7. How London Got Lucky
Luckily for London, V1s and V2 rockets were worrisome in of themselves and worthy of attention. So although the Allies were ignorant about the supergun project, they went ahead and subjected the site to frequent bomb raids anyhow from late 1943 onwards. The Allied aerial raids in the Pas de Calais area disrupted the construction of the structures needed to house the supergun project, and the Germans were eventually forced to abandon parts of the planned complex. The rest of the site was seriously damaged in July, 1944, in a raid that used heavy ground penetrating bombs, that burrowed deep beneath the surface before they detonated. The underground explosions wrecked and collapsed the tunnel system, and buried hundreds of workers and technicians. In the meantime, various development bugs had slowed the pace of the project.
Even when all went well, the V3’s shells failed to reach the intended muzzle velocity of over 4900 feet per second, and barely exceeded 3300 feet. Trials in May, 1944, fired shells to a range of 55 miles – impressive, but not enough to reach London from France. A July test failed catastrophically when a shell was fired 58 miles, only for the gun barrel to burst in the process. Construction was finally halted for good as the Allies made their way up the coast from Normandy to the Pas de Calais, and the abandoned V3 compounds fell to Canadian troops in September of 1944. It was only then that the Allies discovered just how big a threat the complex had actually posed, and just how lucky London had been to dodge that menace.
