by Hitler's Revenge Weapons- The Final Blitz of London (retail) (epub)
Wernher Maximilian von Braun was born in March 1912 at Wirsitz in the German province of Posen, the son of Baron Magnus von Braun and Emmy von Quistrop. The young von Braun took readily to science and music and was soon excelling in mathematics and physics, subjects which would serve him well as he developed an interest in space travel. He became well versed in the teachings of Oberth, Nebel, Winkler, Valier and Ley, and was studying at the Berlin Institute of Technology, Charlottenburg, when he was invited to join the VfR. At Charlottenburg, he studied under Professor Doktor Karl Becker, an oberstleutnant (lieutenant colonel) in the Weapons Department of the Reichswehr (German National Defence), and devotee of innovative weapons, typically the huge First World War ‘Paris Gun’, before concentrating on liquid-fuelled rocket motors. It was Becker who would bring von Braun together with the highly talented engineer and artillery officer Hauptmann (Captain) Walter Dornberger in a partnership which would become central to the story of military rocket development in the Second World War and post-war exploration of space.
By 1929 Oberth and the rocket engineer Rudolf Nebel were also working on liquid propellants, now specifically for a series of small, low cost, Minimum Rakete (Mirak) rockets, powered by liquid oxygen and petrol. During their work tragedy struck with the death of Max Valier on 17 May 1930 when a mixture of kerosene, water and liquid oxygen exploded in a pressurised combustion chamber, this causing such public concern that Nebel’s team decided to move the Mirak-1 trials away from prying eyes in Berlin to a farm at Bernstadt, Saxony.
By now it had become clear that a dedicated launch area was needed for testing the rapidly developing rocket technologies and the VfR seized the opportunity to take over a redundant ammunition depot at Reinickendorf in the northern Berlin suburb of Cité Pasteur, near Tegel Airport. This four-square-kilometre site, soon to be known as Raketenflugplatz (Rocket Airport) opened for business in September 1930 and it was there that the trials on the Mirak series of rockets continued.
The initial, static, tests of the Mirak-1 had been successful, but on its first launch the oxygen tank burst, destroying the rocket. The Mirak-2 fared better, a number of successful tests having been completed with a modified cooling system before it too suffered the same fate as its predecessor, the liquid oxygen cooling system being held to blame in both cases. By now, however, the rocketeers’ work had attracted some wealthy backers and, undeterred by the early failures, the VfR continued its experiments with a new ‘Repulsor’ series, based on the Mirak but with the combustion chambers now cooled by water inside a double-walled aluminium skin. On its first launch, on 14 May 1931, Repulsor-1 reached a height of 200 feet, as did Repulsor-2, a week later, while Repulsor-3 climbed to 600 feet and Repulsor-4s continued the success story, ultimately achieving 5,000 feet over a range of 3,000 yards, before being recovered by parachute for further use.
While the VfR continued its work, other German rocket scientists and engineers were also having some success with their rockets, using both liquid and solid propellants. In March 1931 Reinholt Tiling and Karl Poggensee began launching their solid-fuel rockets, some carrying an altimeter, velocity indicator and cameras, up to heights of 6,000 feet, before they were recovered successfully by parachute. Tiling capitalised on this with his ‘Post Office’ rocket, which carried 188 postcards to a specified destination, and returned them, to argue the safety and speed of this innovative way of delivering the mail. He then took his rockets to Wangerooge, in the East Friesland Islands, where one reached a height of 30,000 feet, this attracting the attention of the Reichsmarine, which had been experimenting with rockets since 1929. Tragedy struck the rocket fraternity again when, on 10 October 1933, Tiling died of injuries sustained when one of his rockets exploded in his workshop. Meanwhile, Hugo Huckel and Johannes Winkler powered their small ‘Huckel-Winkler 1’ to a height of 1,000 feet, using a mix of liquid methane and liquid oxygen, from a site near Dessau, but their success was shortlived; in 1932 their ‘Huckel-Winkler 2’ rose to only 10 feet, before exploding on a range near Pillau, East Prussia. This was a dangerous time of ‘trial and error’.
Just when rocket science was beginning to enjoy real progress, internal tensions in Germany, the great depression of 1931-32 and emergence of a new political order, began to intrude. The VfR, with its primary interest in space, was now dying a slow death, affected by the new conditions and the withdrawal of financial sponsors. Membership dropped to 300 in 1932 as more members found themselves unable to pay the subscription, while the Reichswehr (German Armed Forces), with scant interest in space, turned their attention to the military applications of rocketry. Seeing the writing on the wall, Nebel wrote a paper on the utility of rockets to supplement long-range artillery, quickly triggering a visit to the Rocket Airport by Lieutenant Colonel Becker and Captain Dornberger, from the German Weapons Department, to view the enhanced facilities there and discuss possible ways ahead for the rocket as a weapon. As a result Nebel received a small contract, with the necessary funding, conditional on the production of a rocket which could reach an altitude of 10,000 feet. To that end, work began at once, and the first of these rockets was launched in July 1932 at a new army proving ground, Versuchsstelle West (Experimental Station West), at Kummersdorf. The launch was a failure. The rocket rose a few hundred feet, before becoming unstable and careering off horizontally to crash a short distance away. As a result, Becker refused to pay the 1,367 Reichsmarks contracted, while cutting all ties with Nebel and the VfR – thus signalling the end of the amateur ‘space club’.
While the Germans took the lead, other countries were dabbling in rocket science. In 1924 the Russians had set up the ‘Central Bureau for the Study of the Problems of Rockets’, and the ‘All-Union Society for the Study of Inter-Planetary Flight’. Then, in 1932, the Russian space pioneer Fridrikh Tsander published a thesis ‘Problems of Flight by Means of Reactive Devices’ and this was followed, in 1935, by Glusko’s ‘Rockets, their Construction and Utilisation’, while a powerful team of Russian scientists, sponsored by their government, tested a variety of liquid-fuelled rocket engines. From all this theoretical and practical work emerged two small rockets, the GIRD-X, which reached 1,300 feet in 1933, and the ‘Aviavnito’, which achieved 10,000 feet in 1936.
In 1928 the Austrian Dr Franz von Hoefft, of Vienna’s Gesellschaft für Hohenforschung (Society for High Altitude Research), had begun to examine a number of options for rocket development. In 1931 he and his Austrian colleague Friedrich Schmiedl launched a solid-fuel rocket, to carry mail between Schockel, Radegund and Kumberg, inspiring fellow scientist Gerhard Zucker to attempt to do likewise in a cross-channel flight to Great Britain – but all their rockets exploded when launched. The Italians had also joined the party with Crocco and Riccardo Corelli carrying out tests in 1929 to show again that solid propellants were not suitable for long-range rockets and leading to an examination of such alternative liquid combinations as petrol/nitrogen dioxide, trinitroglycerine/methyl alcohol and trinitroglycerine/nitromethane. These trials were abandoned in 1935, due to lack of funding.
The American Interplanetary Society (AIS) was also developing rockets, fuelled by a mixture of liquid oxygen and petrol, and was soon learning its own lessons the hard way. The AIS-1 was said to have been ‘a model of thrift and ingenuity’, with an aluminium water jacket fashioned from a cocktail shaker, wooden fins and a parachute holder made from an aluminium saucepan. Static tests took place in 1932, during which 60 pounds of thrust (measured on rudimentary spring scales) was generated for 20 to 30 seconds. The rocket was launched at Great Kills, New York, on 14 May 1933, only for the oxygen tank to burst at 250 feet. A second model, which took to the air on 9 September 1934, reached an unsatisfactory 1,338 feet, after which the tests were abandoned. Thereafter, the AIS was committed to the support of a variety of other national rocket projects, using both solid and liquid fuels, but none enjoyed any great success before all the trials were suspended in 1939, at the outbreak of the Second World War. Suffice it to say that, in
the 1930s, no other nation could match the achievements of the German rocket scientists.
The lure of space had motivated many of the big names in German rocket research, giving impetus to rocket development, albeit with some purists at the helm being less enthusiastic about the military applications. Although it could not have escaped notice, many also seemed to pay little heed to the rise of the Nazi party, some even showing a dangerous contempt for Hitler and his cohorts, with all that this might mean for their future. But it was the resurgence of German military aspirations which kept the rocketeers in business, as the Nazi hierarchy in the 1930s attempted to navigate its way around the constraints imposed on them by the Treaty of Versailles. Looking for alternative military concepts and technologies, they perceived that the rocket was one way to go. The more foresighted pragmatists in the rocket community played down any devotion to space and accepted that tacit allegiance to the whims and wills of those then wielding power might be the best, indeed possibly the only, way to achieve their ultimate objectives. Thus began a new chapter in the evolution of the rocket in Germany against the background of a revitalised nation, devoted to innovation, industry and a determination to find a new place in history.
However, it was clear that a hard core of Germany’s rocket men remained obsessed by the ‘lure of space’, loudly applauding Walter Dornberger at a celebration in Peenemünde to mark the first fully successful launch and flight of their A4 embryo missile, when he said:
This is the first time we have invaded space with our rocket. Mark this well, we have used space as a bridge between two points on the earth; we have proven rocket propulsion practicable for space travel. This third day of October 1942 is the first of a new era of transportation – that of space travel.
In the meantime, however, there was a war to be won.
Chapter 2
Deadly Innovation
Although the German Army (Heer) Weapons Agency, given the name Heeres Waffenamt (HWA) in 1922, already incorporated a research and development department, the Heereswaffenamt Prüfwesen (Wa Prüf), the serious work on German military rockets did not begin until 1931, when Captain Walter Dornberger took the lead with a team of aspiring rocketeers, including Rudolf Nebel, Klaus Riedel, Heinrich Grünow and the rising star Wernher von Braun. Making good use of the fundamentals prescribed by Hermann Oberth, they were to kick-start the nation’s rocket development in its new direction – that of military application, under the ever watchful eyes of the Wehrmacht (German Armed Forces). This was grist to the mill for Dornberger, a gunnery officer who recognised the limitations of artillery, with even the mighty, but hardly mobile ‘Paris Gun’, limited to some eighty miles in range, with a relatively small projective, a low rate of fire and poor accuracy. He saw the rocket more as a supplement or alternative to long-range artillery than as a replacement for the manned bomber aircraft and believed that, initially, he could double the maximum range achieved by contemporary artillery with a rocket carrying a one-ton warhead. Ultimately he hoped to build a successor weighing 100 tons, with a 10-ton warhead over ever greater ranges –and the Aggregate (Aggregate) series of rockets was a first step in that direction.
Dornberger’s new group was based first at the old military range at Kummersdorf, south of Berlin, and it was there that its first rocket, the Aggregate 1 (A1), was tested on 21 December 1932. The A1, 4 feet 7 inches long and 1 foot in diameter, had a take-off weight of 330lb; it was fuelled by a mixture of alcohol and liquid oxygen, to generate 300 pounds of thrust for 16 seconds. This first attempt was a failure, with the A1 blowing up on the launch pad, and because it was suspected that the heavy gyroscope installed in the nose would also render it unstable in flight, the A1 was abandoned in favour of the A2. This was a larger rocket, 5 feet 3 inches long and weighing 236lb, powered by a new engine producing 3,000 pounds of thrust for 50 seconds. This time the stabilisation gyroscopes were positioned in the centre of the rocket’s body, between the oxygen and alcohol fuel tanks. Two A2s, named Max and Mintz (after the cartoon characters of that time) were launched on 19 and 20 December 1934 respectively, from a Baltic site at Borkum, where a large group of military and civilian VIPs, watched them climb to heights above 10,000 feet.
In a historic milestone which would have worldwide consequences, Hitler unilaterally repudiated the Treaty of Versailles in 1935, freeing Germany from all the military constraints it had imposed. This released unprecedented funds for a massive rearmament programme and gave rocket development new impetus. Within the reorganisation of the German Ordnance Department, the rocket group was designated Wa Prüf 11 (Weapons Testing Branch 11). Dornberger guarded this branch jealously, but he needed all the help he could get to further his cause, so he welcomed the interest shown by Lieutenant Colonel Wolfram von Richthofen, head of the Air Ministry Technical Office and cousin of that legendary First World War pilot, the ‘Red Baron’, in the use of rockets to power a fighter fast enough to compete with the Allied aircraft then in the pipeline. To that end, von Richthofen visited Kummersdorf first in January 1935 and joined members of Wa Prüf 11, the Air Ministry and the aircraft designer, Willy Messerschmitt, when they visited the independent German engineer Paul Schmitt, who was developing a pulse-jet engine for both missiles and aircraft. In this Schmitt failed but valuable lessons were learned from his research, which would help the Argus engine company to perfect a pulse-jet engine for the flying bomb which would be nurtured later by the Luftwaffe (German Air Force).
Dr Walter Dornberger. (Author, Courtesy HTM Peenemünde)
By 1936 the facilities at Kummersdorf had been greatly improved, with two new static test stands, mobile test rigs and the extensive support facilities necessary to accommodate the much larger A3. The A3 measured 22 feet long and 2 feet 4 inches in diameter and weighed 1,650lb at lift-off; its engine provided 3,300 pounds of thrust for 45 seconds, using a pressure-fed propellant of liquid oxygen and ethanol, and it carried an inertial guidance system. The problem of how to stabilise the rocket without the rotation imparted to a shell in the rifled barrel of a gun was solved by incorporating a simple but reliable gyroscope-based ‘autopilot’, designed by Dr Karl Fieber and produced by Kreiselgeräte GmbH (Gyro Devices Ltd). The A3 had narrow fins, to give aerodynamic stability at supersonic speeds, telemetry to measure temperatures and pressures in flight and a radio receiver, using on-board power, to take commands from the ground to shut the engine down in the air. German rocket development was gathering pace.
The First World War ‘Paris Gun’ set standards for the Second World War. (Author, Courtesy HTM Peenemünde)
Aggregate A2, the beginnings of a military rocket. (Author, Courtesy HTM Peenemünde)
Despite the improvements at Kummersdorf, it soon became clear that the weapons range there was too small to accommodate new technologies or serve all potential users, and too open to public scrutiny, so the search began for a more suitable alternative. The Baltic island of Rügen came to mind, but this had been commandeered by the all-powerful German Labour Front as a ‘strength through joy’ recreational area, an initiative known to be greatly favoured by Adolf Hitler – and so inviolate. It was Werner von Braun who found an ideal site, on the Baltic Island of Usedom where his father used to go duck hunting, specifically the Peenemünde peninsula to the north of the island, and it was there that the HWA established one of its most important weapons proving grounds: Heeresversuchsanstalt Peenemünde (HVP)
Usedom, sixty miles long and twenty-eight wide, was indeed a very suitable location for rocket research and development. The peninsula consisted largely of flat, sandy soil, much of which was covered by pine forests; it had a scattering of settlements, with Peenemünde village in the north-west offering a small port. Monitoring equipment, sited along a 250-mile stretch of the Baltic/Pomeranian coastline to the east, would allow rocket flights to be tracked after launch from Peenemünde, while restricted access to the island gave a high measure of security. Moreover, the tiny island of Greifswalder Oie, north-north-east of Peenemünde, c
ould be an invaluable adjunct to the main range on Usedom.
So it was that, on 2 April 1936, the German Air Ministry paid the local town of Wolgast 750,000 Reichsmarks for the whole of the northern peninsula, the cost shared between the German army and air force. The village of Peenemünde was evacuated and work began on the infrastructure, the air force taking the lead in the construction, unfettered by the army’s traditional ways and conventional wisdoms. This resulted in state-of-the-art research, development, test and production installations, unrivalled anywhere in the world, with the army and air force occupying two distinct sectors.
The Army Research Centre was located at Peenemünde Ost (Peenemünde East), sub-divided into Werk Ost (Eastern Works) and Werk Süd (Southern Works). To the north-east, where the forest gave way to a sandy shoreline, nine rocket test stands were built, the largest and most prominent being Test Stand VII, from which most of the surface-to-surface rockets would be launched, while three more stands, for rocket engine tests, were sited northwest of Karlshagen. Farther north on the peninsula, at Werk West (Western Works), lay the Air Force Test Site, with its rudimentary airfield, test stands and flying-bomb launch pads.
Peenemünde Power Station, looking north, largely unscathed by Allied bombing, survives to this day. (Author, Courtesy HTM Peenemünde)