“So how many of these tunnels are you talking about?” Bronson asked.
“It was one of the largest projects in the history of mankind,” Angela replied. “Nobody knows for sure exactly how many underground facilities were built, or even planned, but even before the end of the war the Allies knew of at least three hundred and forty underground sites and, according to the records recovered after the end of the conflict, over four hundred sites had been given code names. But in fact there were far more than that. Plans held in the German Ministry of Armaments referred to some eight hundred plants in all. Work on them started in the summer of nineteen forty-three, when Allied air raids began inflicting enormous damage on Germany, and Albert Speer gave the go-ahead for the project, with Hitler’s blessing.
“I suppose it’s also worth saying that the idea of having underground facilities wasn’t exactly novel. From as early as the mid-nineteen thirties, the Nazis began creating massive oil and fuel tanks underground. One of these- it’s near Bremen-is still in operation today. There are eighty tanks there, each made of high-quality shipbuilding steel surrounded by a concrete jacket about a meter thick. Each tank holds four thousand cubic meters of fuel. They’re absolutely massive.”
“Well, underground storage tanks are quite common, and have been for many years,” Bronson commented. “When you’re dealing with potentially explosive liquids, burying them is often quite a good plan.”
“I know. But actually the tanks were only a very small part-though an important part-of the project. The biggest and most significant plants were those used for manufacturing, rather than just for storage. The Nazis built an underground aircraft factory at Kahla in Thuringia, using foreign slave laborers who worked twelve-hour shifts and who were told when they arrived there that they would be worked until they dropped dead. That place was used to manufacture the Messerschmitt Me 262 jet fighter, and the plan was to build twelve hundred aircraft there every month, a huge output that absolutely could have turned the tide of the Second World War. That one factory, if it had reached full production, could have produced enough aircraft to drive the Allied bombers and fighters from the skies of Germany. The intention was to create almost twenty miles of tunnels inside the mountain, with four huge subterranean halls, covering around twenty-seven thousand square meters, where the actual manufacturing would take place. By the end of the war, almost half of the internal construction had been completed, and the first aircraft took off from Kahla in February nineteen forty-five. And it was, as I said before, very efficient. The aircraft were assembled in the halls, then they were taken out of the mountain through the tunnels, hauled up to the top in a sloping elevator, and would then take off from a runway the Nazis had constructed on the top of the mountain. Luckily for us, only a few of these Messerschmitts were completed and flown away, so they never became a major threat to Allied aircraft.”
Bronson took his eyes off the road for a second or two to glance across at Angela.
“That’s huge. Was that the biggest underground factory?”
Angela shook her head. “No, not by a long way, and some of them are still in use today. In Baden- Wurttemberg, down in the southwest of Germany, there’s a town named Neckarzimmern. There’s been a gypsum mine there since the early eighteen hundreds, over one hundred meters below the banks of the Neckart River. It was used as a dynamite factory in the First World War, and then after nineteen thirty-seven it became an ammunition dump. The various shafts inside it were expanded to accommodate its new role. Today, it’s a subterranean town. There’s a road network almost thirty-five kilometers long in there, and the various caverns occupy about one hundred and seventy thousand square meters of space. In nineteen fifty-seven, units of the German armed forces were first stationed there, and today over seven hundred people work underground, in the tunnel system, supplying parts and repairing equipment for the German army.”
“Okay,” Bronson said, “I understand that the Nazis turned into moles and burrowed into the hills and mountains, or rather their slave laborers did on their behalf, but you still haven’t told me why we’re heading for the Polish border, or what the ‘lantern bearer’ has to do with any of this.”
“Patience, Chris. To fully appreciate what I’m going to tell you about that, you need to understand a bit more about the Nazi secret weapon program, the Wunderwaffen. We talked about the so-called ‘vengeance’ weapons, the V1 and the V2. The V2 was developed by Werner von Braun at Peenemunde, though it wasn’t at first called that-it was designated the A4-and the first examples were ready for testing by early nineteen forty-three, and the weapon became operational in the summer of ’forty-four. The first V2 hit London on the seventh of September that year and after that the rockets became fairly regular and most unwelcome visitors to the capital. What’s not generally known is that this missile wasn’t built by the Germans, though it was undeniably designed by them.”
“What do you mean? They contracted the work out?” Bronson asked.
Angela shook her head. “No, nothing so civilized. When American troops reached a town named Nordhausen in the Harz Mountains in mid-April nineteen forty-five, they found a concentration camp there named Mittelbau- Dora. The few inmates who were still alive-the vast majority who hadn’t been executed by the Nazis before they left the area had simply starved to death-told the Americans about tunnels in the nearby mountain and a top secret missile factory deep underground where they’d worked as slave laborers of the SS. The American troops were shocked at what they found, but in fact the Allies already knew about it.
“In August nineteen forty-three, after the Royal Air Force bombed Peenemunde, the Nazis had transferred their missile production to Nordhausen. Some ten thousand slave laborers from the Mittelbau-Dora camp were forced to start digging tunnels into the mountain to accommodate the new production lines. For obvious reasons, we don’t know the exact numbers, but it’s been estimated that around three and a half thousand workers died in the first few months from pulmonary diseases, starvation, exhaustion and maltreatment by the SS. Some of them almost certainly simply froze to death.
“In all, the Nazis had allocated an area of about six hundred thousand square meters for the production of the V2 missile, and set a target of one thousand missiles per month, a theoretical output that they thankfully never achieved. We do know that in April nineteen forty-four the factory produced four hundred and fifty missiles, but that was one of their best months ever. Most of the time, production was badly delayed because the German scientists at Peenemunde kept altering the design and making changes. And as a result of that, more than half of the rockets that were assembled were not fully operational and either never reached their intended targets or simply blew up on the launch pads. But the missiles themselves were constructed by specially selected prisoners, who assembled them from some forty-five thousand different components. The sad reality is that most of the V2s that landed on London and caused such destruction to the city were actually built by people-Poles and Jews and others-who we would have considered to be our allies. Of course, they had absolutely no option. If they didn’t do exactly what they were told, they would be summarily executed by the Nazis.”
Bronson didn’t respond for a few moments, as he tried unsuccessfully to imagine what it must have been like to be forced to assemble weapons that you knew, without the slightest shadow of doubt, were going to be used to kill members of the only nation likely to rescue you from imprisonment.
“That’s horrendous,” he said again.
“You know, almost everyone who has read anything about the Second World War knows about the V1 and the V2, but hardly anybody has ever heard of the V3.”
“You’d better include me in that,” Bronson said, “because I’ve never heard of it. What was it? Another type of rocket?”
Angela shook her head. “No. It was something much simpler, but arguably even more dangerous than the other two ‘vengeance’ weapons. It was known to the Germans as the England Cannon or Busy Lizzie, and it consisted of five batteries, each containing twenty-five high-velocity cannons that were designed to fire shells up to one hundred and twenty miles.”
“Jesus,” Bronson muttered. “If they’d ever got that working, from the right location it could have flattened London.”
“It did work and they had the right location. It was a small French village near the English Channel coast named Mimoyecques. Luckily for all of us, the British government found out about it in nineteen forty-four. The Nazis had built an underground facility for the production, and also the operation, of the weapon. But this time, instead of relying on the natural defenses of an existing mountain, they had to build their own mountain, as it were, because the terrain around there is fairly flat. So they constructed a reinforced concrete roof that was five meters thick, and walls that were almost equally massive. On the sixth of July nineteen forty-four, aircraft from 617 Squadron-you’d know them better as the Dambusters-attacked the site with twelve-thousand-pound Tallboy bombs. They were one of the first of what are now called ‘bunker-busters,’ and one bomb went straight through the concrete roof and exploded inside the facility.”
Bronson nodded. “And I suppose that was more or less that,” he said.
