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On August 6, 1944, the Red Army of the Soviet Union reached the village of Blizna, northwest of Rzeszów, Poland, liberating it from Nazi occupation. A remote rural settlement surrounded by agricultural fields and dense pine forests, it might have seemed of little military importance.
However, deep craters in the forest floor, metallic debris, and fake farmhouses gave clues to its secret purpose.
Before the Nazis withdrew a few days earlier, Blizna had been the site of test launches for a new weapon, one with which Adolf Hitler hoped to change the course of the war against the Western Allies.
Known to the Germans as Vergeltungswaffe (Vengeance Weapon) 2, the V2 rocket was the world's first modern ballistic weapon.
Designed by engineer Wernher von Braun, with an approximate range of 280 km and a warhead weighing one ton, the rocket's supersonic speed and high flight altitude made it a "miracle weapon", capable of exploding without warning in the cities at which it was aimed.
But in the summer of 1944, parts of the V2 were smuggled out of Poland and into the United Kingdom in one of the most daring covert missions of the Second World War.
The Nazis began developing the V2 in 1936. However, British intelligence was not aware of the rocket's existence until early 1943, experts told the BBC in the 1977 documentary "The Secret" War.
"We had received some information before 1939 that the Germans might be developing long-range rockets," said Dr. R.V. Jones, head of Air Scientific Intelligence.
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"Then we heard nothing more until December 1942, when a new agent, who turned out to be a Danish chemical engineer, told us that he had overheard a conversation in Berlin between two engineers who said that a new weapon was being developed and tested on the Baltic coast."
Hidden microphones
The turning point came in 1943, when two separately captured German generals were brought to the United Kingdom for interrogation and then allowed to talk alone, without suspecting that the room was bugged.
They debated why the rockets had not yet been used, claiming that something must have gone wrong because they had been told more than a year earlier that the weapons would be ready in just a few months.
According to Jones, one of them said: "Well, we're somewhere near London and we haven't heard any explosions, so nothing can have happened."
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As Jones recalled in 1977, "[Intelligence analyst] Charles Frank...was sitting across from me and suddenly looked up from the interrogation report and said, 'Look, we better take those rockets seriously.'"
The British discovered the secret V2 research center at Peenemünde, on an island off the Baltic coast, and bombed it in August 1943. After the air raid, the Nazis moved the testing, training, and launch site of the V2 rocket outside of Germany.
They chose a location further east, in Poland, about 240 km south of Warsaw, protected by forest cover. Blizna was considered so strategically important that it was visited in the following months by both Hitler and the architect of the Holocaust, Heinrich Himmler.
However, the V2 test weapons had a flaw that delayed their deployment for almost a year. Most disintegrated in mid-flight, shortly before reaching their target located about 320 km away, near the Bug River, in eastern Poland.
A special unit of German troops was deployed there to recover the remains of the fallen rockets and allow scientists to analyze them.
Hidden under vegetables
As William Woollard, narrator of The Secret War, recounted in 1977, "The main disadvantage of this new location was that the local civilian population was not very enthusiastic about the idea of secret German weapons falling from the sky on them. The Polish resistance movement had asked them to try to collect the remains before the Germans arrived."
In May 1944, a V2 rocket fell, relatively intact, on the swampy banks of the Bug River. The locals covered him with reeds and called in a Polish resistance leader, Lieutenant Tadeusz Jakobski. "It was here that the rocket fell without exploding," he told the BBC from the scene 33 years later.
"The Germans couldn't find it and after a few days they stopped looking for it completely. So we hauled the rocket ashore and a team of experts came from Warsaw to dismantle it."
The pieces were loaded into sacks that were hidden under vegetables and transported in carts to Warsaw along little-used rural roads, while armed partisans watched from the forests.
Despite constant security checks in the Polish capital, the rocket fragments were successfully brought into the city.
Among the scientists in charge of analyzing the electronic components was the physicist Janusz Groszkowski. Fearing that their university laboratory might be searched by the Gestapo, the resistance decided that a private apartment would be a more suitable location for their work: the apartment of an unsuspecting German officer.
The electronic units were hidden at night in one of the officer's own suitcases. "Prior to my visit, this suitcase was removed from the officers' room and taken to a special room prepared for me to carry out my research," Professor Groszkowski told the BBC.
He worked for hours in that small room, under the constant threat of the officer returning unexpectedly.
However, as Groszkowski recalled, "that never happened during my time there." Resistance agents were monitoring the German officer. "The maid asked him on the phone what he wanted for dinner... to make sure he was in his office at the airport at that time," the physicist explained. "But if he said, for example, that he was willing to return sooner, I would disappear."
The Warsaw hoax was followed by a top-secret operation to extract the components, codenamed Wildhorn III (or Operation Most III). On the night of July 25, an RAF Dakota transport plane equipped with additional fuel tanks to allow a flight endurance of 18 hours landed on an abandoned runway near the Polish village of Wał-Ruda, in territory surrounded by German military units.
He had to carry 19 suitcases containing key fragments of the V2, technical plans and scientific reports.
Alerted to the operation by cipher codes radioed over the BBC, the partisans emerged from nearby woods when the Dakota landed shortly after midnight.
However, once the material was loaded, the plane could not take off because the wheels became stuck in the mud. Twice the entire load was lowered and an attempt was made to place straw and planks under the wheels to gain traction, while some partisans moved the mud away with their bare hands.
At one point, the operation's commanders believed they would have to evacuate the passengers and burn the aircraft. The crew even sprayed gasoline on the landing gear. But finally the plane managed to take off.
The only way to beat V2
The daring Allied airlift allowed one of the Third Reich's most fearsome weapons to be taken out of Nazi-occupied Europe, literally under the nose of the German army. The V2 rocket arrived safely in London on July 28, 1944, and British intelligence began analyzing Hitler's "miracle weapon."
"Moving the entire rocket was unnecessary and impossible. The V2s weighed about 12.5 tonnes and were 14 meters long. But the Poles meticulously dismantled it so that all the essential components were included on the return flight to the United Kingdom," Guy Walters, historian and author of Stealing Hitler's Rocket, explains to the BBC.
"These pieces were absolutely vital because, for the first time, British scientists were able to get their hands on components that had not been partially destroyed."
The covert mission provided crucial information about a weapon of terror that would attack London for the first time less than six weeks later.
"What the British did not know was whether the rocket had a guidance system. If it did, a way could be developed to jam it from a distance and cause the rockets to deviate from their trajectory...
"What the stolen rockets taught the British was that the rocket had no guidance system, which saved a lot of time for British scientists who would otherwise have been trying to develop countermeasures. The only real way to defeat the V2 was therefore to win the war."
*This article was published by BBC Future. Click here if you want to read the story in its original version (in English)
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