseeable future.
Chapter 47
Shooting Across Oceans: ICBMs and Cruise Missiles
On June 13, 1944, people in London heard a peculiar buzzing sound.
When they looked up, they saw a small airplane traveling across the sky at high speed. Then the plane’s engine stopped and it plunged to the ground. There was a terrific explosion. People were still wondering where the plane came from and what happened to it, when another plane just like the first appeared, and as the first did, crashed into the city and exploded. That was followed by another, then another, then several of the little planes. All crashed and exploded.
The V 1 attack had been launched.
For the first time, it was possible to bombard a target at distances beyond the range of even such hopped-up artillery as the 1918 “Paris gun.” The German were using unpiloted planes — really flying bombs powered by pulse- jet engines (the only time that type of engine has ever been used in combat). The Germans called the “buzz bombs” (British nickname) Vergelstungwaffe eins. To the rest of the world, the flying bomb was the V 1 — Hitler’s first “vengeance weapon.” It was also, although the name had not yet been invented, the world’s first cruise missile.
The V 1 caught the British public by surprise and inflicted heavy damage at first. The flying bombs directed at England destroyed 25,000 houses and killed 6,184 people, almost all in London. It was, however, hardly the ultimate weapon.
It had to be launched from a catapult — the only way its pulse-jet engine could be made to start. It cruised at about 3,000 feet, easily within range of antiaircraft guns as well as fighter planes. It was fast for a plane of those days — 559 miles per hour. It was a jet, after all. But it flew in a straight line and wasn’t so fast that slightly slower (about 100 mph slower) fighter planes couldn’t shoot it down. By August 1944, Allied fighters and antiaircraft guns were shooting down 80 percent of the V 1s.
The next month, Londoners got another surprise — a nastier one than the first. The V 2s arrived. They arrived without warning. No noise announced their coming, and there was nothing to see. The first notice of their coming was a terrific explosion. The V 2 (the Germans called it the A 4) was a quantum leap ahead, technologically, of the V 1. It was a liquid-fueled rocket with a program-mable guidance system — a product of years of research into both space travel and weaponry. It was launched straight up, into outer space and described a high arc. Then its rocket engine stopped and it fell toward its target, powered only by gravity. That was enough to give it far more than supersonic speed, so there was no warning sound as there was with the “buzz bomb.” And it arrived so fast it was practically invisible.
The main brain behind the V 2 was a scientist named Werner von Braun, who had been fascinated by the idea of space travel as a youth and built rockets as a teenager. Von Braun, it seems, had little interest in anything but rocket technology. Politics meant nothing to him. He just wanted to build rockets.
What was done with them did not concern him. In 1932, he met an old artilleryman named Walter Dornberger. Dornberger, too, had an interest in rockets, but his reasons were different from von Braun’s. The Treaty of Versailles had forbid-den Germany from having any heavy artillery, but it said nothing about rockets.
Dornberger saw that rockets could substitute for artillery. One result was Germany’s profusion of traditional solid-fuel rockets like the Nebelwerfer. Braun was not particularly interested in short-range solid fuel rockets. He had been working on liquid-fuel rockets, using an inflammable liquid combined with liquid oxygen — a system American, Robert Goddard, had pioneered a little earlier.
Dornberger, too, was interested in long-range rockets — at least, rockets with a longer range than the “Paris gun.” The Paris gun, the ultimate long-range artillery piece, he said, would throw 25 pounds of high explosive 80 miles. He wanted the first rocket to throw a ton of high explosive 160 miles. But it would be a rocket that was militarily useful. It had to be accurate: it could not deviate from the target more than 2 or 3 feet for each 1,000 feet of range. And it had to be mobile: it could not be too large to transport by road.
The prototype V 2 was successfully test fired in October 1942. By the end of that year, however, British intelligence learned of the V 2 program, and the next April it learned of the Luftwaffe’s development work on a flying bomb.
Both projects were underway on the island of Peenemunde. Thereafter, the RAF bombed Peenemunde so heavily that neither weapon was ready until the summer of 1944.
By the time the V 2 was ready, the Luftwaffe V 1 batteries had been driven out of any launching site within range of England, and the V 2s never got a chance to fire from the chosen sites in France. Germany produced 35,000 V 1s, but only 9,000 were launched against England, and of these 4,000 were destroyed before they got there. The Germans continued flying buzz bombs, though. Their main target was Antwerp, the principal Allied supply base. The V 2s continued to bombard London between September 8, 1944, and March 29, 1945, when Allied troops captured their base.
While all this was going on, von Braun and other German scientists were working on a couple of projects that were really scary. Von Braun and Dornberger had written the specs for a new missile, the A 10, which would have more than one motor and would drop off each as it became exhausted. It would have a range of 2,800 miles — long
