The military exercise took place in one of the disused tunnels of the London Underground, a full-scale rehearsal for a Russian conventional attack on the United Kingdom. The press ran alongside it stories about how Russian cruise missiles could strike British targets with virtual impunity, and I felt a certain grim vindication. Around the time the war in Ukraine began, I had made two videos highlighting this exact vulnerability: that if NATO and Russia ever slid into a conventional war, Russian bombers could launch cruise missiles from outside our airspace and hit British infrastructure, power generation, and the dwindling number of functioning RAF and naval bases, and we would be extremely hard-pressed to stop them. I caught criticism then and was told I was overstating the threat.
Now, with the British military running exercises in the capital and the papers running the same warnings, it seems the point has finally landed. The continuing downsizing of the British military has left the country increasingly exposed to this kind of precision strike. Events elsewhere underline it. The war with Iran demonstrated the range of Iranian missiles, capable of reaching British Indian Ocean Territory and the vital American air base at Diego Garcia, while drone attacks have targeted RAF Akrotiri in Cyprus.
These are exactly the kinds of threats I warned about in my videos on Russian cruise missiles and whether Iran can hit Britain. The links are in the end screen. Eighty-two years ago, Britain faced a similar threat. The German V1 and V2 campaigns were the first sustained cruise and ballistic missile attacks in history.
And a few years ago, a new V1 story emerged with a direct thread connecting it to these current exercises in London: cruise missiles as delivery systems, perhaps for chemical warfare agents, something the Ministry of Defense is undoubtedly thinking about today. In 2017, a minor historical controversy broke out online over an alleged Second World War discovery on the island of Alderney in the Channel Islands. That small collection of British Crown Dependencies, lying just off the coast of France, was the only British soil occupied by the Germans during the war. The gist of the claim was that late in the war, the Germans had begun planning a possible chemical weapons attack on the mainland United Kingdom from Alderney, the most heavily fortified of all the Channel Islands.
The originator of the theory was Colonel Richard Kemp, a former commander of British forces in Afghanistan, working with a research partner named John Weingold. Alderney is the most remote of the Channel Islands and the closest to Britain. Captured and occupied in 1940 along with Jersey, Guernsey, and Sark, Alderney was different from the others. Its population had been almost entirely evacuated to Britain before the Germans arrived, leaving almost no witnesses to what the occupiers were doing on the island over the next four years.
Many years ago, when I was a military history author before I became a YouTuber, I had become deeply interested in Alderney’s dark wartime history. I planned to write a book about the German labor camps built there, the only place on British soil where the SS operated. The book never came to fruition, largely because so much information about Alderney during the war was still classified in the early 2000s. Other authors later managed to piece together what happened on the island.
All of the Channel Islands were heavily fortified by the Germans. Bunkers, machine gun positions, artillery emplacements, anti-tank walls, and countless other bastions were built by the Organization Todt, often using impressed labor. But Alderney was unique in one respect. It was the only place where the SS ran a concentration camp in the Channel Islands: Lager Sylt.
The camp housed Soviet prisoners of war, Jews, and other Nazi prisoners, and was brutally run by SS Hauptsturmführer Maximilian List. Some five thousand prisoners were forced to labor on the defenses, and huge numbers died of exhaustion, beatings, or hangings. The question Colonel Kemp asked was simple. Why was the SS brought into Alderney at all?
Why not simply use Organization Todt as they did everywhere else in the islands? He and Weingold came to believe there was a more sinister reason for the SS presence than merely running a concentration camp. The island has one small town, St. Anne’s.
Just outside it runs a track called Water Lane, threading through a narrow valley called Le Val des Terres. A tunnel system still exists there from the war, hewn from the rock by prisoners from Lager Sylt under almost intolerable conditions and great SS brutality. I am indebted to the website Subterranea Britannica for providing photographs of the tunnels beneath Alderney, and I’d encourage everyone to explore their material further. The link is in the description box.
Historians have generally contended that the system of tunnels and rooms at Water Lane was built for fuel and ammunition storage or possibly a power generator. But Kemp and Weingold felt the reality did not add up. There are two tunnel systems on either side of the valley. Each main tunnel is ten feet wide and nine feet high.
A narrow-gauge railway line once ran along its length, and the roof and sides were once lined with wood. The pair also found the remains of bitumen sheets, used to line the tunnel to make it absolutely waterproof. That was an unusual degree of fitting-out compared to other German tunnels on the Channel Islands and in France. Whatever had been stored in these tunnels, the investigators reasoned, was delicate, valuable, and needed special protection from rock falls and dripping water.
They drew on their own military experience and concluded that the accepted explanations were wrong. As a fuel store or electrical generating station, the tunnels made no sense. The ventilation was poor and the dimensions were wrong. The idea that it was ammunition storage was likewise discounted.
The tunnels were too small and too difficult to work in. The investigators also noted the tunnels’ odd shape. They had curves and bends, which was inefficient in the use of space compared with regular German military storage tunnels, and plenty of those still existed across the Channel Islands for comparison. Whatever was kept in the tunnels sat on trolleys that ran on the small railway line bolted to the floor.
It appeared to Kemp and Weingold that the stored objects were long and thin and could be shunted outside when needed. They reached the conclusion that a Fieseler Fi 103, better known as the V1 flying bomb, with its wings detached for storage as was standard, would fit perfectly in those tunnels. Armies follow handbooks when laying out facilities, and the Germans followed the same practice when setting up V1 launch positions. Kemp and Weingold noticed that outside each tunnel an enormous embankment of earth and rock from the excavations had been deliberately piled up to create two slopes running from the tunnel exits to flattened areas.
Was this the site of a so-called ski ramp V1 launcher? The researchers also noted the site had once held a water tank, which was strange if the location was meant for ammunition storage or an electricity generator. But comparison with known V1 launch sites in northern France raised many parallels. A water tank was integral to V1 sites, allowing crews to wash down the ramp of chemicals used during the missile’s firing.
Coupled with the length of the tunnels, the way the spoil had been shaped into large slopes outside the exits, the high build quality inside, and the rails bolted to the floor, all of it pointed, according to Kemp and Weingold, to Alderney having been a V1 launch site. The researchers concluded that each tunnel could have held seventy-two disassembled V1s on trolleys. Still, the way the Germans had built a V1 site on Alderney was a mystery. It was too close to the coast and would have been very vulnerable to attack once discovered by the British.
Kemp and Weingold also noted that a quarter of a mile inside the hill, two smaller side tunnels branched off the main tunnel in each complex. Each was thirty yards long and led nowhere. Both were extremely well-built and completely dry. Such chambers were not present at V1 sites in France.
The researchers speculated that the V1s would be wheeled along the main tunnel, and as they passed the side passages, something could be fitted to them. Could those very well-built side chambers have held special warheads requiring special storage? In the British archives, there exists a report from a Guernsey fisherman who came into St. Anne’s Harbor one day during the war and witnessed Germans unloading yellow-painted barrels from a ship.
As Kemp pointed out, yellow is the international military recognition color for chemical weapons, then and now. Further evidence came from surviving labor camp prisoners, who reported after the war that the Germans on Alderney had conducted frequent gas drills, often lasting all day, with guards in respirators. Coincidence? Perhaps.
The Germans certainly developed and stockpiled a series of very frightening chemical agents during the war, including the nerve gases tabun and sarin, both horrifically deadly. I did some research on the V1 myself and discovered that the Germans had indeed designed a special chemical warfare variant called the Fi 103D1. As far as is known, it never entered serial production, but the fact remains that we simply do not know whether production of special warheads was undertaken, or whether the D1 variant was built in small numbers. What is well known is that Hitler himself was very loath to use such weapons, even when facing obliteration in the last weeks of the war.
His objections are noted in many surviving documents. But in the case of Alderney, whatever was being done was being done by the SS, operating under the direct authority of Reichsführer SS Heinrich Himmler, the second most powerful man in Germany after Hitler, and a man well known for his secret operations. What about the practical issues? The underground complexes found by Kemp and Weingold could have been V1 launch sites.
If you were going to locate one away from France to attack mainland England, Alderney would have been a good place for several reasons. The closest point of mainland Britain is only about sixty miles away, well within the V1’s standard range of up to one hundred fifty miles. The island was almost completely empty of civilians and heavily militarized. The labor used in the work was disposable and under direct SS control, so no interference would come from other parts of the German armed forces.
No one wanted to upset Himmler, the most feared man in Germany. The question arises: why not simply launch a nerve agent attack from the regular V1 bases in northern France? Why the elaborate subterfuge of doing so from Alderney? Several possible answers present themselves.
First, the nature of the island, with its almost complete lack of civilian population, meant there was never an indigenous resistance organization poking its nose into German activities and reporting back to London, as was the case in northern France. Second, the British would not suspect such a facility in the Channel Islands. It made little sense from a German logistics view to ship complicated weapons like V1s to an island to fire them against England when northern France was perfectly adequate. Third, any accident with the horrendous nerve agents that might be used in such an attack could be contained in one small place, an island four miles long in the middle of the sea, rather than spreading over a wide area full of German troops and defenses as would happen in northern France.
Kemp and Weingold stated that two launch ramps had been built, one for each of the tunnel complexes on Alderney. One ramp lined up with the port of Plymouth, and the other with Weymouth. Both were vital ports for the D-Day operation, crowded with warships, transports, troops, and supplies headed for Normandy. Even after the landings, they continued at maximum capacity for months, sending men and matériel to Europe.
The researchers suggested that nerve agent–armed V1s were going to be fired at these two ports in an attempt to disrupt the Allied invasion effort. The V1 was not a precision strike weapon. It was an area bombardment missile that could generally hit within a seven-kilometer circumference of a target, hence its use against London, the largest city in Britain. But if the Germans fired enough of them at Plymouth and Weymouth, the law of averages suggested that some would get through.
In the case of London, about twenty percent of V1s successfully got through the extensive defensive belts of anti-aircraft guns, barrage balloons, and fighters to impact, causing immense damage, loss of life, and injury. It must also be pointed out that most of the defenses combating V1s fired from northern France were concentrated in southeast England, not the west. Any V1s fired from Alderney would have faced far less opposition. The closest target was Weymouth, about sixty miles almost due north from Alderney.
Plymouth was slightly farther, about one hundred ten miles. Both were within range of a standard V1 regardless of its warhead type. The V1 flew at around four hundred miles per hour, giving a flight time of nine minutes to Weymouth and sixteen and a half minutes to Plymouth. For London operations, V1 launch crews could reasonably fire ten to fifteen missiles per day.
In the case of Alderney, there would have been one battery firing over two ramps, so they could have fired upward of twenty to thirty missiles in a day. Given that Kemp and Weingold calculated each tunnel could accommodate seventy-two missiles, or one hundred forty-four collectively, and taking into consideration damaged or malfunctioning missiles, the Germans could have fired continuously for three days at both ports. And unlike the high explosive warhead normally attached to V1s, the devastation caused by even a handful of successful nerve agent hits on cities like Plymouth and Weymouth could have been catastrophic. Naturally, Kemp and Weingold’s work has been heavily criticized by other historians.
Notably, Trevor Davenport, author of Festung Alderney, a book about the German defenses on the island, dismissed the idea as utter nonsense, though he also admitted there are many things we do not know. That is accepted. It has always been accepted. The island’s operations were quite secret.
So what do you think? Could the Germans have been planning to launch nerve agent–tipped V1s at England in 1944 or 1945? Or is the evidence presented by Kemp and Weingold plausible? I think the very special nature of Alderney in World War II, the secret activities of the SS on the island, and the analysis of the tunnels at Water Lane are compelling.
But until an actual German document discussing this operation surfaces, it will be very difficult to prove. I will say one thing: it would have made an absolutely fantastic plot for a Jack Higgins novel. Many thanks for watching. Please subscribe and share, and also visit my audiobook channel War Stories with Mark Felton.
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