pdf - WHALE

the Wehrmacht had to do was hold out a bit longer. And above all,
it must hold Prague and lower Silesia.
Of course, the standard historical interpretation of these and
similar utterances by the Nazi leadership near the end of the war
explains them - or rather, explains them away - by one of two
standard techniques. One school understands them to refer to the
more advanced versions of the V-l and V-2, and on rare occasions,
the intercontinental A9/10 rockets, the jet fighters, anti-aircraft
heat-seeking missiles, and so on that the Germans were developing.
Sir Roy Fedden, one of the British Specialists sent to Germany to
investigate Nazi secret weapons research after the war, left no
doubt as to the deadly potential these developments held:
In these respects (the Nazis) were not entirely lying. In the course of
two recent visits to Germany, as leader of a technical mission of the
Ministry of Aircraft Production, I have seen enough of their designs
and production plans to realize that if they had managed to prolong
the war some months longer, we would have been confronted with a
set of entirely new and deadly developments in air warfare. 6
The other standard school of interpretation explains such remarks
of the Nazi leadership as the utterances of madmen desperate to
prolong the war, and hence their lives, by stiffening the resistance of
their exhausted armies. For example, to make the insanity gripping
the Reich government complete, Hitler's ever-faithful toady and
propaganda minister, Dr. Josef Gobbels also boasted in a speech
near the end of the war that he had seen "weapons so frightening it
would make your heart stand still." More delusional ravings of a
Nazi madman.
But on the Allied side of the Allied Legend, things are equally
peculiar. In March and April of 1945, US General George S.
Patton's Third Army is literally racing across southern Bavaria, as
fast as is operationally possible, making a beeline for:
(1) the huge Skoda munitions works at Pilsen, a complex all but
6
Sir Roy Fedden, The Nazis' V-Wcapons Matured Too Late (London:
1945), cited in Renato Vesco and David Hatcher Childress, Man-Made UFOs:
1944-1994, p. 98.