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Posted on 05/14/2004 12:02:42 AM PDT by snippy_about_it
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 are acknowledged, affirmed and commemorated.
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 In mid-1944, AAF moved to checkmate a potentially disastrous German threat to the UK and perhaps even to the US.  Operation Crossbow, the Allied bombing campaign against German V-weapon launching sites in northwest France, held top priority in early 1944. Despite hundreds of strikes against these sites, German attacks with V-1 buzz bombs against urban targets in the United Kingdom began in June 1944 and soon resulted in extensive loss of life and great property damage. It was known that the Germans were working on a supersonic guided missile, the V-2, which was believed by many to be technically infeasible at that time. But surprise. The first V-2 hit the London area in September of that year, with 800 to follow.  In the V-weapon launching area, a number of very different large sites were under construction--their walls 12- to 14-feet thick and with massive steel doors. Were they intended to launch V-2s, or perhaps a rumored V-3, a missile with the range to hit targets in the eastern US? The Germans were striving to develop nuclear weapons, though progress in that area was not known. At any rate, the possibility of an operational V-2, or perhaps a nuclear-armed V-3, was not a threat to be taken lightly. These mysterious, heavily defended sites were attacked at night by the Royal Air Force, using 12,000-pound Tall-boy bombs, and during the day, by Eighth Air Force. Damage was minimal. A solution had to be found.  It was concluded that the most vulnerable element of the structures was their steel doors, which were virtually immune to damage by high-altitude bombing. Tactical fighters coming in at low altitude did not have the punch to do the job. Gen. Carl A. "Tooey" Spaatz and his scientific, technical, and operational advisors came up with a novel idea. Why not use war-weary B-17s as guided missiles? That would call for more than a few innovations.  The plan, labeled Project Aphrodite, was tested inconclusively at Air Proving Command in Florida. Essentially, the idea was that a completely stripped-down and explosive-laden B-17 with a crew of two--a pilot and an autopilot technician--would take off from a base in the UK. Once safely in the air, control of the B-17 would be turned over to a mother ship cruising at 20,000 feet, whose crew would fly it by radio signals fed into the B-17's autopilot. The B-17 crew would bail out over England. The mother ship then would fly the bomber, at an altitude of 200 to 400 feet, to the target and dive it into the steel doors. This, of course, was not an "any day" operation. Ceiling--and-visibility--unlimited weather was essential so that the mother ship's crew could follow the progress of its charge. Crews for the 10 modified B-17s were volunteers from bomb groups of the Eighth Air Force 3d Division. Each B-17 had been stripped of everything but a pilot's seat and loaded with 22,000 pounds of RDX, the most powerful explosive available. The war-weary bombers were given new engines and beefed-up landing gear, since they would be about 5,000 pounds over designed gross weight. The boxes were connected and fused so the load would detonate simultaneously.  On Aug. 4, the weather was good enough to launch the first two B-17 flying bombs. The first to go was piloted by Lt. Fain Pool with autopilot technician SSgt. Philip Enterline. They had to enter and leave the aircraft through the navigator's escape hatch, the only entrance not sealed. After making sure the controls operated properly on radio signals, Enterline bailed out at 1,200 feet. Pool followed at a much lower altitude after he had armed the load. When he landed, several British civilians came up to inquire what had happened. Since Aphrodite was highly classified, he told them his plane was on fire, forcing him to use his parachute. Almost immediately they heard a terrific explosion, caused not by Pool's aircraft but by the second B-17 flying bomb.  Its elevator control had malfunctioned, causing the plane to stall and crash before the pilot, Lt. John Fisher, could get out. Pool's plane made it to the target under radio control but on its second pass was shot down by ground fire. The crews of two other modified B-17s that were launched that day survived, but neither reached its target. Never wanting to be far behind the Air Force, the Navy adopted the Aphrodite technique, using its version of the B-24, but with two pilots who also were to bail out over England, while their aircraft was to proceed under radio control to submarine pens at Heligoland, Germany. The first pilot was Navy Lt. Joseph Kennedy, Jr., older brother of John F. Kennedy, 35th US President. His copilot was Lt. Bud Willy. While still over England, the aircraft exploded, killing both men.  No aircraft subsequently launched under Project Aphrodite or its Navy counterpart hit its target. As the Germans retreated in the weeks after D-Day, the large sites in France no longer were within their reach, and the project was abandoned. Despite its lack of success, Aphrodite was a daring, imaginative undertaking that might be considered a first, short step toward the development of American guided missiles. The crews that volunteered for these missions were stepping into an unprecedented, but dangerous, venture. For each of them, it was an act of exceptional valor. By John L. Frisbee, Contributing Editor Thanks to Herbert F. Mellor, president of the McChord Air Museum Foundation, and to Lt. Col. Fain Pool, USAF (Ret.). Published August 1997. Copyright © Air Force Magazine      |
OHH COOL rack itttt
Hey Johnny there was cool article on Sunday Aussie Herald you konw Brit Troops are arraning soccer league for kids
YEAH that was report last weekend or two weekend ago I think that so cool
Rack this US Soldier take
He probably would have managed to find a way to leave after his first oowie.
Afternoon PE. You mean the "normal, everyday" tasks don't end when the baby comes home? You're gonna have to start borrowing time from others too.
That's "Art" in the truck. Art is a bit agitated at the moment: he is a military working dog and, in the absence of any other specific instructions, Art has decided his current "work" is to guard the soccer balls in the HMMWV. He's not too happy that Marines keep removing his charges and giving them to the kids, and is currently and quite intently keeping an eye on some of his strayed "sheep."
LOL! What a great letter! Brightened up my day. Thanks for posting it Johnny.
Afternoon GailA. That was a pleasure to read wasn't it.
I like it! Phil can you work your magic?
Afternoon Diva BR! Thanks for dropping by.
Thanks Sevenofnine. Soccer is something the Brits, Aussies and Iraqis have that can be used as a common building block for building a relationship.
Fascinating information Matthew.
Ping to post 90 for you Iris7.
LOL. Love the photoshop post.
Fascinating stuff Matt.
The Nazi's had plenty of time to do this work, plentty of slave labor and there is plenty of evidence that they had a penchant for "secret projects"
There are more than 200,000 cubic meters of tunnels cut into
the Sowie Mountains, over an area of nearly 200 square kilometers, at the cost of 150 million marks and an unknown number of human lives. What did Hitler's construction specialists need the mind-boggling amount of 257,000 tonnes of reinforced concrete for?
Even though close to 60 years have passed, the existence of the underground military facilities built during World War II in Lower Silesia has yet to find a complete and reliable explanation. The Sowie Mountains and Ksi¹¿ Castle are a good case in point.
The facilities in the Sowie Mountains and within the compound of Ksi¹¿ Castle were built in 1943-45 for the Nazis by thousands of forced laborers, POWs and prisoners of the Riese (Giant; later the whole project adopted this name) labor camp, which was subordinate to the concentration camp of Gross-Rosen.
It seems that, at first, they were meant as locations for armaments factories, and later as command posts for the Wehrmacht, collectively known as the Headquarters. That the Nazis initially wanted to place armaments factories here is suggested by the time the construction work started, the location of the tunnels, and the special construction methods used.
Danger from above
In 1943, due to destructive bombing raids by the U.S. Air Force in the daytime and by the British during the night, the Third Reich began de-concentrating its industry and moving it to underground locations. The geographical placement also had its significance-this was a relatively inaccessible mountainous region with a long mining tradition, the necessary infrastructure and human resources. The Nazis even called Lower Silesia, located far from Allied airfields, the "Reich's air-raid shelter." The way the facilities in the Sowie Mountains were built is practically identical in its main points to the methods used in other similar Nazi structures.
The worsening situation on all fronts, and especially the eastern front, combined with delays in some of the priority construction projects (including those underground) led to a decision at the highest level of the Nazi authorities that these projects be taken over by the Todt Organization (OT), which specialized in military construction and was meant to complete these projects.
It seems this was when it was decided that the purpose of the underground tunnels in the Sowie Mountains be changed-instead of an arms factory, one of two underground Headquarters (the other one was planned near the town of Ohrdruf in Thuringia).
There is proof of this in the memoirs of both the OT head, Albert Speer, the Reich's chief architect and minister of armaments, and Hitler's adjutant Nicolaus von Below, who wrote: "The plans that we kept criticizing in those months [early 1944] included the construction of a huge new Headquarters for the Führer in Silesia, near Waldenburg [today's Wa³brzych, near where the facilities were located], which was also to include Fürstenstein Castle [today's Ksi¹¿ Castle] within the estate of the von Pless princes. Hitler defended his orders and commanded that construction continue with the use of concentration camp prisoners managed by Speer. During the year, I visited this facility twice and each time had the strong impression that I wouldn't see its completion. I tried to inspire Speer to somehow influence Hitler to give the order that the project be stopped. Speer said that was impossible. The extravagant work continued-at a time when every tonne of concrete and steel was so urgently needed elsewhere." (Nicolaus von Below, By³em adiutantem Hitlera [I Was Hitler's Adjutant], MON publishers, Warsaw 1990)
Documents, memoirs and testimonies of witnesses present the following picture: Ksi¹¿ Castle and the tunnels underneath it were meant as a residence for Hitler and his closest retinue, while the facilities in the Sowie Mountains-command posts as part of the Wehrmacht Headquarters. Is this the true story?
A huge undertaking
The construction of the tunnels in the Sowie Mountains was conducted on such a large scale that even today, walking through the forests overgrowing these mountains, you can find traces of barracks, warehouses, structures of unknown provenance, bunkers, storehouses filled with all kinds of building materials, including thousands of sacks of rock-hard cement (see photo below on the right), roof supports, insulators as well as dozens of kilometers of roads for heavy equipment, lined with the excavated material. They can still be found even though for several years after the war, this area was combed and "cleared" by the Ministry of Reconstruction, the specially appointed State Enterprise for Field Searches, various construction companies and plain old looters.
The testimony of the few surviving slave-laborers and statements from subsequent immigrants to the region who had the opportunity to partly search through the facilities, and the arrangement of found and accessible tunnels, suggests that the structure was much bigger. This also seems to be confirmed by Speer's memoirs, when he writes "...In 1944 Hitler ordered the construction of two underground headquarters, and hundreds of necessary mining construction specialists were hired, together with thousands of laborers, in Silesia and Thuringia...At a briefing on June 20, 1944, I informed the führer that about 28,000 laborers were working at the time on expanding his headquarters. The construction of the bunkers in Kêtrzyn [Hitler's quarters in the then East Prussia, known as the Wolf's Lair] cost 36 million marks, the bunkers in Pullach, which ensured Hitler's safety when he was in Munich-13 million marks, and the Riese bunker complex near Bad Charlottenbrunn [today's Jedlina Zdrój near Wa³brzych]-150 million marks. These construction projects required 257,000 cubic meters of steel-reinforced concrete, 213,000 cubic meters of tunnels [today about 97,000 cubic meters of tunnels are known, which means that if we assume the construction was close to completion, over a half of the underground galleries and chambers have yet to be discovered], 58 km of roads with six bridges, and 100 km of pipelines. For the Riese project alone, more concrete was used than was earmarked in 1944 for the whole population for the construction of air-raid shelters... The headquarters was never finished, and in early March 1945, soon before the Red Army took over Silesia, SS bomb squads blew the whole thing up." (Albert Speer, Wspomnienia [Memoirs], MON publishers, Warsaw 1990).
What's hidden underground?
According to Cadet Officer Jerzy Cera, who studied the area with friends from 1971-74, the construction site was close to 200 sq km, and Mt. W³odarz was at its center. "In the structure dubbed the Power Station, 48 meters above the underground tunnels, there are 35 stoneware pipes meant to carry liquid. Where to? We don't know. We measured their depth and tried to use smoke to find out whether the pipes were connected inside, and where they ended. We put two lit flares in each opening-the smoke was evidently sucked inside. In one case, we could hear what sounded like an air-lock working... Smoke from 26 flares went inside and didn't really come out anywhere. How great must be the capacity of those pipes, or even the underground tunnels, if they could take in such a quantity of smoke," Cera wrote.
That there are still more tunnels is also suggested by the fact that some have been bricked up. In some places (also on the surface), pipes come out that lead into the mountain-"to nowhere", and in others, narrow-gauge railway tracks stick out of piles of rock; such tracks were used to remove the excavated material.
There are also empty chambers with no direct connection to the tunnels accessible today nor to any surface structures. Some elements suggest that the tunnels in the Sowie Mountains could have had a multi-level structure, very seldom seen in other German facilities of the same period.
This could confirm the conjectures of some amateur explorers that there might still be something in the corridors which are inaccessible today. The question as to what exactly, still remains unanswered. Still awaiting an explanation are such issues as the ultimate purpose of the structures, when work on them started, as well as the number, nationality and subsequent fate of the people involved in the work.
The obvious interest shown in these facilities after the war by the special services of the Soviet Union, East Germany and Poland did nothing to dispel these doubts.
The continuing deterioration of the rock from which the tunnels were cut means that studying not just the tunnels, but other inaccessible places as well (also on the surface) is becoming a matter of urgency. Studies should involve locating further underground structures (corridors, chambers) that certainly exist somewhere, and the mass graves of the laborers which witnesses mention.
The RATS make me sick running them down.
The precursor to the MOAB. I've read about the "GrandSlam" Earthquake bomb dropped by Lancs. I believe those were carried externally.
My word, Hitler would have stopped at nothing for world domination and destruction of a civilized free society.
Sounds like the Mullahs of today doesn't it?
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