WARTIME PRELUDE

On the evening of 8 September 1944 a mysterious explosion rocked the London suburb of Chiswick, followed seconds later by another in Epping. It was the closing stages of World War II, and Londoners were no strangers to novel kinds of bombardment. They had already experienced the V1 pilotless flying bomb in its thousands. When a V1 arrived over the target it switched off its loudly pulsing jet engine, and the brief ominous silence as it dived to the ground was broken by the roar of its detonating warhead. But this new weapon was different. The sonic boom of its approach was only heard after the explosion, by the survivors. There was no air raid warning, no engine noise, no time to take cover -- just a sudden destructive blast from the skies. Small wonder that the British public was mystified for the next two months, until the government revealed what it already knew. Hitler's second 'retaliation weapon' had come at last, and it was the world's first long range ballistic missile to be used as an agent of war.

The V2 bombardment of London (a few landed elsewhere in the country) lasted just under seven months and killed over 2700 people. Such a destructive power is hardly memorable in the bloody annals of World War II. The Allied bombers over Dresden in February 1945 killed tens of thousands in a single night. No, the importance of V2 lay not in its destructive power but in its range and speed and the promise inherent in its design. For it was the harbinger of a new kind of warfare: a war of technicians, not of soldiers; a war where an aggressor could sit snugly at home and point his finger of force against another country. The rocket which exploded at Chiswick had been fired a few minutes before from The Hague in Holland; and earlier in the day another V2 had been launched from the same place against newly liberated Paris.

As early as April 1943 British intelligence had become aware that on the Baltic coast, at a place called Peenemünde, some kind of rocket was being built and test-fired into the sea. The first reports were vague and their reliability questionable. Aerial photographs taken by reconnaissance planes were ambiguous too, and many months passed before the real degree of threat was grasped in London. The notion of a ballistic missile able to carry a large warhead across the Channel was so revolutionary that at first Churchill's eminent scientific adviser, Lord Cherwell, refused to believe it. He argued that the intelligence reports were disinformation put out to conceal the development of some other weapon. Cherwell's caution is not surprising. At that time all the Allies had in the way of military rockets were the Z-weapons, which despite their sinister name were only 127 millimetre solid propellant unguided missiles deployed with moderate success against enemy aircraft. How could the Germans possibly have rockets well over a metre across, weighing tonnes and capable of bombarding London from 300 kilometres away? It sounded like science fiction. The War Office's proper appreciation of the German achievement was also handicapped by the views of Dr Alwyn Crow, then Controller of Projectile Developments at the Ministry of Supply (MoS). During the deliberations of the Bodyline Committee, set up by Duncan Sandys to examine all the evidence, Crow helped to reinforce the authority of Cherwell. Both scientists argued that the only practicable rocket fuel was cordite burnt in a thick steel case. To carry a heavy warhead across the required distance such a rocket would have to be a monster: it would probably need four stages and weigh anything up to 100 tonnes. Neither man would entertain the possibility of a liquid propelled rocket, even though not long before Crow had seen two demonstrations of Lizzy, an engine which burned aviation gasoline in liquid oxygen (LOX), built by a Shell engineer, Isaac Lubbock, whose company had a small research contract to develop an aeroplane booster.¹ For their part the Germans had abandoned solid fuels for ballistic missiles well before the war, when they started to design what became the V2.

In August 1943 Churchill had ordered a massive bomber raid on the Peenemünde installations, but although this delayed and dispersed the German work it did not stop it. For almost a year the rocket threat to Britain was pushed into the background by the onslaughts of the V1 flying bomb. It was not until July 1944 that a straying experimental rocket landed in a Swedish bog and its transfer to Britain was negotiated. Experts at RAE, the Royal Aircraft Establishment at Farnborough, were at last able to examine physically the two tonnes of wreckage. As they laid out the parts in a hangar and painstakingly fitted them together, they grew astonished at the sophistication of its design. In particular, the Germans had brilliantly solved the problem of pumping the propellants to the combustion chamber by devising a turbine driven by chemically generated steam. This ran two powerful centrifugal pumps, and in fact it was the generous tolerances in one of these that had pointed to the use of LOX as one of the propellants. In its report to the Crossbow Committee (successor to Bodyline), RAE confirmed that the rocket which its staff had reconstructed did indeed have the power and range to reach London from enemy territory in Europe. This evaluation was grimly confirmed with the first casualties in the following month.

The German A-4 (V2) rocket was 1.6 metres in diameter and 14 metres long, weighed 12 tonnes and could deliver a tonne of high explosive over a range of at least 330 kilometres. A mobile unit of trailers and tankers could launch it from any flat solid surface such as a sealed road. Burning alcohol in LOX, the V2 was guided during the propulsive part of its flight by an unjammable autopilot. After its propellants were exhausted it travelled in a free-fall or ballistic trajectory well above the atmosphere and then plunged downwards to its target at thrice the speed of sound. The earlier V1 bombardment had eventually been neutralised by a combination of RAF fighters, radar and anti-aircraft gunnery defences, but the V2 was beyond attack as soon as it was launched. It was the direct ancestor of today's intercontinental ballistic missile.

Under the spur of war Britain had made astonishing advances in radar and had at least kept pace with Germany in developing jet propulsion. In partnership with the United States it was building an atomic bomb. The Allies' air superiority was total by this stage of the war. But the stray V2 proved that the Allies were far behind the Germans in rocket technology. Faced with the mounting evidence of this gap, and later with the new threat in the Pacific war of Japanese kamikaze suicide bombers, the Allied High Command resolved that some effort should be diverted to the research and development of guided missiles, and this work began in 1944. The first step was to find out as much as possible about the German developments.

The bombardment of London lasted until March 1945, two months before the Germans were ousted from Holland and their V2 launching sites over-run. As British forces swept on towards Berlin an enthusiastic hunt began for the technical secrets of the advanced German weaponry. It soon turned into a race to get to the factories before the Russians.² For the British it also developed into a race to get there before the Americans, even though the Allied Chiefs of Staff had ordered that British and American efforts should be co-ordinated to secure these precious trophies of war. In the event the US Army got to the centre of the hive first when on 11 April 1945 they captured the huge underground Mittelwerke factory near Nordhausen in the Harz Mountains, where most of the V2s had been manufactured using slave labour ever since the Peenemünde raid in 1943. Then a few days before VE Day, 8 May 1945, the German scientists who had led the development of the V2 at Peenemünde, including Wernher von Braun and General Walter Dornberger, gave themselves up to American troops in the Bavarian Alps.

British scientists took part in the interrogation of the Peenemünde team. They had already examined captured mechanical and electrical components of the rocket, and RAE had published reports on them by May 1945. In early May came discussions between the Allied Headquarters, the War Office and Sir Alwyn Crow on a proposal to use German experts to fire captured V2s in Germany, to establish exactly how this was done before the technicians dispersed or lost their skill. The consequence was an Allied military operation known as BACKFIRE. As the firings were to be seaward from Cuxhaven on the North Sea coast of Germany, which was in the British occupied zone, Operation BACKFIRE was organised by the British Army and commanded by Major-General A. M. Cameron, with support and technical assistance from the Ministry of Supply. The US Army was invited to participate, but it did no more than provide observers. It had its own far more elaborate plans for the V2, which involved firing it in quantity from the White Sands Range in the New Mexico desert.

Securing enough V2s and their support equipment proved a major headache for Cameron and his team. US army ordnance officers had dug deep into the Mittelwerke factory at Nordhausen, securing enough parts for a hundred complete V2s before that part of Germany was handed over to the Red Army. By the end of May the components had been railed to Antwerp and loaded aboard a fleet of Liberty ships. They were on their way to the New Mexico desert by the time the British protests arrived.

The American officers at Nordhausen told Cameron that the factory still contained plenty of rocket equipment, enough to supply thirty V2s for BACKFIRE, as well as the 120 requested by the Air Ministry. Before the deadline of 21 June ended their access to the factory, the BACKFIRE team recovered and railed to Cuxhaven an impressive 650 tonnes of equipment. But the quantity was deceptive. The Americans had skimmed the cream and many of the complex sub-assemblies were missing altogether. The team scoured northern Germany, collecting components and damaged rockets from factories and railway yards, from canals and ditches and fields where they had been abandoned by the retreating troops. Ground equipment was located by interrogating prisoners of war, and often dug up from where it had been buried. By the middle of September enough equipment had been collected, repaired and assembled to produce just eight V2s fit to fire, although a complete set of the remote control equipment was never found.

The work of rebuilding and launching the V2 rockets was done by a 600-man German unit under British army supervision. The unit included 137 officers and regular soldiers selected from the surrendered A-4 Division of the Wehrmacht. These soldiers were supplemented by seventy-nine German civilian scientists and technicians of the old Peenemünde team who were borrowed from the US Army. To counter possible deception, some of the Peenemünde experts were kept in a separate team and used only to cross-check information supplied.

At the first attempt on 1 October 1945 the engine did not fire and the launch was temporarily postponed. Certain repairs required a mechanic to climb right inside the combustion chamber and, according to report, this intrepid man became helplessly drunk on the fumes of the alcohol fuel pouring down inside. Finally, after several more abortive attempts, three of the eight rebuilt rockets were successfully fired into the North Sea, and two of them landed close to the target. They were tracked by radar and by Askania kinetheodolites, optical instruments of the same make as those which some years later were installed at Woomera. The first guided missile trials in which Britain had participated had proved quite successful. BACKFIRE provided valuable experience in the handling of liquid propellants, an experience that was to be drawn on a decade later for the first of the big Woomera-launched rockets, Black Knight. It also brought home a better appreciation of both the capabilities and the limitations of the V2.

In his lengthy report issued in January 1946, Cameron concluded that his objective had been achieved and that it was impossible to exaggerate its significance:

Whatever the future may hold, the A-4 is undoubtedly already a feasible weapon of war. Even if Britain and the United States do not wish to use it, they must at all costs be prepared to counter it. Efficient and up-to-date countermeasures cannot be produced without developing the weapon itself. The lesson of operation BACKFIRE is that what Britain and the United States can do, other nations can do. No nation can afford to allow the development of long range rockets to jog along as a matter of routine. There is need of all the imagination, drive, and brains that can be mustered. For the sake of their very existence, Britain and the United States must be masters of this weapon of the future.³

Written at a time when devastated Europe had barely begun to count the cost of the war, Cameron's words could hardly have put more succinctly the reasoning behind the joint project, then in the first stages of its gestation. The Allied leaders were quick to realise that two events on opposite sides of the world -- the V2 at Chiswick on 9 September 1944, and the bomb on Hiroshima on 6 August 1945 -- had transformed military science as never before. During the war 3000 of the two V-weapons fell on and around London. They did a lot of damage but were not very cost-effective, especially the V2. Antwerp received no fewer than twenty-six V2s in a single day, yet even this failed to bring the port to a standstill. It would have been a very different story had it been possible to arm them with Hiroshima-size atomic warheads. Just a few such warheads, each with a yield of 22 kilotonnes, would have devastated London and altered the course of the war. No one doubted that the marriage of these two weapons, fearsome enough separately but of appalling potential when united, had only been postponed, not cancelled.

The last of the three V2 firings at Cuxhaven had been used as a semi-public demonstration attended by the press and representatives from the United States, the Soviet Union and France. Probably it was intended to show that the Allies had indeed unlocked the secrets of the V2, but its broader effect must have been to send away the onlookers in a very thoughtful mood.⁴ Certainly none of their governments was slow to grasp the potentialities of the ballistic missile. Although the British were mainly responsible for this demonstration, it was the Americans and the Russians who between them seized most of the valuable spoils of war. As well as their hundred V2 rockets the Americans acquired thousands of technical documents; they also took to the United States most of the key Peenemünde engineers, including von Braun, in an operation code-named OVERCAST (later PAPERCLIP). These men became the nucleus of the US Army Ordnance team that went on to develop Redstone, then the Jupiter-C booster that launched America's first satellite, Explorer 1, and finally the giant Saturn V rocket that put the first man on the moon. To the Russians fell the Mittelwerke factory, the remnants of Peenemünde, and most of the other rocket engineers. Since Nordhausen was in East Germany they were able to revive production there under the guidance and control of engineer Dr Helmut Grotrupp, and probably a thousand or more V2s eventually went back to Russia for experiments. Though the Russians did not get the most talented men, they made the most of their inheritance by going on to develop their own Inter-Continental Ballistic Missiles (ICBMs), to launch the first artificial satellite, and to make the first manned orbital flight.

To the other victors, the British, went far fewer spoils. They had solved the secret of Hitler's secret weapon and alongside the Belgians had withstood the world's first bombardment by guided missile; but all they were left with was a few V2s remaining from BACKFIRE (one or two of which later arrived in Australia) and several capable Germans who went to work at RAE and other establishments.

BRITAIN FACES THE GUIDED MISSILE AGE

With World War II over at last, Britain faced up to the mountainous economic, political and military problems that were its legacy of the conflict. It took some time to come to terms with these, especially the country's diminished economic status and hence its position as a world power. Some of them were to beset Britain for years afterwards, profoundly influencing the joint project throughout its existence.

Economically, the country was in a parlous state, yet money was needed for pressing and widespread reconstruction. Houses had to be built, the transport system renewed and factories converted to peacetime production. Agriculture and fisheries needed revitalising before food rationing could be phased out; indeed, bread rationing was introduced for the first time after the war ended. Much of Britain's wealth had been dissipated in the long struggle, especially the valuable investments abroad which had been the glittering prizes of Empire. Gold and dollar reserves had been cut in half. A third of the mercantile marine was at the bottom of the sea. The years of war had all but dried up capital investment in the home industries. Paradoxically the factories of Britain, with their stock of ageing and obsolete machinery largely intact, proved to be more of a handicap in the long run than the devastated factories of Germany and Japan. Those countries had to make prodigious efforts, but they were able to invest from scratch in the newest equipment, and their productive energy soon transformed the shape of Britain's traditional export market. Only American aid in the shape of the Marshall Plan kept the country solvent in the immediate post-war years.

Politically, Britain had to take some urgent overseas initiatives. She had to help build up the United Nations, participate in the continuing occupation of Germany and try to help stabilise the fluid political scene not only in Europe but also in South-East Asia and the Pacific following the sudden collapse of Japan. The Empire also needed radical changes; as it had promised to do, Britain had to disengage itself from Burma and India.

Militarily, the Eastern bloc had arisen as the main threat in place of the defeated Axis, and this was to lead to the creation of the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO). Britain found it impossible to dispense with conscription even though this kept out of productive work enough able-bodied workers to man a large industry. At the same time, the officers of the British armed forces had to recognise that conventional armies, guns, tanks and battleships were no longer enough. The lessons of V2 and Hiroshima could not be ignored; military planning would have to be thoroughly revised. The Soviets had the Nordhausen factory and could be expected to go all out to develop long range guided missiles. Sooner or later they would be carrying nuclear warheads.

Faced with the realities of post-war international politics and military technology, and barely questioning the dogma that the country must continue to be a world power, Britain faced up courageously to the fact that resources would have to be found for rearmament, and rearmament on a grand scale. An enemy in sole possession of a long range ballistic missile armed with a nuclear warhead would have the heavily populated, highly industrialised United Kingdom at its mercy. The same was true of other European countries, but the British, those offshore islanders, had traditionally relied on their navy for defence. In a war fought with guided missiles the country could be defeated before a single ship had left port. Their new vulnerability was thus felt the more keenly.

If no defence were possible against the guided missile, the only hope was to deter an aggressor by the threat of swift and certain retribution. The new Attlee Labour government decided that it must have the new weaponry no matter what the cost. The development of a British nuclear bomb began in 1947 and continued unabated long after the first test at Monte Bello off Western Australia in 1952. The cost was indeed great, for Britain had to draw entirely on its own resources, the McMahon Act passed by Congress in August 1946 having prohibited the US from sharing atomic secrets with its wartime allies. But the bomb was only part of the burden. Britain also chose to expand greatly the program of guided weapons development that had begun so uncertainly, late in the war.

Though these programs of rearmament and military research were deemed vital for national security and had popular support, they still had serious repercussions. Spending money on the armed forces has never been popular in Britain and before the war expenditure had generally been less than 3 per cent of the Gross Domestic Product. But, as the nation entered the 1950s, the cost of defence rose to 7.5 per cent of the GDP in 1951 and then, with the mounting tensions of the Korean war, to an unprecedented 8.7 per cent the following year. This was a higher proportion than in any other Western country, and as a historian of the period has written, 'the economy creaked and groaned under the pressure of the shift to military production.'⁵ At first the opinion polls showed that rearmament commanded considerable popular support. Even when asked to choose directly between rearmament and housing, a commodity in terribly short supply in 1951, the respondents were almost equally divided as to which should come first. But the burden grew very heavy over the next few years, especially because rearmament called for more aircraft, vehicles, ships and electronic gear, and therefore absorbed a good deal of the most valuable kind of capital investment which could have been of more direct social benefit. It also absorbed the energies of an actual majority -- nearly two-thirds, on some calculations -- of the country's most talented engineers and technicians. This realisation was reflected in the polls. By 1955 a large majority was opposed to any further increase in spending on armaments; most thought the prevailing level was about right.⁶

The decision to develop guided weapons having been taken, the immediate task was to set up an organisation, more formal than the ad hoc arrangements of 1944, to administer the research and development effort. At first the work had been divided up along traditional service lines. Research into 'aircraft-like' and air-launched missiles was assigned to the Ministry of Aircraft Production (MAP), the body set up just before the Battle of Britain to develop and build warplanes. Ship-launched missiles became the province of the Admiralty and ground-launched missiles of the Ministry of Supply (MoS) which at that time looked after the needs of the War Office (Army). A 'Guided Anti-Aircraft Projectile Committee', known as the GAP Committee, was set up in March 1944 to co-ordinate Admiralty and MoS efforts. The GAP Committee oversaw the research into the basic arts of rocketry -- propulsion, guidance and instrumentation --which was going forward at some ten MoS scientific establishments. The GAP Committee's work was strongly practical and oriented towards quick production. By contrast MAP, in charge of airborne weapons, had a rather different philosophy. It wanted to do a lot more basic research before embarking on weapons production. In particular it felt it needed to develop test instruments and simulators to allow the behaviour of missile systems to be measured and predicted. Their work was conducted by RAE and by theTelecommunications Research Establishment (TRE), which were both controlled by MAP at the time.

One job undertaken by the GAP Committee was to draw up the first military staff requirement for a guided missile. This was for a medium range weapon capable of attacking fast, high flying bombers. The shopping list quickly grew: air-to-air missiles with which fighter planes could attack bombers; an expendable pilotless bomber; a V2-type bombardment ballistic missile of up to 500 kilometre range; and a very advanced winged missile capable of reaching across Europe. And the military forces wanted these things soon -- in three years or less. Their ambitions were damped for a while by the report, issued in June 1945, of a secret committee chaired by Sir Henry Tizard, the government's eminent scientific adviser on military matters. The report took a cautious line on the supplanting of manned aircraft by guided missiles, observing that 'there is a tendency to attach too much importance to the possible substitution of human beings in aircraft by automatic mechanism. A highly trained man is more flexible than any automatic device.' It predicted that the major defence of cities and convoys would rest with supersonic fighter planes supplemented by ground-to-air missiles. Influenced no doubt by the success of the V2, Tizard saw a place for ballistic missile bombardment over a range of 650 kilometres or so, observing that V2-style rockets would continue to be very hard to counter. By contrast the strategic bombing by aircraft, as used to such effect during the war, would be too costly once supersonic fighters had entered service. However, Tizard thought long range guided missiles were many years away. Ranges even of 3000 kilometres were possible in theory, but for each additional tonne of warhead the launching weight would rise by 100 tonnes. Pilotless aircraft would be more efficient by a factor of ten, but in both cases there were daunting problems of terminal guidance. Tizard concluded that 'there is little reason yet to believe that the effort will be worth the cost.'⁷

It is evident that the Tizard report was a very conservative document. Its authority was vitiated by the fact that Churchill refused the Committee access to atomic information, and its deliberations were concluded by the time the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombs were exploded. Though the report has some shrewd remarks about the future significance of nuclear weaponry, it does not comment on the potentialities of guided missiles with atomic payloads. This may have hindered its later acceptance in policy making circles, and personal friction between Tizard and Crow may have played a part too. Whatever the reason, the Tizard report was against the tide of the times and its conclusions on guided weapons were virtually ignored over the following year or two.

It was inevitable that the divisions of function and philosophy in MAP, MoS and the other ministries should spell administrative confusion and duplicated effort. After a review early in 1945, the split of responsibility for new weapons between MoS and MAP was clarified. Within MoS a new Directorate of Guided Projectiles (DGP) was created in July 1945, to control research and development of ship- and ground-launched weapons for the Admiralty and Army. The new Director was Sir Alwyn Crow, and he took over the work of the GAP Committee, which was dissolved. An interdepartmental committee was also formed, to co-ordinate this MoS work with that of MAP on air weapons.

Crow also moved to set up a new Guided Projectile Establishment at Westcott in Buckinghamshire to be a focus for work on guided weapons in other establishments, and to carry out work not already catered for, particularly into the chemistry of propellants. After the foundation of Westcott in April 1946, static test-firing stands were constructed and the engineers buckled down to the manifold problems of rocket design.

Just after the end of the war the government decided to absorb MAP into an enlarged Ministry of Supply, which now was given the responsibility of supplying weapons to all the armed services. However, the split between air and other weapons was preserved at a lower level until November 1946, under two separate Controllers of Supplies, one for Air and the other for Munitions. This gave the new Ministry something of a split personality when it came to guided weaponry, a split which was to emerge again later. The Munitions side of MoS, particularly Crow himself, was not inclined to give much weight to Tizard's analysis. It favoured pushing forward quickly with guided weapons, continuing from where the Germans had broken off at the end of the war. The Air side of MoS continued to be more interested in developing the techniques of propulsion, guidance and aerodynamics before embarking on the production of service weapons. The Munitions viewpoint prevailed at this stage. Just as Cameron had recommended in the BACKFIRE report, the British government determined to produce a selection of guided weaponry with the utmost priority and at any cost. But once built, the missiles had to be tested. For this Britain had to have a rocket range, and it needed to be a good 1600 kilometres long to accommodate the transcontinental flying bomb.

EYES TURN TO AUSTRALIA

No one doubted that Britain's rocket range would have to be overseas, on the broad terrain of a friendly nation. Nowhere in the British Isles could rockets be fired safely over even a tenth of the required distance. The few weapons ranges in Britain had been designed for short range gunnery, for bombing practice, or for testing small unguided rockets. Most of them ran over the sea, making recovery of the remnants awkward, and in any case the climate ruled out long distance optical observations. So late in 1945 Crow and the defence planners took a hard look at several possible locations. They were not looking for a range site alone. They saw advantage in having the actual production of military hardware dispersed abroad, as had been done in the later phases of World War II, in order to lessen the risk of disruption from enemy attack. Perhaps Britain and the host country could help each other to design and produce weapons. The obvious place for Britain to look for partners in such a joint venture was the British Commonwealth: the dominions of Canada, South Africa, Australia and New Zealand. Britain already had a share in a nuclear plant in Canada and a chemical warfare establishment at Proserpine in Queensland. Dispersing the production of guided weapons over these distant countries would make communications difficult in an emergency, but it also made it hard for an enemy to knock out all production simultaneously.

It was soon apparent that for practical purposes the choice of a Commonwealth country for a missile range narrowed down to Canada or Australia. Only these two were politically uncomplicated and possessed enough unpopulated territory for a long range overland. (The third possibility was briefly canvassed of a sea range in the Bahamas, but rejected because recovery would be difficult, and because the area was heavily populated, thus posing security and safety problems.) The choice, then, was Canadian tundra or Australian desert. The advantages of Canada were that it was close to the United States and relatively so to Britain too; it was also more industrialised than Australia. However, 1300 kilometres of Hudson Bay tundra was about the most that Canada could offer. This terrain would be snowbound through the long winter, meaning that for a large part of the year visibility would be poor and recovery of the expended missiles difficult. Nevertheless, Canada was being seriously considered in the second half of 1945.

Australia was a very different proposition. It had the disadvantage of being an immense distance from the Western power centres, although the need for absolute security made isolation an equivocal factor. On the positive side, the task of finding in the vast empty interior of the continent a stretch of desert even 1600 kilometres long did not seem onerous, and an extra length over empty sea could easily be added on at many points around the coastline. Surface communications in the outback were less than ideal, but roads would be easy to build across the flat and rainless land and a rail-link to the rangehead appeared possible too. Industrial support could come from the cities of the settled south-east. The heat, flies and occasional sandstorms would be troublesome to the staff for a few months in the year, but most of the time the climate would be ideal and the clear desert skies would be superb for optical tracking. Trials could go on all the year round. Finally, Australia was an affluent country with little war reconstruction to do, and politically it was extremely stable and one of the most loyal members of the Commonwealth.

At that time Australia had a representative of the Munitions Department posted in London. His name was William Coulson. He and Crow had joined in firing small air-launched rockets at the Aberporth range in Wales, and Coulson had often urged the advantages of his country, which he was sure could meet the requirements for a range. Matters came to a head in September 1945. Coulson persuaded two high officials of MoS that an agreement on the point of being negotiated with Canada should be postponed while he put his ideas to his superiors at home. According to Coulson's own account:

At this meeting [with the MoS representatives] I tabled amap of Australia on which was marked a range area based on a rangehead at Mt Eba in South Australia, firing in a north-westerly direction crossing the coast between Port Hedland and Broome. (This map, the first to show the Australian Rocket Range, was still at Australia House in 1950, and maybe there to this day.)⁸

Coulson's next step was to fly to Melbourne to report to his chief, Noel Brodribb, Controller General of Munitions. At the Victoria Barracks on 16 October 1945 Brodribb and Coulson explained the scheme in detail. Present were the three Chiefs of Defence Force Staff; Frederick Shedden, Secretary of the Department of Defence; and Sir David Rivett and Dr F. W. White of the CSIR (later CSIRO: the major civil scientific research organisation which it was then assumed would be working for the project). Of these, Shedden's voice was perhaps the most influential. A senior public servant of great experience and authority, Shedden was very fond of the role of grey eminence. Once he had put his weight behind the proposal, general acceptance quickly followed and was recorded in these terms:

Sir Alwyn [Crow] is anxious to ascertain the view of the Australian Government on a suggestion by the British Government that guided projectile research should largely be moved from the United Kingdom to Australia, in order to take advantage of the exceptional facilities offered by this country's empty spaces, combined with her intensive production ability.⁹

The Minister for Defence, John Dedman, then consulted Prime Minister J. B.Chifley. Both agreed to recommend the Crow-Coulson plan to Cabinet when it was submitted formally, with the proviso that satisfactory arrangements would have to be worked out between the governments covering such matters as Australian participation in the work, the access to information, the financial details, and how the undertaking was to be controlled. In general, though, the Australians believed strongly in defence co-operation and were eager to strengthen the bonds of Empire.

One should not interpret Chifley's quick acquiescence as simply answering the call of the Mother Country. Even in 1946 Australian loyalty was not quite as blind as that. A good deal of self-interest was at work. We should recall that the Labor Party had been in power in Australia ever since the early years of the war, and it had borne the heavy responsibility of administering most of the war effort. Its Ministers remembered only too well that in the desperate days of 1943 Australia had asked Britain for armaments to use in the Pacific theatre, only to be denied them because they were needed in Europe. Chifley was thus very interested in Australia's acquiring its own versions of the new generation of weapons for use in any future war. The British proposal seemed to offer that, and more; it might lead to Australia's becoming the arsenal for the whole Empire. If the British weapons research effort were moved wholesale to Australia the consequences could only be good. Many highly desirable people would migrate with it. The economy would receive a general boost from the influx of money, the establishment of new industries and the encouragement of scientific research. Australia clearly stood to benefit provided an acceptable agreement could be worked out on how the control, work, costs and information were to be shared. This was not Chifley's opinion alone, but very much that of his advisers too. A few months later, when the proposal was beginning to take shape, Brodribb told him confidently that:

it has been accepted in the United Kingdom that within a period of a few years there will inevitably be an almost complete transfer to Australia of research and development associated with this project. This ultimate transfer will without question put Australia in the very forefront of the most modern developments in Defence Science.¹⁰

In the light of subsequent events both the British proposal and the Australian reaction to it appear rather naive. The idea of a united Empire defence started to look quaint with the granting of independence to India and Burma and the rise of nationalism in Egypt, Palestine and Ceylon. Britain eventually abandoned even the semblance of Commonwealth defence by withdrawing west of Suez and largely restricting its military forces to Britain itself, Germany and its NATO obligations. No massive transfer of guided weapons research, production or staff ever flowed from Britain to Australia. The benefits of the Anglo-Australian joint project to Australia, though real, were more dispersed and tenuous than that. Nevertheless, the two countries saw the project from the beginning as truly a joint undertaking in which both would take full part and from which both would benefit. This philosophy, though problematic from the start, was strong enough to survive several changes of government in both countries, and a number of searching reappraisals and renegotiations in the years ahead.

THE EVETTS MISSION

When Coulson returned to London with good news from his masters, the British decided to send a formal mission to Australia to discuss in detail how the Range should be set up. As they started to plan for this, an unexpected opportunity arose to garner some more information at little cost.

It was now the end of 1945. It so happened that a small team was about to embark on an overseas tour to study how far military production could be distributed among the Commonwealth countries. It was led by H. W. L. (later Sir Leo) Kearns, a high-ranking officer of MoS in charge of machine tool production. The other members were a Mr Harrison (also from MoS) and Lt Col John Caddy (later one of the 'Evetts eleven' who moved to Australia to administer the project). The Kearns team were going to visit India, Ceylon, Australia and New Zealand. While in Australia they could easily take a preliminary look at the country and talk about the proposal with some officials. This they did. Whether by accident or design their port of entry was Exmouth on the north-west coast of Australia, and from there they flew diagonally across the continent. They were fascinated by the red earthy desert unrolling hour after hour like an endless loop of cinema film beneath the wings of their aircraft; a featureless expanse relieved only by rocky outcrops and ridges, utterly bereft of towns, railways or important roads. If you wanted to fire experimental rockets then here, surely, was the country to do it in.¹¹

Perhaps as a result of the favourable reports brought home by the Kearns party at the turn of the year, the British government was able to be quite specific about its requirements when, in February 1946, it formally requested Australia to receive its mission. The letter began by defining the ideal requirements for 'a large area in which trials with guided weapons can be carried out.' The area should be about 1600 kilometres long by 300 kilometres wide at the target end, easily accessible by road and rail to the firing point and yet easily protected against prying eyes. It should be flat, easily surveyed and in an area with an equable climate. It should be within reach of a suitable research organisation and of an industrial zone where components could be manufactured efficiently and securely. If the mission left very soon its work would be done in time for an informal conference on defence science scheduled for June. This conference, chaired by Tizard, would be attended by officials from all the Commonwealth countries. The British were eager to seek Commonwealth support, and perhaps involvement, in what they were planning to do in Australia.

After receiving approval, preparations went ahead for the visit, now formally entitled 'The Mission to Australia in connection with Guided Projectiles.' The official briefing called upon the mission 'to obtain the best possible range in the British Commonwealth, and to make a general survey of the industrial and technical facilities to enable full scale firing trials to be carried out of all types of guided projectiles.' It was to 'endeavour to reach satisfactory understandings with the Australian Government' on a number of matters including Australian participation in the work of the Range and the possible future Australian production of guided missiles. The mission was ordered to be circumspect in talking about money:

At this stage, the mission should do no more than invite the Australian Government to agree in principle to bear some part of both the capital and maintenance cost of the range; and take note of any proposals from the Australian Government as regards the amount of the contribution or the form which the contribution might take.¹²

The initial proposal was for Sir Alwyn Crow to lead the mission. In the event it was led by the Senior Military Adviser to MoS, Lieutenant General J. F.Evetts, CB, CBE, MC. Apparently Evetts was not entirely happy with this assignment, feeling he was the wrong man for the job.¹³ His fears were baseless. Evetts went on to do more than any other individual in fostering the growth of the project in its first few years.

John Evetts, tall, genial and sufficiently debonair to be known in the ranks as 'flash Jack', was neither scientist nor engineer but a career Army officer. A graduate of Royal Military College Sandhurst, he had been in the Army since 1911 and was decorated with a Military Cross during World War I. Between the wars he was stationed in the Middle East for some years, where he was employed by the Iraq Army from 1925 to 1928 and afterwards had held several senior commands with the British forces in Palestine during the troubles there. He had served in India early in World War II. Evetts was not lacking in the rank and background needed. He had commanded Australians, those notoriously unruly troops, and unlike some British officers got on well with them. He was no stranger to arid regions either. Sometimes Evetts struck other more phlegmatic personalities as being something of a worrier. He seemed to find it hard to let things rest; to let time work out his problems for him. Yet it should be remembered how heavy his responsibilities were. With the possible exception of manufacturing an atomic bomb, his government had no greater priority than its guided weapons program. It thought the nation's survival might depend on it. Evetts had to live with the nagging sense of being engaged in a race against time. He was assisted by his clear if unsophisticated sense of what he was about. As he once told an interviewer:

we must go all out to create -- as I believe we are creating-- and to maintain a team of men who will be up to test match form and capable of playing their part in the greatest Test Match of all time; namely, the prevention of war and the preservation of the unalienable rights of mankind.¹⁴

Of the other five members of the mission, four were also from MoS. David Clemmow (Evetts's personable right-hand man) and J. C. Yarrow represented the Munitions side of MoS, while Wing Commander R. F. Harman and Norman Coles represented the Air side. The fifth member, H. C. Calpine, a quiet and skilled radar physicist, was from the Admiralty. The various interests of the mission blended well, and together they had expertise in all the right areas --scientific, technical and military -- for the unusual task of founding a rocket range.

Meanwhile in Australia arrangements were going ahead to receive the mission. Much of the routine administration, of accommodation, transport and so forth, was left to two army staff officers, one of them Major John Howard who later worked for the project in London and at Salisbury. To provide informed support the Minister for Defence set up an ad hoc liaising committee. This GP [Guided Projectiles] Committee had five members, representatives of the Army, Navy, RAAF, Department of Munitions and the Council for Scientific and Industrial Research (now CSIRO). The Chairman was the army representative, Major General Leslie Beavis. Beavis was a middle-aged career soldier who had graduated from the Royal Military College Duntroon during World War I. In World War II he had served in the war as Master General of the Ordnance. This job -- supplying soldiers in the field with arms and equipment -- had been onerous and Beavis had handled it very competently. He was loyal and strong minded, but in speech rather inarticulate, and he had a fierce temper. One of his aides' jobs was to put a new drinking glass on his desk at regular intervals, for he used it as a gavel to punctuate his conversation. The RAAF representative was Air Commodore E. C. Wackett, brother of the famous aeronautical engineer. These two, together with Noel Brodribb from Munitions, were to take an active part later as members of the Long Range Weapons Board of Administration.

Evetts, Clemmow and Calpine arrived in Sydney on the evening of 9 April, having travelled out by Hythe flying boat. The others arrived the next day in a Lancastrian. Security was tight. There was little comfort for the waiting journalists, agog to hear the details of the mission's itinerary. The only statement forthcoming was a single sentence saying that the party was 'investigating the possibility' of setting up a test range.

On the same day (10 April 1946) that saw his team reunited, Evetts took them to Canberra for an interview with Chifley, who was on the point of leaving for London to attend the first post-war Commonwealth Prime Ministers' Conference. One very junior officer, an eyewitness to the meeting, which was also attended by Deputy Prime Minister Frank Forde, Frederick Shedden and others, recalls how warmly Chifley received the mission and how the other Ministers, very deferential to Chifley, took their cue from him.15 Evetts formally asked permission to select a site for the Range and to make a general technical and industrial survey as his superiors had ordered him to do. Chifley readilyagreed, whereupon Evetts raised some of the specific points for negotiation: the machinery for controlling the program of Range work; the attachment of scientific trainees to British defence establishments; what R&D work could be done in Australia; how the Range would be administered; and how costs were to be shared. Chifley felt these points would have to be resolved by negotiation at leisure between the two governments. One point which he did raise in detail was the question of whether, under threat of another war, Australia would have full access to the secret manufacturing information should it decide to embark on producing the latest weaponry for its own use. Evetts assured him this would be made available. However, Evetts had been told to avoid promising any contribution to the cost of producing guided weapons for Australia other than what would be needed for testing at the Range.

Once these diplomatic exchanges were over, Evetts turned his attention to finding a site. In consultation with the GP committee he had decided to look for one flexible enough and large enough for every possible contingency, and he already knew that what he wanted could be found forward of Mt Eba, a pastoral property west of the northern end of Lake Torrens in South Australia. It was time to exchange the map for an aerial and ground inspection of this little-known region.

Two days before Easter the mission flew to Adelaide. As their RAAF plane circled Parafield airport before landing, the Britishers caught their first sight of a sprawling and vacant munitions factory at Penfield, which their hosts were now proposing as the base establishment for the project. Obeying Chifley's injunction to 'go and see old Tom', Evetts first met Premier Playford and his Director of Lands. Their meeting was extremely cordial. Playford's ambitions for industrialising his State knew no bounds, and he was eager to secure the Range. The two men pored over a large map of the north of the State, which Evetts later remembered as consisting mostly of blank space traversed only by the faint lines of vermin fences. On Good Friday morning the mission set off again in a Dakota, with a second carrying two jeeps.

The airstrip at Mt Eba homestead was a refuelling stop for the commercial flights plying north to Darwin, and the mission happened to arrive just after the regular mail plane had departed. One passenger had disembarked. As the party began to unload its gear, this passenger exhibited a curiosity which, it soon emerged, was professional. He was a reporter from the Adelaide Advertiser sent up to cover the Kingoonya picnic races, and purely by chance he had stumbled on a fine scoop. Trying to retrieve the situation as best they could, Evetts, Wackett and others went into a huddle and then worked out with the lucky journalist a suitable press release. The 'secret' location of the rangehead made headline news across the country, with the newspaper illustrators drawing imaginative circles radiating outwards from Mt Eba.

The ground reconnaissance, otherwise very satisfactory, was notable for another incident. Two Australian members of the party were Air Commodore Wackett and Wing Commander George Pither, both of whom were important inthe project administration later. The two men were eager to see more of the country further afield and despite Evetts's muted disapproval took a ride on the truck of a mail run north to the opal fields of Coober Pedy. On the way back the truck broke down and Wackett, Pither and the unconcerned mail man were stranded in the bush until the searching Dakota spotted them. The crew took the door off and kicked out a crate of biscuits and some bully beef, just in time to save them from dining off a parrot. Eventually they were retrieved by the manager of Mt Eba after two nights and a day next to the truck.¹⁶

For the rest of its very busy seven weeks the mission split up to visit various factories, universities, government laboratories and the like in Sydney, Melbourne and Adelaide. Two members flew to Perth for talks with West Australian officials including the government geologist. Evetts himself had a formidable round of entertaining, including seven showings of a V2 film he had brought with him; and of course he was mostly responsible for writing the report. The deadline was tight, but he managed it in time and put the hurriedly finished report into the right hands in London by 21 May 1946. Almost all of its recommendations were adopted in the months ahead.

EVETTS'S RECOMMENDATIONS

The main conclusion of the Evetts mission was that the stretch of land they had selected was suitable for the project and the best available in Australia. It recommended that the Range should be constructed on a 320 kilometre wide strip of arid and desolate country stretching 1850 kilometres north-west of Mt Eba to the coast at Eighty Mile Beach. All of this enormous slice of land was either the Crown's or held on lease from the Crown. If this length were deemed insufficient for any reason, it could be extended into the Indian Ocean for a total of 3200 kilometres or more, while still keeping clear of Java. If the firing line were swung a few degrees south (from 306 to 299 degrees true), passing now over Port Hedland and Christmas Island, a range of more than 4800 kilometres became possible. How should the Range be instrumented? The mission had no firm ideas on this, for it depended very much on the type of vehicles chosen for development. Tentatively it suggested a series of observation posts every 80 kilometres for the first 320 kilometres out from the rangehead and every 160 kilometres thereafter. Each one would be a capsule of comfortable living in the desert, permanently manned with a staff of twenty, with an underground shelter, airstrip and a fleet of vehicles.

When it spoke of support facilities at the rangehead, the mission had nothing like Woomera village in mind. What it envisaged was a base of a few hundred men, not a township of a few thousand. It thought that nearly all the work should be done at a centre somewhere close to Adelaide. The British had investigated the munitions factory at Salisbury and had been mightily impressed by its hundreds of stout brick buildings only a few years old and now practically deserted. It was ideal in every respect, and the Australians had already promised to make it available. There was no airfield at Salisbury, but at Gawler, only a short distance to the north, was something that might do: an abandoned RAAF aerodrome whose runways could easily be extended for the largest transport aircraft.

The mission had been fairly pleased with its inspection of Australia's industries, and had concluded that they could produce anything required for the experimental missiles and perhaps even take on production runs of equipment. Finding trained staff for research work was a different matter, however. A two-way flow would have to begin at once: scientists and engineers migrating from Britain and young Australian graduates going there for a year or two as trainees.

The mission's key recommendation was that the two governments should agree to establish a Range along the chosen stretch of inland Australia. For the immediate future, the planning for its establishment should start at once. British officers with executive powers should go to Australia to form a nucleus of staff there. The Australians should set up a suitable organisation, and a British team should be briefed on what was required and then sent out to work within it.

THE PARTNERS AGREE -- IN PRINCIPLE

While Evetts was off finding the ideal site in Australia, Chifley was in London attending the first post-war conference of Commonwealth Prime Ministers. Here he recalled Australia's serious shortage of munitions in 1943, when supplies from Britain and the Allies had been meagre and his country had been unable to produce enough of its own to meet the Japanese threat. His government was determined to avoid a repetition in the unstable post-war world by building up its own defence industry. Australia, he said, was prepared to take more responsibility for British Commonwealth defence in the south-west Pacific area, and an expanded defence industry would be needed for this purpose as well. These remarks were preface to the tabling of the Evetts report at the informal Commonwealth Defence Science Conference held early in June 1946. After considering the report the Conference unanimously resolved that facilities should be provided as early as possible in Australia for the testing of guided projectiles and pilotless supersonic aircraft, and for the associated research and development including radio control and countermeasures.

So far neither of the governments was committed, nor could they be until a formal agreement was signed. In Britain the plan was to initiate it with a government to government cablegram. Difficulties arose, however, in getting the Ministries concerned to agree on the line to be taken in the cablegram. As might be expected, the root of the dissension lay in who was to pay. The Treasury and the Dominion Office thought that each country should meet the costs incurred on its own soil: thus, Australia should be invited to pay all the capital and operating costs of the Range. The Ministry's view was that it would be politic for Britain to pay for a little more than half the operating costs in Australia, in order to retain a greater influence on the project. MoS also wanted it to start at once, if necessary on the understanding that costs would be adjusted as soon as a cost-sharing formula had been agreed. The Treasury wanted the formula settled first. Eventually the Treasury won the first point and MoS the second. The cablegram would suggest that in principle the costs should 'lie where they fall', but there should be no delay in starting work. The Cabinet having agreed to the wording, the cablegram was dispatched directly from Attlee to Chifley on 20 September 1946:

Following for the Prime Minister from the Prime Minister.

The United Kingdom Government have considered the report of Lt Gen Evetts's Mission to investigate the possibility of providing facilities in Australia for research and development work on guided missiles and supersonic pilotless aircraft.

We for our part agree with the recommendation of the Mission which has since been endorsed by the informal Commonwealth Conference on Defence Science that an experimental range and supporting development establishment should be set up in Australia. We also accept the recommendation of the Mission as regards the area to be used for the range. We should be glad to learn whether the Commonwealth Government are in agreement with these two recommendations. If so, we think that the first step should be to install the necessary facilities at the rangehead and along the first 300 miles of the range and that the remainder of the range area should be reserved for future use as and when required.

For this purpose we should like, if you agree, to send Evetts to Australia again accompanied by a small technical staff to collaborate with the Commonwealth authorities concerned in the detailed planning and execution of the project. Evetts would serve in a civilian capacity . . . .

The British offered a tentative estimate of 3 million pounds Australian for building the rangehead and 500 kilometres of Range, including 100 kilometres of railway to join the rangehead with Kingoonya, the nearest point on the transcontinental line. They thought the Range might cost another 3 million pounds a year to run, including the cost of the experimental firings. It is notable that the cablegram's estimate of capital cost was considerably less than the one made by Evetts, which was 6 million pounds Australian for 1770 kilometres (1100 miles) of Range without the road and rail links.

On the question of how the expenses should be shared, the British had a proposal to make.

Part of the expenditure on the range and development establishment in Australia will be incurred in Australia and part in the United Kingdom but we are not yet able to indicate how the total expenditure will be split geographically. We should like to suggest however that a decision should be taken in principle now that the Commonwealth and United Kingdom Governments should bear respectively that part of the expenditure in connection with this project which is incurred in Australia and the United Kingdom. If this suggestion is agreeable to your Government detailed financial arrangements can be worked out later.

Attlee, or more properly his advisers, was cautious about the virtues of the Salisbury base. He agreed that the munitions factory 'appears at first sight to be suitable for conversion' and he asked for it to be held in reserve; but he wanted more time to look at the proposal before definitely asking for it to be allocated. This caused no bother. Salisbury after all covered many square kilometres, and only a few of its hundreds of buildings would be occupied during the first tentative steps. Who could be sure that the project would grow at the predicted speed? It suited the Australians not to be committed to offering the whole factory, particularly when the Army was looking at sites for a new ordnance store.

To settle the highest questions of policy (not the executive arrangements, which would be Australia's province alone) Attlee proposed that a special joint body be established in London. This was eventually created under the name of CUKAC (the Combined United Kingdom--Australian Long Range Weapons Committee), and it continued with one or two name changes right through the project until 1980. Finally, the cablegram concluded on a note of urgency: 'I am anxious that rapid progress should be made in establishing this range which is of the highest strategic importance.'¹⁷

Now it was time for Australia to act. Chifley referred the matter first to his Defence Committee and then to Cabinet, which approved it on 19 November 1946.

In order to minimise interdepartmental rivalry to control the project, the Cabinet accepted the advice of Defence Minister Dedman that his Department should control its policy while Munitions should be responsible for execution, on condition that representatives from Defence, Army, Navy and Air should sit on the administrative board and that servicemen should be integrated into Munitions to gain experience with guided weapons.¹⁸ These internal arrangements having been decided, Chifley dispatched a cablegram of acceptance on 23 November 1946.¹⁹ It was of course an agreement in principle only, and many important matters were left to be sorted out later. In particular, Chifley sidestepped the thorny question of who should pay for what. He wanted it deferred until some estimates were available -- especially comparative estimates of how much was to be spent in each country. Until then he was not willing to accede to the 'costs lying where they fall' formula. Chifley also wanted to know more about the joint policy body in London; in particular, about its responsibilities. He thought that all questions of policy and facilities should be submitted formally to the Commonwealth government. The cablegram also spoke of the need for a detailed agreement, especially covering such matters as the extent of Australian participation in the work, access to information, and the financial arrangements.

In a reply cablegram²⁰ of 13 December 1946 Attlee welcomed the Australian agreement to his proposals, and accepted the conditions. He advised that Evetts would arrive in January to discuss the use to be made of Salisbury, and asked that the Australian views on the proposed detailed agreement be made known to Evetts. The Australians should help him draw up the financial estimates quickly so that the cost sharing formula could be negotiated. Finally, he requested that Evetts should be able to commit up to 500,000 pounds immediately, on the understanding that Australia would pay its share after the formula had been agreed. This would avoid delaying urgent work.

Thus it came about that Britain and Australia, after a mere twelve months of negotiation and survey, committed themselves to an enormous joint venture that was to last for more than three decades. It was a bold step, typical perhaps of the heady days of the closing stages of World War II and its immediate aftermath.

PLANS ARE LAID . . . AND THE TEAM ASSEMBLED

Many months before these diplomatic negotiations came to fruition the Ministry of Supply had started to plan the project: it had to, for there was no time to lose. A small committee which included Crow and Evetts mapped out a provisional program and described the facilities required in Australia to accomplish them. In July 1946 the committee published its deliberations in a document known as the 'Outline'.²¹ The Outline looked at the projects and tried to evaluate how the Range should be developed to accommodate them. Only one of the weapons would need the full length of the Range selected by Evetts: this was the V1-like device, which had now been given the code-name of Menace. The Outline described it as 'a projectile, probably a horizontal flying propulsive duct, capable of travelling 1000 miles' and thought that with the right backing a prototype might be flying in three years.²² Within this period the Range, together with all its instrumentation, observation posts and recovery systems, had to become a working entity.

According to the Outline three other weapons would need a Range up to 500 kilometres long. One was the V2-type ballistic missile now code-named Hammer, for which elaborate test equipment would be needed at the base as well as on the Range. Another was an air-launched bombardment weapon, conceived as being a pilotless supersonic drone launched from a carrier aircraft in flight. A third was not strictly a weapon but rather a stage in the development of supersonic pilotless aircraft. The famous designer Barnes Wallis, known for several wartime aircraft designs as well for the skipping bombs used by the Dambusters, had now turned his attention to supersonic flight, and was working on scale models to be flown at transonic and later at supersonic speeds. The Wallis models were to be tested in Australia by launching them from aircraft and boosting them to speed with liquid fuelled rocket motors.

Finally, the Outline proposed a separate range 32 kilometres square for high altitude bomb ballistics work. This was being done already in Britain, but it could be done a lot more easily in the excellent visibility of the outback.

Estimating that the capital cost of the Range, including buildings, services, cables, rail link, airstrips and aircraft would be 14 million pounds sterling, the Outline ended with the warning that:

it must be stated that there is no possibility of carrying the development of any long range projectile to a stage approaching a Staff specification within a period of the order of five years unless the programme stated in this report can be followed, and facilities and personnel provided within a period of three years. It will be clear that this will involve, amongst other things, the recruitment and training of personnel at a rate considerably in excess of anything achieved to date. On the constructional side, annual expenditure to the value of between 2.5 and 3 million [pounds] will be necessitated, and preliminary talks with Australian authorities, confirming opinions obtained by Lieut General Evetts's mission whilst in Australia, have indicated that such a target is capable of achievement if the problem is tackled with firmness and as a matter of urgency.

As a serious proposal for future work into guided weaponry, the Outline was a wildly ambitious document. Britain did not develop a medium range ballistic missile until its independent deterrent Blue Streak more than a decade later, and Blue Streak was cancelled before it could be tested at Woomera. The only projects listed in the Outline that ever came to Woomera were those needing only the small bomb ballistics range or a short missile range. It was to be over ten years before the main Range was to be developed for more than 16 kilometres let alone 1600 kilometres. In fact the whole joint project was very nearly stifled at birth, as we shall see in the following chapter.

The brave sails of the Outline were soon trimmed over the following months. Its main author, Sir Alwyn Crow, left for a new post in Washington. Crow's departure coincided with, if it did not help to cause, a marked change in emphasis in Britain towards the new guided weapons. In the cooler political climate of late 1946, more than a year after VE Day, enthusiasm for the expensive kind of crash program advocated in the Outline waned within the Attlee Labour government, now preoccupied with its reconstruction and social welfare programs. It was more inclined to give weight to Tizard's opinion that weapons with a very long range were years away from realisation. Another factor was that a fresh shake-up within the Ministry of Supply was in full swing, eventually resulting in the old Air side of MoS taking over the planning of guided weapons, including the Australian project. Sir Ben Lockspeiser, formerly of the Air Ministry and later the Ministry of Aircraft Production, became Chief Scientist in the Ministry of Supply, and the Air philosophy -- solve the problems of guidance, control and aerodynamics before embarking on expensive weapons systems -- moved into ascendancy.

Whatever the nature of the work to be done, capable men had to be found to doit. In August 1946, while the terms of the first cablegram were being debated in London, Crow and Evetts started selecting their Australian team. Evetts himself had accepted that he was the obvious choice for team leader. He had clearly made a success of the earlier mission, and he was committed.

Evetts did not pretend to have any scientific skills, and strong scientific leadership would be necessary. Britain at that time had few experts in rocket engine technology, but it did have many outstanding scientists who had contributed to the wartime development of radar: a field of electronic engineering which could be brought to bear on the problems of missile guidance and control. One of these was A. P. Rowe who had succeeded Watson-Watt as leader of the radar development team, and had been Superintendent of TRE. At the time he was Director of Scientific Research in the Admiralty. He accepted the chief scientific position in the mission, but did not last long with the project. To many of his contemporaries Rowe -- the 'abominable Roweman' some called him -- was stiff, humourless and obstinate; qualities which were perhaps less obtrusive in a Vice-Chancellor of Adelaide University, which he later became, than in the relatively free-wheeling atmosphere of Salisbury.

Evetts secured the services of another most capable scientist as deputy to Rowe. He was William Alan Stewart Butement, currently Assistant Director of Scientific Research at the Ministry of Supply. Rowe had originally chosen another man as deputy but he eventually declined. Time was short, and Butement was finally asked to make up his mind while on the end of a telephone line in Paris. Despite this inauspicious start, he eventually succeeded Evetts and took charge of the whole joint project. He was also to be the only member of the Evetts team to settle permanently in Australia, but then he had been born in New Zealand and had attended Scots College in Sydney for a time. He had, however, lived in Britain since the age of eleven. After completing his secondary and university education in 1928, he joined the Signals Research Establishment, a War Office outstation at Woolwich, and there, together with a colleague, P. E. Pollard, he did some pioneer work on radar. Although one of their experimental models successfully detected a sheet of galvanised iron 100 metres away, their employers were not impressed and reacted by splitting up the two young men so they would waste no more time. Since those early days Alan Butement had risen steadily in the scientific civil service. In his habits of work he approximated the vulgar stereotype of the mad scientist. His mental energy was prodigious. Mercurial and bored by administration, what he most relished was stimulating and informal society where he was free to fling off in conversation ideas by the hundred. On more sober consideration ninety-seven of these notions would be impracticable, two would be worth looking into by cooler minds (someone given such a job punned neatly that 'a think of Butey is a chore forever') and one would be a winner. He could be disconcerting. Once, during the course of a plane trip with a group of reporters from Woomera to Adelaide, someone was fingering the mesh of a luggage rack and asking what it was made of. 'A sort of plastic,' said one helpful official. 'Well,' said Butement mildly, 'it's a polyvinyl acetate, polyvinyl chloride, one of the copolymers, I think. Remarkable stuff.' He looked a little pained when someone asked him to explain, but not as pained as the official who had called it merely 'plastic'. As this story suggests, what made Butement so valuable was that his scientific interests extended far beyond his specialty of electronic engineering. His powers of lateral thinking astonished his colleagues.

By November 1946 a team of eleven had been assembled. Fortuitously, none of them apart from Evetts had been on the previous mission. The eleven names were Evetts, Rowe, Butement, Fresson, Pye, Hunwicks, Caddy, Bayly, Wynne-Williams, Rendall and Williams. Probably they felt the parallel with the team of eleven English cricketers under Hammond who were about to play the Australians in the first post-war Test Match series, also to be held in Australia. Of their enthusiasm there could be no doubt. One anecdote describes how Chuck Bayly, ex-RAF and the only one among them who knew anything about liquid fuel rocket motors, had been given the opportunity to make his decision in an instant. A head had come round his office door one Saturday morning at Westcott and had said: 'It's the Ministry of Supply on the phone. They want to know if you would like to join the long range weapons team going to Australia?' 'Yes,' the cheerful Irishman had replied. 'When do we leave?'²³

Evetts gathered together his eleven at Shell-Mex House on the Thames Embankment. He told them that they would henceforth be known as the Long Range Weapons Organisation, Australia, or LRWO(A). They would be going as a mission of the Ministry of Supply, and on arrival would split into two. Evetts would form a headquarters in Melbourne with Fresson, Wynne-Williams, L. S. Williams and Rendall, where they would be neighbours of the Department of Munitions and other departments concerned with the project. The other six, all of them scientific civil servants apart from Caddy, would be stationed in Adelaide under Rowe as Chief Scientific Officer. Here they would become the nucleus of the Australian scientific, engineering and support staff that would be formed around them to plan the project in detail.

The team was soon joined by R. P. (Bob) Bonnell, also of MoS. Although not one of the original eleven, he was the first to be added to it, and like Butement he moved permanently to Australia. Bonnell was asked to stay behind in England for a year to collect information to be used in setting up the bomb ballistics range.

Many years later, Sidney Hunwicks, one of the eleven who had just missed out on the first Evetts mission because his boss had said he could not be spared, recalled his first tasks for the new organisation. Rowe had been very sickand his doctor advised him to avoid the English winter by going to Australia in advance of the main team. (This could have been diplomatically embarrassingsince there was as yet no proper agreement, so Rowe entered the country as a visitor on private business.) Before going he split the likely projects between the four Principal Scientific Officer equivalents²⁴ and left his deputy Butement in charge. Hunwicks was one of them. He wrote:²⁵

We PSOs were to be the project's representatives in Australia, communications with UK would not be easy (airmails existed in 1946 but there was no thought of using telephones, the teleprinter link came much later and although visits by project officers were recognised as being essential at some stage, they were likely to be rare events). Therefore our task was to go to the responsible UK Establishments and Headquarter Branches and get to know their requirements in as great a depth as possible. To do this we took notes, wrote requirement papers, submitted them back to those concerned, revised them etc etc until both sides were satisfied. When we could we got the project teams to write the requirements and we amplified them to cover our lack of knowledge. By these means we produced a number of project plans covering the technical facilities, back-up staff and such like requirements necessary for a UK party to carry out trials some 12 000 miles from home. We would also, I am sure, have noted what was likely to be the composition of the UK team concerned, what they would bring with them or send in advance and whether these items would be transported by sea or air. Such project plans were augmented by . . . general requirements which we considered necessary -- we even went as far as defining what we thought would be a multi-purpose standard laboratory bench. This we did as we expected (rightly as it turned out) to be so busy when we got to Australia that we would have not time to get together and discuss such matters. Thus over a few months we compiled a number of plans which could be used for reference both by ourselves and the project teams in UK. It was a small step to 'bind' the set together into a Master Plan which for obvious reasons became the 'Bible'.²⁶ As far as I can recall we were very surprised that, even with delays in some projects, it turned out to be remarkably accurate and so useful.

The 'Bible' contained a revised list of weapons to be available for testing at the Range within three years. The Air side of MoS contributed to this list the projects that had already appeared in the Outline, such as bomb ballistics, high speed target aircraft and the Barnes Wallis supersonic models. However, contributions from the Munitions side had a notable omission: the long distance Menace had dropped from sight. Nothing more was heard of very long range weapons until the development of Blue Streak began a number of years later, and Blue Streak was of course a ballistic, not a cruise missile. The V2-type Hammer still appeared, with a thirty-month time scale. Several anti-aircraft weapons not mentioned in the Outline appeared in the 'Bible'. One of these was LOPGAP (Liquid Oxygen and Petrol Guided Anti-Aircraft Projectile), which subsequently became the mainstay of Woomera's early missile trials as Rocket Test Vehicle No 1 (RTV1). It is surprising in retrospect how vague the specifications for these weapons were at the time. This is brought out in a recent recollection by another of the eleven, N. H. Fresson:²⁷

While we were preparing to depart for Australia to set up the rocket range, by far the greatest problem exercising our minds was the lack of information about the weapons it would be required to test. In these circumstances it was difficult to draw up any sort of plan of the range, but at the same time we could not arrive in Australia without having made any attempt to do so. Butement and I therefore went to see General Evetts and with his blessing arranged certain visits notably to TRE and Vickers with a view to ascertaining the lines on which research was progressing. My recollection of these discussions was that no attempt would be made to copy V2, and that it was more likely we would develop a winged missile, guided by automatic astro. I remember Richards of TRE outlining his views on this subject and our discussions with Barnes Wallis who, at that time was investigating supersonic flight with models . . . .Having consulted the oracle we then attempted to visualise the sort of hardware that was likely to materialise and the layout of the range which would be required to test it. Distance was the basic consideration. What amounted to the first conception of a cruise missile was clearly intended to penetrate deep into Europe if not beyond. Obviously one could not build an 1100 mile range across Australia until such weapons were well advanced, so a beginning had to be made with provision for it to be stretched later. To the best of my recollection we decided to start planning observation posts up to the first 250 miles only. Planning a range based on conjecture was neither easy nor satisfactory. As one guess was built on another the results became more and more dubious and there was a tendency to doubt the usefulness of what we were doing. For those who had homes to sell and plans to make in preparation for transporting themselves and their families half way round the world (with no definite promise of accommodation the other end), the exercise tended to seem a little academic. However, we had to formulate some idea of the task we were asking the Australians to share with us and at least to show that we had done our homework so we kept at it. In the circumstances it was not surprising we were rather apologetic about our efforts and that the finished article was referred to somewhat sceptically as the 'Bible'. How useful it turned out to be is hard to say because, as factual information began to filter through so the need to consult it became less frequent until it was finally forgotten. It did at least provide a basis and ready reference when initial estimates of manpower and materials were needed and we arrived with an easier conscience for having produced it . . . . I do think it worth bringing out that we were inevitably jumping the gun. We had so little information to go on but projects like that are not built in a day and the sooner we made a start the better.

Before departing for Australia, Evetts received official instructions signed by the Permanent Secretary of MoS, Sir Archibald Rowlands. They told him, in part, that he was going out as head of the Ministry of Supply Long Range Weapons Organisation, Australia, or LRWO(A), and that his task was to plan to complete 500 kilometres of the range in the next three years. He had wide discretionary powers, but he had to be guided by the High Commissioner in Canberra over all political matters if there was not time to refer to London.²⁸

And so, on 14 December 1946, armed with the Instructions and the hastily prepared 'Bible', Evetts and L. S. Williams sailed for Australia on the SS Orontes. This steamer of 20,000 tonnes would soon be reconditioned as a liner, but for the moment Orontes was still unashamedly a troopship and the two men had a very uncomfortable passage. At last they arrived in Melbourne on14 January and joined Rowe. Rendall and Wynne-Williams flew out shortly afterwards. The remainder of the eleven, Fresson, Butement, Pye, Bayly, Caddy and Hunwicks, followed two months later with their families, on the SS Asturias. Hunwicks many years later recalled the tiresome journey, which started in the depths of the worst winter in living memory:

We embarked on 7 February 1947 -- in the middle of a very wintry period. There had been several days of snow and our car broke down about 200 yards from our local station so that we had to trudge the last part carrying our suitcases plus a variety of handbags and helping along a small boy of three and a half. Not the best of starts for a 12,000 mile journey! We sailed from Southampton at twelve noon on Saturday 8 February 1947. The SS Asturias was a ship of 22,000 tonnes, at the time manned and run by the Royal Mail Line for the Ministry of Transport. During the war she had been an armed merchant cruiser. After major damage due to a torpedo in 1943 she had been repaired and converted to a trooper. She was still in her trooper configuration on our trip with all accommodation doubled-up: four of us shared one cabin with our families sharing nearby cabins. Altogether there was some 1500 passengers on board including 200 children. Also included were some returning Australian servicemen and some hundreds of migrants.

We took the Suez Canal route calling at Port Said, Colombo, Perth and finally arriving at Melbourne where we disembarked on the morning of Tuesday 11 March. There we were met by General Evetts.²⁹

The voyage of the eleven from Britain to Australia was more than the movement of a few people. It represented the migration of an embryonic organisation, an embryo that after a shaky start in life was to grow over the years into a very vigorous establishment. The following chapters will trace the periods of growth, maturity and old age that followed; and to tell it properly the focusof the story must shift with the eleven from Britain to Australia.

Notes and Sources

1. A fuller account is given in Brian Johnson, The Secret War. British Broadcasting Corporation, London, 1978.

2. This race is described from an American perspective in James McGovern, Crossbow and Overcast. Hutchinson, London, 1965, and there are more details in the early chapters of Tom Bower, The Paperclip Conspiracy: the Battle for the Spoils and Secrets of Nazi Germany. Michael Joseph, London, 1987. Allied Supreme Headquarters did not sanction such competition, and had in fact set up a Combined Intelligence Sub-Committee (CIOS) to organise an orderly exploitation of captured German scientific data and equipment. It seems that British-US co-operation was very close at first, but deteriorated as the competition became fiercer.

3. A. M. Cameron, Report on Operation BACKFIRE. The War Office, London, January 1946. This is an official report addressed to the Commanding General of US Forces in Europe as well as to the War Office; but when one reads between the lines it is plain that Cameron had little co-operation from the US Army Ordnance officers at Nordhausen in finding usable V2s. According to McGovern, Crossbow and Overcast, the Americans regarded BACKFIRE as a British rather than an Allied project, and were much more interested in securing the hundred V2 rockets they wanted for firing in the US before the Russians arrived at Nordhausen. This was despite an order issued to all Allied formations on 4 May 1945, and later confirmed by the Combined Chiefs of Staff, that all V2 equipment was to be frozen until the allocation for BACKFIRE and other demands had been settled.

4. One of them was Col Segei Korolev, the legendary 'Great Designer' of so many of the later Soviet space efforts, who through some confusion over the invitations was forced to watch BACKFIRE from outside the wire fence.

5. T. O. Lloyd, Empire to Welfare State: English History 1906--1976. OUP, London, 1976. There are various ways of calculating defence expenditure. These figures are derived from the tables in Malcolm Chalmers, Paying for Defence: Military Spending and British Decline. Pluto Press, London, 1985. The proportions were very high by European standards. In 1962 the size of Britain's defence bill was, among its NATO partners, exceeded only by the US and Portugal.

6. Though it remained at well above 6 per cent of GDP for the rest of the 1950s. Data taken from the files of the British Institute of Public Opinion Social Survey and analysed by William P. Snyder, The Politics of

British Defence Policy, 1945-1962. Ernest Benn, London, 1964.

7. Report 'Future developments in weapons and methods of war' by Sir Henry Tizard's ad hoc committee dated 16 June 1945. PRO CAB 80/94. One may speculate that another reason for the down-playing of Tizard's conclusions may have been the release late in 1945 of the findings of a British technical mission led by Crow and sent in the wake of the advancing Allied forces to survey how the Germans had progressed with guided missiles. The mission revealed that several anti-aircraft weapons employing mid-course guidance and terminal homing systems were in an advanced stage of development; not to mention very long range multi-stage rockets. Whether these revelations weakened Tizard's conclusions even further is unknown. A revised edition of the Tizard report released in 1946 did not alter its conclusions about the future of guided weapons. Subsequently Tizard became a vehement opponent of the British independent nuclear deterrent.

8. W.H. Coulson, 'A note on the events which led to the establishment of the Woomera Range'. (undated, but attached to a letter dated 12 October 1961to J. L. Knott, Secretary of the Department of Supply). Although

incomplete in one respect (it does not mention the Kearns visit at the end of 1945) Coulson's account is the most circumstantial available of the very early planning of the Range.

9. The Crow proposal is quoted from a memo dated 18 October 1945. AA MP1217 Box 1910.

10. Memo dated 20 September 1946 to J. B. Chifley. AA MP1748 file GW/P/3 Part 1.

11. Neither the author nor DOD officers have been able to find any Australian records of discussions between the government and the Kearns party about a Range, although they certainly met Chifley and other officials. A minute by Evetts dated 28 February 1946 quotes information from one of the Kearns party (Caddy) that 'a Range 1000 miles long by 200 miles wide at the target end can be obtained in Australia. A firing point could be selected somewhere to the north of Port Augusta at the head of Spencer Gulf. A line of fire in a north-westerly direction would provide a 1000 mile range with the target area in Gibson's Desert.' PRO AVIA/1506. Evetts went to Australia in April 1946 with an excellent idea of where to find what he was looking for.

12. From the Instructions for the Mission in J. F. Evetts et al., 'Report by the mission to Australia in connection with Guided Missiles (May 1946).'

13. Coulson.

14. Quoted in 'Rocket chief on technical initiative', Advertiser, 20 June 1949.

15. Reminiscence of Brigadier E. J. H. Howard, Staff Officer to the mission, at an interview on 12 December 1983.

16. The incident is described in Lieut Col E. J. H. Howard, 'The first reconnaissance for a guided weapons range in Australia', Missile, April/May 1954. Howard was in the searching Dakota.

17. Cablegram 316 of 20 September 1946 from the Secretary of State for Dominion Affairs, London. Shedden Papers Box 1643.

18. Crow made his earlier unofficial approach direct to Coulson, possibly because he represented the Australian Department of Munitions, the nearest equivalent to his own Ministry of Supply. However, at that time research and development in armaments was controlled in Australia by the relevant service and not by Munitions. Accordingly the three Chiefs of Staff had taken a key part in the subsequent meeting with Coulson to discuss Sir Alwyn's proposal. The new project was obviously an inter-service one and could not be split up. Defence was then a small department with a policy and co-ordinating role only. CSIR declined to be involved. The solution was to give the project to Munitions but to involve the services as well. Within that Department the Research and Development Division was given the responsibility for the project. This solution was to stand until that Division was absorbed into the defence science and technology activities in the much larger Department of Defence.

19. Cablegram 399 of 23 November 1946 to the Secretary of State for Dominion Affairs, London.

20. Cablegram 393 of 13 December 1946 from the Secretary of State for Dominion Affairs, London.

21. Ministry of Supply, 'Outline of facilities required in connection with the Australian Guided Missile Project (2nd edition, 29 July 1946)'.

22. The phrase 'horizontal flying propulsive duct' suggests a ram-jet flying bomb or cruise missile. The line of descent therefore ran from V1 to Menace (which lost its top priority status in 1947, but survived as a

listed item under the name Blue Menace until mid-1949) and eventually to Blue Steel (an air-launched, nuclear-tipped missile extensively tested unarmed at Woomera and in British service between 1962 and 1970).

23. Ivan Southall, Woomera. Angus & Robertson, Melbourne, 1962, p.31.

24. The four 'PSO equivalents' were Pye, Hunwicks, Bayly and Caddy. The first three were then graded as Principal Scientific Officer (PSO), a British staff grading also used in Australia in the early years of the project. Caddy as an Army Lieutenant Colonel occupied a post of equivalent status. Having technically qualified serving officers holding posts in civilian R&D establishments was, and is, accepted practice in the UK and Australia.

25. Contribution of S.A. Hunwicks written in 1980.

26. The 'Bible' consists of a nine page paper dated January 1947, titled 'Appreciation of the work to be carried out in constructing the Guided Missiles Range in Australia'. Bound with this are eight attached memoranda, thirteen general appendixes and ten specific appendices. The copy held by DRCS library weighs 2.5kg and bears the overall title 'LRWO(A) specifications for construction of projectile range'. However, it is understood that the document was frequently revised and that several versions exist, possibly with variant titles.

27. Reminiscence of Air Commodore N. H. Fresson DFC, written in 1980.

28. MoS document SM 2693.S dated 13 December 1945.

29. Hunwicks.