London - The madman dreamed of the destruction of New York.
In his mind’s eye, he saw an apocalyptic scene of skyscrapers blazing like giant torches, buildings collapsing, and terrified people running in panic, all faith in their impregnability shattered, their gods of capitalism and democracy unable to save them.
This could well be the sort of the demonic vision that drove Osama bin Laden and his 9/11 plotters to the suicide assault on the Twin Towers in 2001. Yet more than half a century before them, another fanatic revelled in that same fantasy — Adolf Hitler.
Though the object of the Fuhrer’s hate was 4 000 miles from Berlin, he demanded that his scientists and engineers find ways to reach it with bombs and wreak the havoc he craved.
The schemes they came up with — including suicide planes that would dive into the heart of Manhattan causing mass death and destruction — are eerily prescient of 9/11.
They never came close to succeeding, but the intensity with which they were pursued over the best part of a decade and even as Hitler’s Reich was collapsing around him is startling.
For years, the Fuhrer trod warily with the United States, anxious not to provoke enmity, happy for Washington to stay out of European politics while his army and the Luftwaffe in the skies enforced his will in Europe. Publicly he stated that Germany had no transatlantic ambitions and was a friend of America.
In private, though, he despised its democratic structures, its belief in personal freedom, its mixed races and its many Jewish bankers — all anathema to Nazi ideology. He also calculated that one day there would have to be a reckoning.
As he saw it, after he had fulfilled his immediate goal of subjugating Western Europe and destroying the Soviet Union, there would be just two super-powers left in the world — Germany and America. A war between them for domination was inevitable, and he was determined to be prepared for it.
As early as 1937, he had been excited when Willy Messerschmitt, aircraft designer extraordinaire, unveiled for Hitler’s eyes only a mock-up of the massive long-range bomber he was developing at his factory in Augsburg in southern Germany.
This four-engine giant, the Me 264, was ostensibly intended to support German submarine operations out in the Atlantic. But it also, Messerschmitt told the excited Fuhrer, had the potential of reaching the US coastline.
Hitler gazed up in wonder and expectation at the full-size (but non-functional) dummy. Make it happen, he ordered — a command easier to give than to carry out.
It was, after all, only 34 years since the Wright brothers had made the world’s first flying machine. The technology had taken off in leaps and bounds since then, constantly producing bigger, faster planes which could stay in the air longer and range further.
But to build one capable of flying non-stop to New York and back with a three-ton payload of bombs on board was to stretch that fast-moving technology to breaking point. Was it even possible?
Messerschmitt’s finest engineers devoted the next few years to experimenting with wing loads, engine power and weight ratios to find out.
Meanwhile, Europe was at war as all-conquering German troops marauded west and east in pursuit of Hitler’s goal of global domination. By 1941, France was beaten, England corralled, the Soviet Union under siege. That showdown with the US was getting nearer.
But the weapon intended to spearhead it, the Me 264, was proving tricky. It needed to be exceptionally lightweight for the distance across the Atlantic but sturdy enough for the load it had to carry and fast enough to defend itself. The aerodynamic equations simply did not add up.
One solution would be to shorten the trip by finding a staging post along the way for refuelling and repairs. To this end, Hitler ordered a naval operation to seize Iceland — half way between the European and American land masses.
This was forestalled, however, when in mid-1941 the U.S. — though still neutral and a non-combatant in the war but aware of which way the wind was blowing — took over the defence of Iceland specifically to deny it to the Germans as a base.
Back to their drawing boards went Messerschmitt’s designers. Their plane would have to go the full distance after all.
Later that same year, the demand for it intensified when — in response to Japan’s attack on Pearl Harbour — the United States joined the war.
Hitler now gave full vent to his real feelings, railing that America was “an uncultured nation ruled by greed” and denouncing President Roosevelt and the ‘satanic circle of Jews around him’ as warmongers and liars.
He could not resist taking the battle to his newest enemy, and, with Project Amerika Bomber still not happening, he tried a different tactic to get at Uncle Sam.
In May 1942, a four-man team of German commandos were landed by submarine on to a Long Island beach on America’s Atlantic coast, just a few miles from New York. Dressed in civilian clothes and carrying dynamite, they took a commuter train into the city and holed up in a hotel.
A coastguard who had seen them come ashore alerted the FBI, who began a massive manhunt, which failed to find them. Fortunately, John Dasch, the leader of the commando group, decided to defect, handed himself over to the American authorities and shopped not only his own band of saboteurs but another group that had arrived in Florida.
J. Edgar Hoover, the FBI boss, trumpeted to the American public his force’s success in rounding up the infiltrators. Their mission, he said, had been to attack munitions factories.
What he concealed — for fear of creating panic — was that their real objective had been civilian targets, such as Grand Central Station. Hitler’s saboteurs had come mightily close to a terror strike on the streets of New York.
Back in Germany, a prototype of the Me 264 finally took to the air but proved unstable and almost impossible to handle in test flights. There was also a tendency for the engines to fall off. Willy Messerschmitt’s attempt to build a weapon to bring the United States to its knees was foundering.
New ideas were called for, and a pilot, Col Viktor von Lossberg, stepped forward with a daring plan. He volunteered to fly a sea plane into the middle of Atlantic, where it would land on the water and link up with a submarine carrying the bombs and the extra fuel he needed for the remainder of its flight to the American coast.
After bombing New York, it would meet up with the submarines in mid-ocean again to refuel for its supposedly triumphant return to Germany.
The strike would be limited in weight of explosive, but symbolic: Lossberg promised the Fuhrer his first bombs would drop on Jewish neighbourhoods — and deliver a serious blow to American morale.
He got the go-ahead from Berlin, only for reality to intervene.
A near-perfectly flat sea was essential for the operation, which ruled out winter. Spring 1944 was the chosen time, but by then the US Navy had driven most of the German submarines out of the Atlantic, and Lossberg’s plan sank without trace.
High-level enthusiasm had by now switched, anyway, to rockets, which were under development by scientists such as Wernher von Braun at the Peenemunde arms research centre on Germany’s Baltic coast. So far, these new-fangled ‘wonder weapons’ were short-range but, to Hitler’s delight, the possibility existed of building one that could reach America.
Knowing this, the Allies bombed Peenemunde, forcing the rocket research to go underground. Using slave labour, a new facility was dug deep into a mountain at Ebensee in Austria, where a 60ft-high assembly room was constructed to house an intercontinental missile assembly plant.
Time, though, was running out for Hitler’s grand design of world conquest. From mid-1944, a vice was closing on the Third Reich from east and west. Shortage of fuel — his biggest logistical problem — grounded his aircraft and stalled his tanks.
But he still yearned for a way of hitting New York, and desperation spawned ever more desperate ideas. Germany already had an aircraft capable of crossing the Atlantic — the long-distance Condor passenger plane.
Built by Focke-Wulf, it had made the first non-stop flight from Berlin to New York in 1938, taking 25 hours. But, without refuelling, it could be a one-way trip only.
From Dr Fritz Nallinger of Daimler-Benz came a radical suggestion.
Pack a Condor with explosives and fly it not only to New York but into New York. Having set the plane on its final unmanned course, the pilot would parachute to safety — if he was lucky.
This was coincidentally an idea already being tried in secret by the Allies to winkle out the underground sites in France and Holland firing flying bombs and rockets at England. The American air force experimented with what they called ‘robot’ bombers full of explosives and flown straight at the targets, with the pilots jumping out at the last minute.
It was a risky, near-suicidal tactic, and an unsuccessful one. In all, 19 missions were launched and four pilots killed (including Lt Joe Kennedy, older brother of the future American president) but not a single target was destroyed before the project was abandoned.
The German equivalent never even got off the ground. The Condor was reckoned too slow and too easily shot down by US fighters for such a mission. But a more extreme version took its place, papers unearthed for a recent TV documentary have shown.
With Germany now in deep trouble militarily, Luftwaffe fighter pilots who had run out of ammunition were reported to be bringing down enemy bombers by ramming them — suicidal tactics, much as Japanese kamikaze pilots would soon be employing against American warships in the Pacific.
So on his drawing board, Nallinger sketched a mighty aircraft with a colossal wing span. Slung underneath its fuselage were five small, one-man planes, to be manned by suicide pilots.
The big plane would fly its one mission to New York, over which the small planes would detach and, with their explosives on board, nosedive into Manhattan, bringing mayhem into America’s capital of commerce.
Early in 1945, Goering, head of the Luftwaffe and Hitler’s deputy, approved this “piggy back” plan. Whether the Fuhrer himself was shown it is unknown, but if so it would have been the nearest his dream of hate against the US ever came to being fulfilled.
It was all too late. There was no shortage of diehard Nazis willing to give their lives on such a mission, but no time to turn into a reality the notional machine that would get them within striking distance.
In his bunker in Berlin, with the Russians at the gates and his armies in disarray, Hitler continued to fulminate and plot revenge.
Albert Speer, his armaments minister, remembered him demanding to be shown films of firestorms engulfing London and Warsaw after being blitzed by his bombers, and fervently wishing the same fate on the Americans.
Speer recorded in his diary how his master fantasised about New York “going down in a sea of flames, the skyscrapers transformed into gigantic burning torches and collapsing on each other and the exploding city reflecting against the night sky”. - Daily Mail