archived as http://www.stealthskater.com/Documents/Nazi_Supergun.doc (also …Nazi_Supergun.pdf) => doc pdf URL-doc URL-pdf

more on this topic is on the /Military.htm page at doc pdf URL

note: because important websites are frequently "here today but gone tomorrow", the following was archived from http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/military/hitlers-supergun.html on January 16, 2018. This is NOT an attempt to divert readers any website. Indeed, the reader should only read this back-up copy if it cannot be found at the original author's site.

Bombing Hitler's SupergunPBS/NOVA Airdate: May 11, 2016

NARRATOR: It is the height of World War II. Allied intelligence officers spot something terrifying. The muzzle of an enormous cannon protruding from an underground Nazi bunker. It is a SuperGun. A monstrous new weapon, part of Hitler's plan to reduce London to rubble and win the War through terror.

TONY POLLARD (Battlefield Archaeologist): It's a very cruel and a very nasty way of making war. But they believed it might work.

NARRATOR: The Allies hatch 2 bold plans to defeat it. One involves Joe Kennedy, Jr., the eldest son of what would become an American political dynasty. He would be piloting an explosive drone.

NICK SPARK (World War II Drone Expert): What happened to Joe Kennedy and his co-pilot on that plane is actually one of the greatest mysteries of World War II.

NARRATOR: The other scheme would use the biggest bomb the world had ever seen. But would either plan work?

HUGH HUNT (Engineer): 3 ... 2 ... 1 ...

NARRATOR: Now in a series of explosive experiments, engineer Hugh Hunt will investigate the allies' bunker-busting technologies.

HUGH HUNT: It's vanished. There's ground-zero and there's nothing there.

NARRATOR: And he will build his own supergun …

HUGH HUNT: Firing!

NARRATOR: …to see if the weapon really could have brought London to its knees. Bombing Hitler's Supergun -- right now on NOVA.

By spring of 1943, the tide of World War II was beginning to turn against Hitler. In an effort to regain the offensive, he drew up plans for the World's biggest gun. With 25 barrels, this

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enormous cannon would be buried deep underground in Nazi-controlled France. It was designed to fire shells 100 miles, cripple London, and pave the way for a Nazi victory.

In a desperate race to knock out Hitler's supergun, the Allies devised their own miracle weapons. The Americans pioneered the drone. A radio-controlled heavy bomber packed with 12 tons of high explosives. Leading the drone mission was 29-year-old Joe Kennedy, Jr., a man groomed from birth to be the first Catholic president of the United States.

The British drafted in the brilliant engineer Barnes Wallis. He came up with the original bunker-buster. A bomb that would explode underground and trigger a manmade earthquake.

The Allied efforts were focused on the tiny hamlet of Mimoyecques 5 miles inland from the French coast. On the surface, it's now just a ruin. But hidden inside this hollowed-out hill is the secret installation built to house the V-3 Nazi supergun.

TONY POLLARD: Good grief!

HUGH HUNT: I can't quite make sense of this. This isn't natural rock. This is concrete.

TONY POLLARD: No, this is a roof. Look at it. It's 4-or-5 meters thick!

NARRATOR: Engineer Hugh Hunt and battlefield archaeologist Tony Pollard have been drawn to find answers to the many questions that remain about this mysterious super weapon.

HUGH HUNT: This was the entrance of a tunnel?

TONY POLLARD: Yes. It looks as though there is some sort of hatchway.

NARRATOR: How did it work? Was it powerful enough to hit London 100 miles away? And could it have ended the War? These are the mysteries that Tony and Hugh are trying to solve.

HUGH HUNT: This is a glorified pillbox with a 130-meter-long gun. I'd love to see what's underground. ... Right. Let's go.

NARRATOR: The fortified bunker has not been fully explored since the War.

TONY POLLARD: Whoa! That's slippy! You okay?

HUGH HUNT: Yep, yep!

NARRATOR: They rappel down one of the steep shafts that would have each contained 5 barrels of the supergun.

TONY POLLARD: Wow! Look how steep it looks from the bottom! This is certainly BIG.

HUGH HUNT: This, we reckon, is about 50 meters.

TONY POLLARD: And it was 130 meters.

HUGH HUNT: And this is one-third of the way down.- 2 -

NARRATOR: The shaft extends a further 300 feet beneath them. But now it's blocked by rubble. Today, there is no sign of the barrels. But the design of the shaft reveals a telling detail.

HUGH HUNT: This tunnel is centered very accurately on a particular line. ... Well, here we are here at Mimoyecques. And this particular tunnel that we see here points directly over here at Westminster Bridge. Which is astonishing!

NARRATOR: Hitler's gun was trained right on central London.

By the spring of 1943, the Nazis had tasted defeat in the deserts of North Africa. And they had been driven from the Soviet Union after a bloody battle at Stalingrad. Hitler was determined to strike back.

Taking center stage in his war room was the SuperGun or the “London Cannon” as he called it. Its 5 shafts would each contain 5 barrels. That's a total of 25 barrels firing 300 shells an hour 24 hours-a-day.

Maintaining this onslaught would require an enormous infrastructure. A network of galleries to store ammunition. 1,200 troops to man the guns and an underground railway to supply them.

This was artillery warfare on an industrial scale.

HUGH HUNT: Whoa!

NARRATOR: Hugh and Tony explore the farthest reaches of the complex looking for clues to how the tunnels were built.

TONY POLLARD: It's almost like a city underground, isn't it?

HUGH HUNT: Yep.

TONY POLLARD: Look at this, Hugh. Look! What they've done is they've actually used drills or spikes.

NARRATOR: What they find shows them the tunnels were carved by hand using pickaxes and jackhammers with steel spikes.

TONY POLLARD: Oh look! Look! Look at that! Look at that!

HUGH HUNT: That fits.

TONY POLLARD: They're just using them to prise away fragments of the stone. And imagine the effort all day every day hammering these spikes in and then moving away all the rubble. It's just a horrible thought.

NARRATOR: The SuperGun's first victims were not the people of London but the slave laborers who built the installation.

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TONY POLLARD: This complex was built by a large number of people that had been conscripted against their will. And there can be no doubt that many many people lost their lives. This wasn't a normal building site. Work here never stopped. They had gangs of workers on site, 24 hours-a-day 7 days-a-week. The priority here was to get those guns into action. The human cost didn't matter.

NARRATOR: Hitler wanted to rush his wonder weapon into action because he was hungry for revenge. He had bombed London during the Blitz in the early days of the War. But since then, his Luftwaffe had lost air superiority in the skies over Europe. The Allies were exploiting this lack of air cover by relentlessly bombing German cities.

Hitler began building fortified installations all over Northern France. Massive concrete bunkers hidden in remote woods that would house a new generation of secret armaments called “V-weapons.”

TONY POLLARD: They're called the V-weapons because they're about vengeance. They're about retribution. This is Hitler getting his own back. What the R.A.F. and the American Air Force have been doing is bombing German cities and killing German civilians. Hitler is absolutely outraged by this and decides that he's going to take it out on London. So all of these weapons are designed to hit London from France.

NARRATOR: These were technologies straight out of science fiction. There was the V-1, a jet-powered flying bomb. There was the V-2, a rocket that would shoot beyond the stratosphere before falling back to Earth. These weapons had the potential to reduce London to rubble. But they were untested in battle and unreliable.

TONY POLLARD: Initially, at least, Hitler was fairly skeptical about these new experimental weapons. Rockets and missiles were not really his bag. His was a more traditional military background molded in the trenches of the First World War. But what that experience did give him was knowledge of how effective artillery could be. He had seen how artillery could cut men apart. Upwards of 80 percent of the casualties on the Western front were caused by artillery.

And the V-3 was a super gun. It was old school but with a new twist.

NARRATOR: The twist was that unlike traditional artillery, the shells of the V-3 SuperGun would not be falling on frontline soldiers but raining down on London's terrified civilians.

In September 1943 in a country house in Buckinghamshire, the first evidence began to emerge of Hitler's secret plot against the British capital. An elite team of specially trained intelligence officers had been posted here to comb through aerial photographs taken on reconnaissance missions over occupied northern France. They were searching for signs of Nazi weapons sites.

Officers examining pictures of the Mimoyecques area spotted something mysterious. Railway tracks disappearing into a hill. They couldn't see what was going on underground. But they wondered if the complex concealed a new kind of weapon.

For 2 years, a corner of Britain had already been on the receiving end of big Nazi guns. And the K5 railway gun just outside Calais in France was one of the biggest.

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TONY POLLARD: It was used for pounding the English coast. In fact, they would quite regularly hit the town of Dover. And that corner of southeast England got pounded so heavily through the years of the War that it became known as “Hellfire Corner.”

What the population would do would be to run into the caves in the cliff behind the town. The Germans were a bit cruel in that they would wait until the “All Clear!” had been sounded until people started to come out again. Then they would fire another one to try and catch them in the open.

They hit the coast very hard. Something like 10,000 houses in Kent had been destroyed by this artillery fire.

NARRATOR: The K5 could fire a shell 40 miles. But Hitler wanted to reach London, more than double the distance. To get there, his engineers had to find a way of increasing the speed of the shell. One method was simply to increase the length of the barrel. This kept the bubble of rapidly expanding gas from the gunpowder blast pushing on the shell for longer.

But lengthening the barrel causes a problem.

HUGH HUNT: One thing that people don't necessarily think about is that this bends under its own weight.

TONY POLLARD: Really? Even a gun barrel?

HUGH HUNT: Even a gun barrel. And the longer you make it, the more flexible it's going to be.

NARRATOR: But supporting a longer barrel isn't the only problem. If the barrel is extended too far, the expanding gas propelling the shell will eventually peter out.

One possible solution was to increase the amount of gunpowder. But that would risk blowing the barrel apart. A German military engineer called August Coenders came up with a radical proposal. He would not set off the whole charge in one go. Instead, he would split it into smaller amounts and place them in chambers along the length of the gun. After the shell was fired conventionally, the cascade of explosions would boost the speed of the shell as it travelled down the barrel.

Hitler ordered his engineers to build a prototype SuperGun in German-occupied Poland and stepped up work on the stronghold that would house it, in France.

Then in the fall of 1943, the Allies took the first steps to knock out the site. 219 bombers took off from airfields around Britain. The American and British bombing campaign to destroy the mysterious building site at Mimoyecques had begun.

In total, they would fly 18 missions. 1,375 aircraft would drop 6,517 bombs. But conventional bombs made little impact on the fortifications buried deep underground. The Allies were forced back to the drawing board. Engineers working on both sides of the Atlantic tried to find a powerful enough weapon to destroy sites like this in a single blow.

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The British called on their go-to engineering genius Barnes Wallis. Wallis was an original thinker with ideas years ahead of their time. He had designed one of the most successful aircraft of World War II, the Wellington Bomber.

But it was the weapon he invented to destroy the hydroelectric dams that powered the Nazi war machine that made his name -- the legendary “bouncing bomb.” The success of the dam-busters raid carried out in May 1943 by the Royal Air Force 617 Squadron secured Wallis' position as Britain's top military engineer. [StealthSkater note: see doc pdf URL-doc URL-pdf ]

Now, his challenge would be to create the biggest bomb the World had ever seen and use it to trigger an earthquake that would shake a powerful structure apart.

The American military began experimenting with an extraordinary innovation of its own -- the drone. The idea was to pack an aircraft with explosives and turn it into a flying bomb. A pilot would take the plane into the air before bailing out. And then a remote pilot would guide the aircraft to the target by radio control.

Volunteering for this most hazardous mission was a 29-year-old naval aviator. He was the eldest son in a family that would become a great political dynasty. His name was Joe Kennedy, Jr., son of Joseph Kennedy, one of America's richest men and former ambassador to the U.K. Joe's path through life had already been mapped out by his family.

CARI BEAUCHAMP (Kennedy Biographer): His grandfather upon his birth had announced to the press that his grandson would be the first Catholic president of the United States. So from day one, literally and figuratively, Joe Jr. had this focus on him. That that was his destiny. I mean it was very much like an heir to the throne the way he was raised.

NARRATOR: Joe was a naval pilot patrolling the Atlantic Ocean on the lookout for German U-boats. With more than 50 missions to his name, he never caught so much as a glimpse of an enemy submarine. Still, he could have returned home with honor. But the chance to lead the attack on Hitler's SuperGun was irresistible.

CARI BEAUCHAMP: I think he really believed that this would be his contribution. He didn't think that what he had done so far was enough. Yet to everyone else, it was more than enough. But he felt compelled to keep performing.

NARRATOR: Neither Kennedy nor his team fully appreciated the threat that London was now under. By May 1944, the Germans were on the verge of reaching the British capital with their prototype SuperGun.

They had managed to fire shells 80 miles at their secret test site in Poland. It was further than any other shell in history. But just how gun designer Coenders managed to time the booster charges to go off one after the other with microsecond precision remains a mystery to this day.

One theory is that he used the hot gasses behind the shell to ignite the boosters as the shell passed down the barrel. Engineer Hugh Hunt wants to test that theory. So he has asked explosives engineer Charlie Adcock to build him a supergun of his own. They will use the barrels of 6 rifles, fit each section with a booster chamber, and join them end-to-end.

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If Hugh can get his experimental model to function, it will help him to solve the mystery of how Hitler's SuperGun might have worked.

HUGH HUNT: There's a couple of things we want to look at here. One is we want to see if it was indeed the hot gasses that initiate the booster charges. And the other thing is do the booster charges make the bullet any faster?

NARRATOR: They will shoot the bullet through 2 beams of infrared light. The time it takes for it to pass between them will give an accurate speed.

CHARLIE ADCOCK (Explosives Engineer): Live round.

NARRATOR: First, they will fire the gun without the boosters to set a benchmark speed.

CHARLIE ADCOCK: We are all good. We can retire to the chamber.

Quick blast on the hooter. ... Okay. Firing!

HUGH HUNT: There we go. That's got a velocity. 742 meters per second.

NARRATOR: Now they will try to speed up the bullet with the booster charges.

HUGH HUNT: Let's load up these side chambers. So, these booster charges ... What have you put in them?

CHARLIE ADCOCK: These are rifle cartridges full of high explosives.

HUGH HUNT: Charlie's got a fantastic instinct for what's going to work. And handling these high explosives is a bit scary. But what I'm most interested in is whether it's going to make this projectile go faster.

CHARLIE ADCOCK: Stand by ... Firing!

HUGH HUNT: Whoa! 964! That's nearly a thousand meters per second.

NARRATOR: Hugh has made a key observation. He can clearly see that the boosters were set off, as expected, by the hot gas behind the shell.

HUGH HUNT: What have we got?

CHARLIE ADCOCK: Everything's fired. ... Yeah, they've all gone.

NARRATOR: And as Hugh discovers, there's an added bonus.

HUGH HUNT: There's been a 30 percent increase in speed. That's going to translate to maybe a 60 percent increase in range. In terms of what Hitler might have been wanting to achieve with his Gun, booster charges massively increased the range.

NARRATOR: And now that Hitler's SuperGun was nearing completion, there was a new urgency for him to use it.

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On June 6, 1944 - D-Day - 150,000 Allied troops stormed the beaches of Normandy in the biggest invasion in hHistory. In just 24 hours, they smashed through the German defenses and gained a toehold in Nazi-occupied Europe.

Hitler demanded a rapid response. London was the target. Within a week of D-Day, he had pressed the first of his Vengeance weapons into action. The jet engines of the V-1 flying bombs were timed to cut out over the city. Up to 100 bombs fell from the sky every day. Over an 80-day period, about 6,000 people were killed and a million buildings damaged or destroyed.

TONY POLLARD: The philosophy was that if you could destroy the morale of a people, you would basically break their will to fight. And so rather than go for the hard military targets, you would go for the soft civilian targets. It's a very cruel and a very nasty way of making war. But they believed it might work.

NARRATOR: In July 1944 at a secluded American airbase in the east of England, a specially modified bomber loaded with top-secret equipment flew in from Philadelphia. This was the centerpiece of the daring American plan to wipe out Hitler's SuperGun. Instead of merely dropping its payload on the target from above, the aircraft itself would be used as a remote-controlled bomb.

As leader of the mission, Joe Kennedy chose to downplay the jeopardy he faced.

CARI BEAUCHAMP: He writes his father: “I'm going to stay just for one more mission. There's hardly any danger. I'm sure it'll be fine.”

And Joe, Sr., while incredibly disappointed, wrote back and says: “Please, I understand. Just don't push your luck.”

I think he had a sense of a little bit of a golden aura about him. And I think he really believed that he could pull it off.

NARRATOR: Kennedy's aircraft would be loaded with 12 tons of torpex high explosives. Then he and his co-pilot would take the plane up to 2,000 feet accompanied by another aircraft known as the “mothership.” Using a state-of-the-art guidance system, the mothership would take control of the aircraft while the crew parachuted out (itself a risky maneuver).

NICK SPARK: Bailing out of one of these drones was very dangerous because the plane was flying at very high speed. You might be jumping out into a 200-mile-an-hour slipstream. There were several deaths that occurred and at least one amputation where someone's arm got caught up in the parachute shrouds.

NARRATOR: Once the crew had bailed out, an operator in the mothership sent a radio signal to prime the explosives for detonation. They would then explode on impact. This was the World's first precision-guided-attack drone made possible by a piece of remarkable new technology.

NICK SPARK: What's really amazing -- and I think it's something that most people don't appreciate -- is that before television arrived in your house, it had actually already been used on the battlefield. [StealthSkater note: Lester Dent wrote the Doc Savage adventure "The Yellow Cloud" in 1939 doc pdf . A televisor/television was introduced. Which begs the question was television known before it was commercially mass-produced?]

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What we have here is an actual World-War-II-era Iconoscope television camera. And it's absolutely authentic. It hasn't even been restored. We've got it hooked up to a T.V. monitor. I've pointed it a somewhat distant object. An American flag up on the pole there.

Now, I can make out the stripes, no problem. But I really can't see the stars very well at all. But this was good enough to use for a military application. Adding television into the system meant that they could see exactly what the weapons saw as it tracked into the target. And that was a revolutionary development.

NARRATOR: The plane was fitted with 2 prototype television cameras. One pointed straight ahead showing the way to the target. The other was focused on the gauges on the dashboard. The live pictures were relayed back to the operator in the mothership who used a joystick to manipulate the controls of the unmanned aircraft.

NICK SPARK: The T.V. camera made the drone a truly precise weapon. Something you could fly by remote-control and see where it was headed. And you could literally put yourself in the cockpit of that aircraft. It was going to be able to deliver that 12 tons of torpex directly on this target. It was not going to miss.

NARRATOR: Neither Kennedy's team nor their British counterparts had much idea of the scale of the task they faced taking on the SuperGun.

Once installed, the barrels would be encased in rock over 300-feet thick and shielded by 16 feet of concrete. And so far, the complex had been impregnable to Allied bombs.

But fortunately for the British, they could call on the mastermind behind the "bouncing bomb". Barnes Wallis had already proven his worth by busting the formidable German dams doc pdf URL-doc URL-pdf . But could he crack a Nazi stronghold like Mimoyecques?

IAIN MURRAY (Barnes Wallis Biographer): The thing which runs through all of his work is efficiency. He was always after the most efficient solution to the problem. What he realized was that it was more efficient to destroy a factory than it is to destroy all of the tanks or airplanes that come out of the factory. And it's even more efficient if you can destroy the power sources that the factories were using.

NARRATOR: Wallis started thinking about the most efficient use of explosives and came up with a brilliantly original idea. A bomb that would explode underground and create an earthquake.

Now, Hugh Hunt wants to see if a bomb going off underground would be more destructive than one exploding on the surface.

HUGH HUNT: Well, suppose that this is a bunker in Northern France and you want to blow it up. Barnes Wallis' method was to bury a bomb deep in the ground to create a mini-earthquake. You only have to push the foundations a short distance and you've destroyed the structure.

We're going to do 2 tests. One test is with some explosive on the ground nearby. Then we'll bury that same amount of explosive deep in the sand and see what happens.

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Firing! 3 ... 2 ... 1...

The pressure has created a crack in the building. I think it will be interesting to see with the same amount of explosive what happens when we put it in the ground underneath the building.

NARRATOR: They bury a second identical charge 12 inches beneath the surface.

HUGH HUNT: Firing! 3 ... 2 ... 1 ...

Look at that! Look at how far the sand has gone. There's ground-zero and there's nothing there! It's vanished. That's amazing!

IAIN MURRAY: I don't think anybody had looked at the effect of bombs exploding underground at that point. People instinctively thought it was the bit of the bomb exploding that you could see visibly which did all the damage. But in fact, that's only part of the damage. Most of the damage is caused by the pressure wave which is actually invisible.

NARRATOR: With the help of slow motion photography, it is possible to see the pressure wave moving at supersonic speed ahead of the blast, rippling the ground as it travels along.

Wallis had found that above ground, this wave of energy would quickly dissipate and do comparatively little damage. But below the ground through solid earth, it would travel with more destructive force.

So pound-for-pound, an underground bomb would be more efficient than one exploding on the surface. But getting it to penetrate deep into the earth was the challenge.

Each bomb was laboriously sculpted on a lathe into the perfect shape that would allow it to pierce the ground and move the earth aside as it burrowed in. The steel casing had to be just thick enough where strength was most needed. But would taper away elsewhere to save weight.

IAIN MURRAY: So this section down here is virtually solid for hitting the ground very fast without squashing up. That's really solid. And then, that's nice and hollow down that part. It's only about an inch thick at this point.

And then, this would have penetrated into the ground to 50 feet or more. And this would all have exploded. And the massive shockwave would have permeated out through the ground. Anything nearby would have been shaken to pieces.

NARRATOR: The R.A.F. started ordering up earthquake bombs. It was not a moment too soon.

In a dramatic breakthrough, intelligence officers studying photographs of Mimoyecques spotted suspicious openings in a concrete slab that protected the SuperGun's underground bunker. Just visible in one of the openings was an object they identified as the end of a barrel. It looked like the Nazis had started installing the SuperGun.

The response from the British was immediate. The elite 617 Squadron was called in. Famous for its dam-busting raid with Wallis' bouncing bombs, the squadron was chosen to deliver his latest weapon to Hitler.

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JOHN BELL (617 Squadron): You were with a group of really experienced crew. People who had been on the dams raid. You looked up to them. And here was a squadron equipped with yet another Barnes Wallis weapon. It had to be good. It was that sort of feeling in the squadron. You really got something with which you could hit the enemy with. And here was a beautifully streamlined bomb. And it really looked as though it was going to do the business. Like throwing a dart at the board and getting a bullseye every time.

NARRATOR: And this would be a precision strike. 17 bombers, each equipped with a single Barnes Wallis bomb would attack in broad daylight.

This rare footage shows the earthquake bombs exploding.

Interpreters examining photographs of the hill taken immediately after the raid identified 8 enormous craters made by Wallis' earthquake bombs. Although the concrete slab had been hit, it was impossible to tell just how much damage the bombs had done below ground. So the hill remained a prime target.

One month later, it was the Americans' turn to attack the SuperGun site. Joe Kennedy was ready to lead the experimental mission to turn a heavy bomber into a remote-controlled missile.

But as the plane sat on the apron, a young officer named Earl Olsen spotted what he thought was a flaw in the system. On the control panel designed to arm the explosives, a special safety pin had been inserted. This was supposed to prevent a rogue radio signal (one that hadn't been transmitted by the mothership) from accidentally arming the bomb.

Earl was worried that jamming the arming panel with the pin might damage another part of the system. He took his concerns right up the chain-of-command. But no one would listen.

NICK SPARK: Out of everybody in the field with the drone program, Earl Olsen was the most qualified person to make an assessment of this panel. But he was dismissed by a number of people because he was a junior grade officer. He was not a college graduate. A lot of what he knew about electronics was self-taught. The people at the Naval Aircraft Factory who had built this panel were viewed as world class experts. Just who was Earl Olsen to argue with them?

NARRATOR: Exactly what the flaw was that Earl Olsen spotted has been lost. Finding the one document that might identify it -- the circuit diagram of the panel -- has long obsessed Nick Spark.

NICK SPARK: I just kept looking. I looked in every nook and cranny there is. The National Archives. I contacted the Navy and filed Freedom Of Information Act requests. And finally after about 2 years, in a pile of documents that I had received, I turned over a page and there it was. A diagram of this arming panel. So when I saw that, I knew I had found the smoking gun.

NARRATOR: Using Nick's diagram, Hugh Hunt reconstructs the panel to try to uncover the fault Olsen had identified.

HUGH HUNT: When a radio signal comes in from the mothership to arm the explosives, it essentially powers up this board like this. They had, perhaps rather sensibly, put in a safety pin so that the mechanical arming system would never accidentally operate. And if there was a rogue radio signal like this, then the lever doesn't move. Which means that the mechanical arming system is safe.

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But look! This light is still on. That means the electrical power continues to run to these little solenoids that are not designed to have current flowing into them continuously.

NARRATOR: The jammed lever has inadvertently held down a switch that allows electricity to flow, illuminating the bulb and overheating the solenoid. This could start a fire and set off the explosives.

These tiny components called solenoids were part of the aircraft's back-up arming system. They would only be activated if the unmanned drone ever went out of control over Britain and it was necessary to blow it up in midair. In such an emergency, the mothership would signal the arming panel to send a pulse of electricity to the solenoids. These would then pull out pins from the detonators priming the explosives to go off. The plane could then be safely blown up in midair.

But the problem was if the arming panel received a rogue radio signal as Olsen feared, the jamming action of the safety pin would allow electricity to flow continuously to the solenoids and this would cause them to dangerously overheat. This explains why Olsen was so desperate to delay the mission.

Before his death in 2011, he described his final conversation with Joe Kennedy.

EARL OLSEN (VIDEO CLIP): He said: “Well, Earl. Is there any sure thing that will cause me trouble?” And I said: “Well, I can't tell you. It may cause you trouble right away or it may be delayed a while. It takes a little while, probably, for that thing to heat up enough to set off the charge. After 15 minutes or more, it might blow up then. If you please, take off and drop out as soon as possible, you might escape it.”

NARRATOR: Zero hour had arrived for the drone strike on Mimoyecques. Joe Kennedy decided he would take his chances. At 6:00 p.m., he and his co-pilot squeezed past the 12 tons of high explosives and the suspect arming panel.

All Earl Olsen could do was watch and pray. An armada of support aircraft followed Kennedy's plane into the air. Olsen was able to watch the events unfold as television pictures from the drone were transmitted back to the airfield.

NICK SPARK: Kennedy's plane “Zoot Suit Black” had a perfect takeoff. It climbed to about 2,000 feet which was the mission altitude. At that point, Kennedy went on the radio and said the code word “Spade Flush” twice. That was the signal for the control pilot in the mothership to take over command of the airplane and he began to test it methodically turning the television on-and-off and putting the plane into various turns.

NARRATOR: No one will ever know for sure. But it seems likely that some time after takeoff, a stray radio signal was picked up by the arming panel triggering the chain of events that Earl Olsen had feared.

The aircraft exploded over England almost 100 miles from the target. No human remains were ever found.

Joe Kennedy, Sr., received the news the following day.

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CARI BEAUCHAMP: He was devastated beyond words. All his plans, everything that had happened to him, he could understand and he could cope with. But having this happen to his son was beyond devastating.

NARRATOR: To Olsen's deep regret, his prediction had come true.

NICK SPARK: He had tried so desperately to prevent them from flying even at the risk of court martial. And he was not a drinker at all. But he got dead drunk the night that that happened. And it stayed with him throughout his life.

NARRATOR: Joe Kennedy and his co-pilot Bud Willy gave their lives to save the people of London. But just 23 days after their fateful flight, Allied soldiers made a discovery that cast the 2 Americans' sacrifice in a tragic light.

On the 5th of September, 1944, Canadian troops fought their way through to Mimoyecques and found the bunker in ruins. The British attack the previous month had destroyed Hitler's SuperGun after all. The earthquake bomb created by Barnes Wallis had lived up to its name.

HUGH HUNT: All of these carefully constructed arches of concrete and all the foundations for the gun itself and for the infrastructure for the gun was damaged way, way beyond repair. Many eyewitnesses at the time described it as being like an earthquake.

NARRATOR: In the nick of time, Hitler's plot to destroy London had been foiled. And with it, his hopes of turning the tide of War in his favor lay in ruins.

The shockwaves from the American supergun raid reverberated way beyond the borders of Europe. Especially for Joe's younger brother Jack Kennedy.

CARI BEAUCHAMP: Jack gets the word of his brother's death. This incredible golden brother who he's adored and revered since birth. Yet it also means something else to him and he's very well aware of it. And as he says to his friend: “Now the burden falls to me.”

NARRATOR: Jack Kennedy picked up where his golden brother had left off and in 1961 was inaugurated as the first Catholic President of the United States.

2 years later at a naval test site in California, the President came close to meeting the man who tried to save his brother's life.

NICK SPARK: When John F. Kennedy came and visited Point Mugu, Earl Olsen worked there. People there knew that he had worked with Joe Kennedy in the Wa and they said: "Hey, don't you want to meet John F. Kennedy?” And he said: “I can't do that. I wouldn't want to have to tell him the truth about what happened to his brother.”

NARRATOR: 70 years after the War, bunker-busting bombs are still part of military arsenals and drones are in common use. But no nation has ever successfully deployed a SuperGun.

[StealthSkater note: Gerald Vincent Bull (March 9, 1928 – March 22, 1990) was a Canadian engineer who developed long-range artillery. He moved from project to project in his quest to economically launch a satellite using a huge artillery piece to which end he designed the Project

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Babylon "SuperGun" for the Iraqi government. Saddam Hussein was more interested in using it as an artillery weapon. Bull was assassinated outside his apartment in Brussels, Belgium in March 1990, presumably by Israeli secret agents.]

http://www.pbs.org/how-we-got-to-now/blogs/howwegottonext/space-guns/

The field of long-range artillery lay dormant for a while as the space race heated up and rocketry took center stage in the United States. But in Canada, a tempestuous engineer named Gerald Bull had other ideas about how best to get things into orbit.

Gerald was the second-youngest of the 10 children of George and LaBrosse Bull. Following the death of his mother in childbirth and his father’s subsequent nervous breakdown, his older sister Bernice raised him. He started school early and loved building balsa wood aircraft of his own design. He graduated in 1946 and at just 16 years old managed to persuade the directors of the aeronautical engineering department at the University of Toronto to admit him to their brand new undergraduate program.

Despite achieving only average marks, he was then invited to join the university’s just-opened Institute of Aeronautics following a personal recommendation from its director Gordon Patterson who felt that Bull made up for his lack of academic credentials with his tremendous energy.

After successfully constructing a supersonic wind tunnel  ( at the time a rare device),  he finished his Ph.D. thesis in 1950 and began working at the Canadian Armament and Research Development Establishment (CARDE) which was researching supersonic flight and various rocket and missile projects at the time.

Bull developed a knack for bypassing budgetary restrictions by using scrap parts and shuffling money around between different projects. He became interested in finding ways to shoot missiles out of guns at extremely high velocities. This progressed to firing model aircraft out of guns which attracted negative attention from his supervisors after he embarrassed the Prime Minister of Canada by leaking a story to the newspapers that the country was working on plans to put high-velocity guns in the noses of missiles.

Things came to a head on April 1, 1961   when Bull got into an argument with his direct superior over paperwork. He resigned. A post-resignation report stated that “ … his tempestuous nature and strong dislike for administration and red tape constantly led him into trouble with senior management.”

Bull had seen this coming for some time, however, and had no problem getting another job as a professor at McGill University. He quickly set about turning the engineering department there into a leader in the field of aeronautics as well as founding a private ballistics lab known as the Highwater Station on the U.S.-Canada border.

He remained close with some of his former colleagues, particularly Charles Murphy who he’d worked with on the model aircraft project. They partnered with Arthur Trudeau  (director of U.S. Army Research and Development) who Bull had previously impressed during a visit to CARDE   on a project exploring the possibility of using guns to put missile components high into the Earth’s atmosphere for re-entry research.

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The U.S. Navy supplied a spare 16-inch battleship gun it had lying around. The Office of Naval Research paid for it to be rebored. Meaning that the contract Bull, Murphy, and Trudeau signed totaled just $2,000. It was named Project HARP  ( short for “High Altitude Research Program”).

But there was a problem. Bull’s Highwater station wasn’t big enough to support the enormous gun. The team needed an alternative launch site and found one in a rather unconventional location. A meteorological station on the Caribbean island of Barbados. It was perfect for 2 reasons. Its location near the Equator meant less thrust would be necessary to achieve escape velocity. And it also allowed for a huge downrange area over the Atlantic for projectiles to land.

McGill University had run the station for some time. So Bull managed to get a meeting with the Barbadian Prime Minister Errol Barrow. Barrow needed to be convinced that it was a good idea to allow another country to set up an enormous piece of artillery in his territory with the supposed purpose of firing things into Space.

Barrow was easily won over. Bull had acquired a $200,000 advance to develop the gun range. The impoverished nation  (which at the time was still not fully independent of Britain)  was eager to support projects with both potential and significant budget. As a result, Barrow became one of the most enthusiastic supporters and arranged for the gun to be set up in Foul Bay on the southeast shore of the island.

The gun arrived by boat in the summer of 1962 but couldn’t be delivered directly to the site because of its rough coastline. Instead, it had to be unloaded farther down the coast. Hundreds of locals were employed to transport the heavy components overland. A temporary railway track was laid but with only 1,476 feet of rails available. So the track was pulled up as the gun passed over it and re-laid in front.

Eventually by the end of the summer, the gun was in place and its support buildings constructed. Just as preparations were underway for the first test shot, however, the Cuban Missile Crisis erupted on the far side of the Caribbean. It couldn’t have come at a worse time . Despite Project HARP’s peaceful objectives, the installation of a massive gun on a nearby island wouldn’t have gone unnoticed by the Soviets. Fortunately, the confrontation ended peacefully.

On January 20, 1963 under a clear blue sky, the first shot was fired. A 694-pound wooden slug was propelled over 1.8 miles into the air flying for 58 seconds before landing about a half-mile off-shore. It was a complete success. So 2 further scheduled test firings were abandoned and preparations were made to fire real projectiles.

The next day, a Martlet-1 was launched. The Martlet was a dart-like finned projectile named after the mythical bird on the McGill University crest. It flew far higher   to an altitude of 16 miles with a flight time of 145 seconds.

2 days later, a second Martlet-1 reached 16.8 miles with a radio transmitter beacon attached. This allowed the team to track the projectile throughout the course of its flight.

But the first tests revealed a few problems . The decades-old gunpowder being used to fire the gun was of poor quality. The projectile was leaving the barrel so quickly that the gunpowder didn’t have time to completely burn. The powder was replaced and by the end of June a world-record altitude had been reached of just over 57 miles for a gun-launched projectile.

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It wasn’t just for fun. The Martlet was equipped with electronics that released chemical markers at set altitudes leaving a smoke trail through the sky that could be used to measure upper-level winds. Some used additional electronics to measure magnetic fields. Bull later wrote:

"The idea was to find out what happens in the atmosphere from sunset to sunrise. Remember, nobody gave us grants. We had to produce tropical atmospheric meteorological data for the Army research office. That’s how we got our money. We were trying to measure everything to the top of the atmosphere which we labeled as a nominal 200 kilometers.”

Funding was increased. But this high-atmosphere work was only an appetizer for Bull’s real interests. He wanted to fire a projectile into Space. After extending the gun allowing the powder to be contained for a longer period of time and slowing the acceleration, the team managed it. On November 18, 1966, a Martlet-2 was launched just short of 112 miles high. A world record for a gun-launched projectile that remains to this day.

The speed of the projectile was less than half of that necessary to reach low Earth orbit. So Bull wanted to continue. He designed a more complex Martlet-3 and Martlet-4 which were miniature rockets with their own thrusters. But political opposition to the project was mounting. The U.S. Army lost its battle to control space operations and was forbidden to conduct launches above 62 miles. Meaning that all funding for Bull’s orbital program had to come from the Canadian government.

That budget was shrinking due to changing public attitudes toward military affairs and negative reviews from the press and other researchers. A change of government sealed the deal .  Canada didn’t renew its funding in 1967 despite a last-ditch attempt to stir some nationalism with a plan to launch a Canadian flag into orbit.

With the cancellation of Canadian sponsorship and the U.S. Army’s inability to launch to orbit, Project HARP was over.

The representatives of the Government that dismantled the project wanted to see its guns cut up and its facilities destroyed. But Bull had a trump card up his sleeve. A clause in his contract required McGill to return the test sites to their original condition at the end of the lease. His Highwater station had grown into a major scientific facility. Returning it to its original condition of a scrubby piece of land down a dirt road would have cost the university millions of dollars.

Bull proposed a solution to the impasse he’d created . The university could transfer the Highwater and Barbados launch sites along with the guns and all the facilities over to his ownership. With no other options, the university agreed. With his new resources, Bull founded the Space Research Corporation.

The company needed money so immediately inked deals with the Canadian and U.S. military research arms to develop artillery systems, putting his work on space guns on hold. He worked as an international artillery consultant throughout the 1970s supplying arms to the United States, Israel, and South Africa.

However, in the latter half of the decade as International criticism of the apartheid government of South Africa grew, he was arrested for illegal arms dealing. Bull pleaded guilty, expecting a fine, but instead was sentenced to several months in prison.

Upon release, he moved to Brussels and secured work with the People’s Republic of China and Iraq. After designing a pair of artillery pieces for the Iraqis, he decided the time was right to fulfill his former

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ambitions. In 1988, he managed to persuade Saddam Hussein that Iraq would never be a real military power without the capability for space launches and offered to share his expertise from Project HARP to build a cannon capable of such launches.

Hussein was interested enough to greenlight the project which called for a gun that was 512 feet long, weighed 4.6 million pounds, and had a 3.3-foot diameter. It was designed to be capable of placing a 4,410-pound projectile into orbit.

But the Iraqis, seeing how badly Bull wanted to realize his dreams of space guns, added another condition to the deal.  Bull would need to help with the development of the country’s long-range scud missiles. He agreed and the plan was named Project Babylon.

The first gun built was a prototype for test purposes. “Baby Babylon” was mounted horizontally and had a barrel length of 151 feet. It was expected to achieve a range of 466 miles. While its barrel was similar in size to the V-3 cannon that threatened London during the Second World War, it was not considered a security risk by Israel since it was immobile.

The second supergun “Big Babylon” was more imposing, however. Iit was the 512-foot gun that Bull had pitched to start the project. This attracted rather more consternation from Iraq’s military rivals   Iran and Israel. Despite the fact that its ability to fire conventional projectiles would have been limited and slow, it was seen as a threat.

While construction of Big Babylon was taking place, Bull worked on the Scud project as promised. During the course of his work, his apartment suffered several break-ins where nothing was stolen. A few months later on March 20, 1990, Bull’s doorbell rang. He answered the door and was shot 5 times in the head and back at point-blank range.

The leading theory is that the assassination was conducted by Israeli Mossad agents who subsequently spread misinformation alleging Bull was shot by Iraqi agents. Other theories point to the Iranians, the CIA, MI6, or the Chilean or South African governments as responsible for his death. After years of working in the international arms industry and with such a tempestuous nature, Bull had many enemies.

Project Babylon continued for several months following Bull’s death but was slowed in April 1990 after British customs seized several parts of its barrel. The segments which were being constructed in Britain, Spain, the Netherlands, and Switzerland were shipped to Iraq as “petrochemical pressure vessels.”

Fearing for their safety, members of Bull’s remaining staff returned to Canada shortly afterward and the project ground to a halt. Following the end of the Gulf War in 1991, Hussein admitted the existence of Project Babylon. UN inspectors destroyed the remaining pieces of the gun without it ever having been fired.

In 1995, HBO produced a straight-to-television film titled "Doomsday Gunabout -- The life of Gerald Bull and his involvement with Project Babylon". Bull’s story was also the starting point of a 1994 novel by Frederick Forsyth called The Fist of God.

As Bull was making his fateful deals with Hussein in the late 1980s, another team of researchers was bringing his dreams to life at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California.

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Project SHARP (Super High Altitude Research Project) was under the direction of a scientist named John Hunter. In 1985, Hunter had been looking at the plans for electromagnetic railguns to shoot down ballistic missiles when he realized that a light gas gun would be much more efficient to launch projectiles to a high percentage of escape velocity.

Light gas guns work just like airguns. A gas is compressed by a piston through a small diameter barrel containing a projectile forcing it out at very high speeds. Hunter put together a team and set about designing an L-shaped device capable of sending projectiles into the atmosphere at extremely high speeds.

The gun became operational after Bull’s death in December 1992. It was the largest of its kind in the World at the time. It was over 426 feet long and theoretically capable of firing an 11-pound projectile into a set of sandbags at around 8,700 miles per hour (about a third of the required velocity to get an object into space).

During testing, the gun achieved velocities of just over 6,710 miles per hour which was promising enough to plan an even larger gun  called the "Jules Verne Launcher" after its spiritual predecessor. Such a gun would have had a monstrous 2.2-mile long barrel. But the chief problem was its cost. Aan equally monstrous billion dollars. Funding was not forthcoming, so Hunter left the project. DARPA eventually acquired the gun.

Hunter moved between projects building water stations on the California-Mexico border, designing armored vehicles, and at one point even developing the Zyclone Zing Ring Blaster and Moonshot kids toys. But like Bull, he’d developed a fascination with launching projectiles from guns into Space. In 2009, he founded a company called Quicklaunch.

Quicklaunch set out to build a space gun submerged below the ocean. Hunter’s design called for a 3,609-foot barrel that could be adjusted based on customer launch requirements, fired using hydrogen as the working gas, and methane as the explosive heat source.

According to the company’s claims, it would have taken just 10 minutes to heat and pre-pressurize the hydrogen gas before launch. Most would be recovered at the end of the launch tube to be reused for subsequent launches. The design yielded an initial speed of 3.7 miles per second, though this would decrease rapidly once the projectile hit the atmosphere and still fell about halfway short of escape velocity.

Instead, the launcher was designed to replace the first stage of a rocket   giving it some oomph before it fires its own engines to take them to orbit. The remarkable thing about the project is the cost-per-kilogram to get something to low Earth orbit. About $1,100 compared to $4,100 on SpaceX’s Falcon 9, $10,500 on Europe’s Ariane 5, or $13,200 on NASA’s Atlas V.

That cost combined with the high possible frequency of launch (up to 5 times a day) makes such a system ideal for sending cheap resilient cargo into space  ( refueling a space station or orbital space depot, for example). The firing process produces 5,000 Gs . Better than Tsiolkovsky’s estimations but still far from survivable. “A person shot out of it would probably get compressed to half their size” Hunter told Popular Science in 2010. “It’d be over real quick.”

Unfortunately, as of 2012 the company has faded away. Its website is now a domain parking page and its Facebook page offers a last post from March 2013 with a link to a podcast featuring Hunter. Meanwhile, Hunter has been working on toys  ( the Moonshot and the HurriK9).

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We spoke to Hunter to find out more about what was going on with Quicklaunch. He left the company in 2012 but is working on some fascinating other projects.

So where does that leave us today? Quicklaunch was the only company working on a modern space gun, though there are several alternatives using magnetic levitation technology such as the Startram project.

To date, a space gun has never successfully launched an object into orbit  al though Project HARP managed to put one of its Martlet-2s into suborbital spaceflight with a maximum altitude of 111.8 miles (far above the Kármán line that separates our atmosphere from Space).

Rockets remain inefficient. But after many decades of use, they’re a relatively safe and well-tested technology for getting objects into orbit. Other forms of non-rocket space launch may be developed as a way of saving costs for simple resupply missions out of the atmosphere. But only for the most basic robust payloads.

Will we ever shoot people into space from a cannon? Sorry, Jules Verne. Thanks to the G-forces involved, the answer is almost certainly not.

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