Hitler's Rockets: The Story of the V-2s (4 page)

What followed on that December day in 1937, three years after the first research had started at Kummersdorf, proved a massive disappointment. The launching turned out such a failure that Dornberger could not bring himself to describe it and ‘eyewitness accounts from the staff were wildly contradictory’. But Dornberger was not the man to give up at the first rebuff:

We decide to venture on a second launching. I watched, from the lighthouse, how the second rocket rose from the ground. The same thing happened again. Soon after the start it made almost a quarter-turn about its longitudinal axis, turned into the wind and, after climbing a few hundred feet, ejected the parachute. Then the motor stopped burning and the rocket fell into the sea near the precipitous east coast of the island.

Before they could try again, having decided to leave out the recovery parachute, the fog came down and the scientists crowded into the inn for a melancholy inquest on the recent failures. The moment the fog cleared they went back to the launching site:

According to the weather forecast, rain, snow, gales and a cold snap were to be expected within a few days. We had to hurry. But even the next two launchings gave no better result. Immediately after rising the rocket took the line of least resistance, turned into the wind and at a height of between 2500 and 3500 feet turned over and fell into the sea.

This premature splashdown, so different from the triumphant flight they had hoped for, left the rocket team depressed, and it was a sad voyage back to the mainland:

As we ran into the Peene estuary in our motor-boats late in the afternoon, when it was already getting dark and blowing hard, the icy north-westerly gale sent high black waves slapping down on the foredeck and away over the upper works. Rain and snow made visibility difficult. We were feeling subdued, almost despondent. But not hopeless. Despite all our failure we were still convinced that we should pull it off.

Already they had decided that the four A-3s they had tested had simply been blown off course from the start by the stiff north-east wind and that what was needed was a tenfold increase in the power of the control gear and in the speed of the rudder vanes it operated. Like a general who, with centre and flanks crumbling, plans to attack, Dornberger decided to abandon the A-3 and press on to a far more ambitious model, the A-5, designed specifically to provide data applicable to their real goal, the A-4. The motor, the outstanding success of their work so far, remained unchanged, and efforts were now concentrated on the control mechanisms and the missile’s aerodynamic properties. The famous Zeppelin aircraft works at Friedrichshafen provided a wind tunnel to test ‘the stability of the A-5 with the new tail surfaces’, the Graf Zeppelin Flight Research Institute at Stuttgart devised two new types of parachute to slow it down and return it to earth, while a draughtsman at Kummersdorf came up with a money-saving idea, making the rocket’s external vanes of graphite instead of molybdenum, which cut the cost of this item from 150 RM to 1.5 (£13.25 to 13p). By the autumn of 1938 four A-5 rockets, complete except for the guidance mechanism, had been launched from Greifswalder Oie. All had reached a height of five miles and had approached the speed of sound without the A-3’s instability; that was one giant hurdle climbed.

In March 1938 Austria was forcibly incorporated in the Reich, in September Britain and France were publicly humiliated at Munich, and in March 1939 the rest of Czechoslovakia was seized in plain defiance of the recent agreement. These events simply seem to have passed Dornberger and his subordinates by. Of far greater important to them was the Führer’s visit that same month to Kummersdorf, though it was not an obvious success. Hitler said barely a word, even when watching the testing of a horizontally suspended rocket motor, which usually set visitors gasping in admiration. He did show a flicker of interest in the A-4 and asked how long it would take to develop – Dornberger was evasive in answer – but spoiled things by telling his hosts, over his frugal lunch of mixed vegetables and mineral water, that his only previous contact with the rocket world had been back in his Munich days, with a rocket enthusiast who was a hopelessly impractical dreamer. Hitler, Dornberger decided – a verdict from him which came close to disloyalty – ‘had no feeling for technological progress’, but he consoled himself with the knowledge that ‘Colonel-General von Brauchitsch’ – Fritsch’s successor as army Commander-in-Chief – ‘and the few others who had seen the demonstration had given . . . expression to their admiration and approval of what we had accomplished in so few years’.

Von Brauchitsch’s support was now to prove all important. On 5 September 1939, two days after Britain and France had declared war on Germany, he agreed to give the A-4 project the highest possible priority, and Dornberger returned from his headquarters, jubilant, to witness the first A-5 tests on the Greifswalder Oie. It was a glorious autumn day on which the previously inhospitable island looked its best; permanent buildings had now replaced the tents and huts of two years before, and Dornberger looked around at these signs of progress with warm approval:

Facing north, in the direction of the firing point, stood the long and massive Measurement House, dazzlingly white in the sunshine, with its workshop, oscillograph room, offices, and flat roof reached by an outside stairway. There were concreted roads, concrete observation shelters, and a concrete apron of considerably enlarged size. The scaffolding which covered the awnings had been replaced by an armour-plated working tower which could be wholly closed in and lowered for the take-off. To bring the rocket, painted bright yellow and red, to the firing position, it was pushed through the detachable roof of the lowered tower and both were then raised by means of a cable winch.

What happened when the rocket was launched was also very different from that day of unhappy memory nearly two years before:

The first rocket shot up from the firing table. It rose vertically in the azure sky. It did not turn about its longitudinal axis and did not yield to the wind. The projectile rose steadily higher and higher, faster and faster on its course. . . . The backs of our necks ached as we stared aloft. . . . At a height of nearly five miles, after 45 seconds of burning time, the tanks run dry. . . . The speed of the rocket caused it to rise still higher, though it had lost its motive power. At last it reached the peak of its trajectory and slowly turned over. At that moment von Braun pressed the button transmitting the radio order for parachute release and a tiny white point appeared close to the flashing, sunlit body of the rocket. This was the braking parachute. Precisely two seconds later von Braun pressed another button, which released the big supporting parachute. The rocket . . . glided slowly down, hanging quietly from the shrouds . . . and after a few minutes it dropped in the water outside the mole with a splash that glittered in the sunshine. . . . Our launch immediately left the harbour and in little more than half an hour the rocket, its bright paint easily seen among the dark waves, was hauled aboard.

The A-5 had achieved, on its first flight, a range of eleven miles and reached a height of seven and a half miles, leaving Dornberger well content:

What we had successfully done with the A-5 must be equally valid, in improved form, for the A-4. . . . I could see our goal clearly and the way that led to it. I now knew that we should succeed in creating a weapon with a far greater range than any artillery.

From now onwards Peenemünde, already the most advanced establishment of its kind in the world and soon to be the largest, was the heart and centre of the whole rocket enterprise. Administratively, as well as physically, the island was divided into two. The eastern half, or HVP, for Heeresversuchanstalt Peenemünde (Peenemünde Army Research Establishment), was Dornberger’s province, with von Braun, a civilian, as his technical director, and an army officer, Colonel Leo Zanssen, as his ‘camp commandant’. The western part of Usedom, Erprobungstelle Karlshagen (Karlshagen Experimental Station), which contained the airfield, was Luftwaffe territory. The two coexisted in comparative harmony. These were the golden years at Peenemünde. Research and development work went ahead smoothly, with virtually unlimited funds, a pilot factory already planned to study how the finished A-4 could be mass-produced, and even a target date, albeit an optimistic one, for the start of large-scale manufacture, December 1941. The real obstacle, but fortunately a remote one, was Hitler, who apparently believed that the rocket, if it worked at all, would arrive too late for the present war, and in the spring of 1940 Peenemünde was removed from the priority list for men and supplies. Von Brauchitsch’s support now stood Dornberger is good stead and he connived at the creation of a new, and essentially fictitious, Northern Experimental Command, to which the 4000 men working at Peenemünde, from technologists to labourers, were transferred, supposedly for merely temporary duty in Germany, the only way to prevent their being called up for routine, frontline military service.

Around the same date there was a more encouraging development: on 21 March 1940 an A-4 motor was successfully tested for the first time. It required 284 lb (129 kg) of the propellant mixture of oxygen and liquid alcohol every second, and merely to provide this a wholly new type of pumping system had to be devised, making use of a turbine operated by steam released from hydrogen peroxide by calcium permanganate, ‘a motor within a motor’; the cooling arrangements, which involved the use of a separate supply of alcohol, proved equally elaborate. Progress had by now also been made on the launching technique. The original intention had been to fire the rocket at an angle, pointing towards the target, but it proved unstable when fully loaded and the intention now was to achieve lift-off vertically, after which it would gradually tilt to an angle of 49° as it climbed upwards. When the rocket had sufficient thrust, the supply of propellant would be cut off, a radio signal at first being used for this purpose, though later a self-contained system, which operated automatically at a predetermined point, was substituted.

The myriad technical and design problems which every part of the increasingly complicated A-4 presented left the Peenemünde team little time to observe events in the outside world. While France fell, Russia was invaded, the armies in the Western Desert advanced and retreated, the Battle of the Atlantic was joined and British bombers flew over Germany in increasing strength, Dornberger’s men remained obsessed with their own problems. On 18 March 1942 the first complete A-4 was ready for a static test. It proved a disaster, but component after component was doggedly tested and it was decided to go ahead with a full-scale launching, on Usedom itself. On the flat roof of the glittering new measurement house Dornberger stood on 3 October 1942, microphone in hand, observing a scene of which he wrote an almost minute-by-minute account:

It was noon and the arch of a clear, cloudless sky extended over Northern Germany. My eye strayed out to the Development Works, gloomy in their camouflage, to the spreading pine woods and across the reedy promontory of the bay of Peenemünde, to the . . . Greifswalder Oie six miles away.

In the south, nestling in the evergreen forest, I saw the two big, bright concrete sheds of the Pre-Production Works, their northward sloping roofs covered with camouflage netting. In the west the low hills of the far bank of the River Peene were dominated by the redbrick tower of Wolgast Cathedral. The light blue contours of the oxygen-generating plant, the six conspicuous chimneys of the big power-station overlooking the harbour, and the long hangars of the Peenemünde airfield completed the picture I had grown to know so well....

When I leaned over the parapet I could see a great deal of animation. In the avenues and paths between the widely scattered buildings of the Works, at the windows and on the roofs of sheds, workshops and offices, the entire staff seemed to be waiting and watching. . . . All wanted to witness the event they had striven for, one which would perhaps make history. . . .

There were still three minutes to go. . . . Their almost unbearable tension was repeated with every trial launching and they had come to be known as the ‘Peenemünde minutes’, so much longer than sixty seconds did they seem. . . .

‘X minus 1.’

The tension mounted. . . . So far we had succeeded only twice in getting a rocket of this size off the ground at all. . . . If today’s test failed . . . I should have to propose the transfer of all our armament potential to aircraft or tank construction. . . . I felt cold with suspense and excitement under the warm autumn sun. . . .

A smoke cartridge hissed into the sky. Its green track over Test Stand VII drifted sluggishly away before the wind. Ten seconds more! . . .

‘Ignition!’ . . .

After about a second thrust rose to 25 tons. . . . The gleaming body of the rocket rose vertically from the forest into the sky. . . . The flame darting from the stem was almost as long as the rocket itself. The fiery jet of gas was clear-cut and self-contained. The rocket kept to its course as though running on rails. . . . The first critical moment had passed. . . . Then it began, almost imperceptibly at first, to incline its tip eastwards. The tilt had begun. . . .

‘Sonic velocity!’ reported the loudspeaker at last. My heart missed a beat. . . . Now was the time – what if the white cloud of an explosion should appear in the blue sky?

Nothing appeared. The projectile flew on imperturbably. . . . At that moment on 3 October 1942 supersonic speed was achieved for the first time by a liquid-propellant rocket. . . . The reddish flame had vanished. The thick white vapour trail was forming no longer. Only a thin, milky streak of mist still followed the rocket as it raced away at a speed of over 3000 m.p.h.