During the Second World War, the Germans hammered Britain with a succession of ever more advanced aerial weapons, reaching their peak with the V-weapon campaign of 1944 and 1945, when southeastern England came under fire from the world’s first widely used cruise missile, the V-1 flying bomb, and the first operational ballistic missile, the A-4, known to history as the V-2. Neither weapon was capable of precise strikes. Like the conventional bombing the Luftwaffe had carried on throughout the war, the best they could hope for was an indiscriminate effect over a broad area. In the case of London, that meant launching enough V-1s and V-2s at the sprawling urban center in the hope that a small fraction would hit something worthwhile.
But the Germans were also interested in developing weapons that could strike with surgical accuracy, the kind of precision-guided munitions that are so common today. That ambition eventually led to the introduction of an early guided bomb into combat late in the war: the Fritz X, an anti-ship glide bomb. Attacking warships with aircraft had always been brutally difficult, especially when trying to hit a moving target with unguided, free-falling bombs. Once a bomb was dropped, there was no way to steer it.
Dive bombers like the Junkers Ju 87 Stuka had to fly straight into the enemy’s anti-aircraft fire to release their ordnance, putting both aircraft and crew at terrible risk. And even then, a moving ship made the whole task vastly more complicated. The first steps toward making bombs steerable after release began in 1938 and 1939, when some 250-kilogram bombs were fitted with radio-control spoilers to help guide them toward their targets. The Germans later combined this technology with rocket development to create the Henschel Hs 293, a radio-guided glide bomb that first saw combat, unsuccessfully, on 25 August 1943.
Roughly a thousand of them were built, and they eventually sank about 25 Allied ships. But the Hs 293 was not armor-piercing. It was only effective against merchant vessels or thinly armored warships such as destroyers and light cruisers. Some of these bombs did hit armored destroyers and other warships during the Allied landings in Sicily and southern France, and they were later turned against bridges during the fighting in Normandy and, at the very end of the war, along the Oder River.
The Fritz X was different. It was designed with heavy warships in mind, built around the PC 1400 armor-piercing bomb. The weapon was released from a conventional bomber flying well outside the range of the target’s anti-aircraft defenses. A dedicated operator on board the mother aircraft then steered the unpowered glide bomb through a radio link that sent signals to movable spoilers arranged in an X-shaped pattern on the weapon’s tail.
The operator used an early form of joystick, and a flare mounted in the tail of the bomb allowed him to keep visual contact with the weapon throughout its flight. The bomb was dropped from altitudes between 13,000 and 18,000 feet, at an operational range of just over three miles. It reached speeds of up to 767 miles per hour and carried a warhead packed with 320 kilograms, about 710 pounds, of high explosive amatol. Steering a Fritz X onto a warship demanded intense practice and real skill.
The unit that deployed it had both. III Group of Kampfgeschwader 100, known as the Viking Wing, flew the twin-engine Dornier Do 217 K-2 medium bomber. Its first attack came on 21 July 1943, during the Allied invasion of Sicily, and the weapon showed promising results through the Italian campaign. On 9 September 1943, Dornier 217s of the Luftwaffe dropped these bombs and succeeded in sinking the Italian battleship Roma, the flagship of the Regia Marina, killing 1,300 of her crew.
Buoyed by that success, the Luftwaffe drew up an extremely bold plan to do the same to the Royal Navy, not in the Mediterranean this time, but in England itself. The target would be His Majesty’s ships lying safely at anchor in Devonport, the major naval dockyard that is part of the city of Plymouth on the southwest coast of England. In April 1944, a Luftwaffe reconnaissance flight identified potential targets docked there, chiefly battleships and other capital ships. The prize among them was HMS Howe.
The newest battleship of the King George V class, she had entered service in 1942. At the time of the planned German attack, she was in Devonport undergoing maintenance and refit after service in the Italian campaign. She was being prepared for operations in the Far East with the Eastern Fleet, and would later serve with the British Pacific Fleet. She was what the Luftwaffe would have considered a vital target.
HMS Howe displaced 45,000 tons fully loaded and stretched more than 744 feet in length. Her main armament consisted of ten 14-inch guns. The Royal Navy had already met the Fritz X in Italy, and the experience had been harrowing. On 13 September 1943, off Salerno, a Fritz X struck the light cruiser HMS Uganda.
The bomb tore through seven decks, reached the keel, and exploded beneath the ship, causing catastrophic damage and flooding. A British battleship had also suffered a successful attack. HMS Warspite was hit off Salerno on 16 September, the bomb piercing six decks before exploding in her boiler room and shattering her double bottom. Warspite flooded heavily and was out of action for nine months.
If the Germans could take a ship as significant as HMS Howe out of the war, it would be a devastating blow and a major propaganda victory. But how could they do it? A conventional air raid with free-falling, armor-piercing bombs might cause some damage, but the bombs would almost certainly scatter across the dockyard and the surrounding city. They might not put Howe out of action at all, and definitely not for long.
The Fritz X offered the possibility of a guided, precise strike against the ship. The unit chosen for the operation was drawn from Kampfgeschwader 100, based at Toulouse in France. Twelve Dornier 217s, from the K-2 and K-3 variants, were assigned to the mission, each armed with a single Fritz X. Unlike the operations over the Mediterranean, this attack had to be flown at night, because of the powerful British anti-aircraft defenses and night fighters positioned across southern and eastern England.
By this stage of the war, conventional German bombers were suffering appalling attrition rates during their attempts to bomb Britain, and a daylight raid on a heavily defended naval port would have been suicide. The raid was led by Feldwebel Pfeifer. The twelve Dorniers took off from Toulouse-Francazal late on the evening of 29 April 1944. Because of the darkness, they would fly as a single formation but attack independently.
The aircraft set course toward Morlaix on the northern coast of Brittany, where they picked up the Knickebein beam, the blind-bombing radio navigation system the Germans used to guide their bombers to targets over England at night. This attack depended on the operator in each aircraft visually steering the Fritz X onto HMS Howe, so the plan called for German Junkers Ju 88 reconnaissance aircraft to arrive over Plymouth ahead of the Dorniers, dropping flares to illuminate and mark the target. That part of the plan fell apart almost immediately. The Dorniers arrived before the flare-droppers, reaching the target area around 03:30 on 30 April.
By that point, British radar had long since detected the incoming raid. Night fighters were scrambled, anti-aircraft batteries were alerted, and, crucially, the British activated a smoke screen around HMS Howe and the dockyard. Thick clouds of artificial fog rolled over the area, making visual guidance of the Fritz X all but impossible. The situation over the target was so bad that Pfeifer, for example, circled over Plymouth four times, searching desperately for a gap in the smoke screen to release his bomb.
Other Dornier crews simply dropped their bombs at random, relying on guesswork since they could not see their targets at all. Most of the Fritz X bombs fell harmlessly into the sea. One crashed into a sports field at Oreston, leaving a huge crater and damaging a few nearby houses. Of the twelve bombs carried, only four hit land, and they caused very little damage.
The British night fighters were already arriving overhead as well. A Mosquito Mark 12 belonging to No. 406 Squadron managed to shoot down two of the Dornier 217s. The squadron commander, Wing Commander D.
J. Williams, a decorated pilot of the Royal Canadian Air Force, shot down the German leader’s Dornier at 03:45, hitting its right engine. The aircraft crashed into the sea in Plymouth Sound. Pfeifer was listed as missing in action, and one of his crewmen was killed.
Two other crew members survived the crash landing and made it ashore at Whitsand Bay, where they were taken prisoner. Williams’ second victory of the night was a Dornier 217 K-3 from 9 Staffel, which crashed into a farm in Devon at 04:02. Three of the crew bailed out and were captured, while the fourth was killed. It was the only time the German air force ever attempted a precision attack on England using Fritz X guided bombs.
The raid failed because the Germans could not see their targets, thanks to the failure of the Ju 88 flare aircraft to arrive on time and the immediate success of the defenders’ smoke screen. The idea was sound, but the execution was poor. The Luftwaffe lost two of the twelve attacking aircraft and gained nothing in return.