Even as a seashore resort Peenemunde was not important. Nearby Zinnowitz was more fashionable by far—and Zinnowitz does appear on many maps. The small steamers which, starting out from Swinemunde, provided a coastwise connection between the string of seashore resorts on Usedom and then went on to those on the island of Rugen, made Zinnowitz their last stop before shuttling across to Rugen. Peenemunde was neglected and could only be seen in the distance from deck.
But it is possible to locate Peenemunde with fair accuracy even on a map where it does not appear. If you draw a straight line from the city of Stettin to the northermost point of the island of Rugen, that line will cut the coastline very close to Peenemunde about two thirds of the whole distance from Stettin.
The Nazis selected this site for two reasons: it was at the seashore and out of the way of the main coastwise traffic. Being located at the tip of a long island, all land approaches could be easily sealed off, while the sea approaches could be patrolled without difficulty. It is possible that Hermann Oberth, who by some sources is credited with originating the idea for that laboratory, had something to do with that choice.
This whole section had some fame in the history of German rocket research. Between the island of Usedom—and Peenemunde—and the large island of Rugen there is the tiny little islet which is known locally as the Greifswalder Oie. When Oberth was working feverishly to complete his first rocket which was to be sent into the air on October 15, 1929, the day of the first showing of the Fritz Lang film which had provided Oberth with the necessary cash, he had the Oie in mind as a place from which to launch the rocket.
The fact that there was a lighthouse on the Oie prevented him from obtaining permission to use the island for this purpose. He then selected the coast of the mainland near the seashore resort of Horst, some forty miles east of the Oie. Two years later Johannes Winkler brought his second liquid fuel rocket to the Oie, hoping to persuade the authorities in charge to grant him the permission Oberth had failed to obtain. Winkler, incidentally, failed too. And then, finally, nearby Rugen was the “site” of the famous Fischer Hoax of 1933 which told about the “secret demonstration” of the fabulous man-carrying rocket of the Fischer Brothers who never even existed.
If Oberth had anything to say about the matter, it would be like him to select the site for a rocket research laboratory. Of course, we don’t know yet just how much his words and wishes counted with the Nazis.
So much for the location of the rocket research laboratory, which was later found and mapped and bombed by the R.A.F. with great thoroughness.
Now the probable date of its founding.
When the Nazis came to power in Germany in February 1933 they discouraged all rocket research. The German Rocket Society was torn apart, the men who had worked under its auspices were distributed in commercial jobs which had nothing at all to do with rockets. The testing ground became an S.A. drill ground, the records disappeared in the files of the Gestapo.
Three groups had been interested in rocket research in Germany during the months before that happened. One was, of course, the German Rocket Society itself which had progressed to rocket motors delivering a thrust of four hundred forty pounds. The second group consisted of one man and his boss. The man was Pietsch, who was chief engineer of the Industrial Gas Company, Inc., and the owner, Dr. Heyland.
Dr. Heyland had been Max Valier’s last sponsor and after Valier’s death Pietsch had overhauled the liquid-fuel-propelled rocket automobile on which Valier had been working and had demonstrated it on two public test runs in April and May 1931. His rocket motor was very inefficient from the point of view of fuel consumption, but it did produce a thrust of about three hundred fifty pounds, weighing some forty pounds itself.
The third group consisted of one man and his assistants, Friedrich Wilhelm Sander of Wesermiinde who had manufactured the powder rockets for Valier’s and Opel’s rocket cars and rocket gliders. Sander was interested mostly in powder rockets, but had an interesting idea which, I think, bore fruit later on. He wanted to eliminate the danger of explosion and reasoned that this danger was due to the fact that in a powder rocket “combustion chamber” and “fuel tank” are one and the same thing.
The liquid-fuel enthusiasts had pointed to that until even Sander, who, after all, had a commercial interest in powder rockets, had to admit it. Sander then thought of building rockets of metal, with separate tank and combustion chamber, but still with powder for a fuel: liquid powder. He succeeded. In summer 1931 he staged a demonstration of products of his factory, signal rockets, line-throwing rockets, rockets throwing self-inflating life-savers, et cetera. Among the novelties shown there was the liquid-powder rocket. Witnesses stated that it looked “like heavy black machine oil,” but the composition was, of course, Sander’s trade secret.
Add to this some experiments made by the Reichswehr before Hitler. The Reichswehr did not consider liquid fuels of any kind, they wanted storable powder projectiles. Rumor has it that they attained a range of thirty thousand yards after some time—it was not specified whether vertically or horizontally—and that the project was then shelved for future reference.
At the time Hitler was actually coming to power no rocket research went on anywhere in Germany and this state of affairs was to prevail for another three years.
All the while Hermann Oberth was sitting in Mediash in Rumania, being simultaneously “at home” and “in exile,” smoldering over his own misfortune and hating everybody, most especially Rumanians, Russians, Prussians, Jews and other rocket experimenters. He did some work of his own during that time, as evidenced by an interview which appeared in the Swiss newspaper Neue Ziircher Zeitung in 1935, but that work was in the nature of tinkering in the basement and in the school laboratory. Also he was, according to his own statement, an active member of the German Nazi organization in Rumania.
In 1937 he established, presumably through that organization, contact with the German Army and most especially with Colonel Albert Kesselring—now Field Marshal Kesselring in command of the German forces in Northern Italy.
Naturally there is no record of that conversation or conversations. But it is not difficult for someone acquainted with Oberth’s conceptions of rocket theory to reconstruct the main points of those talks, especially in view of the results that became apparent later on.
Some time ago, I wrote an article about the use of rockets in place of artillery. The conclusions I arrived at were simple, but subsequent correspondence has taught me that some readers missed the points I tried to make. The most important point was that there is an upper size limit for powder rockets and that within the possible size limits rockets are inferior to artillery in two respects.
One is accuracy. Modern guns place their shells with extreme neatness, almost as neatly as if they were carried over to the target and dropped by hand. Rockets are not that accurate, rockets are what the military calls “area weapons,” capable of beating a given area but hitting the target or targets within that area only by chance. The second drawback which I pointed out was the higher powder consumption. For a given range which can be attained by rockets as well as by artillery the rocket always needs at least three times as much powder to get there as does the artillery shell.
These two drawbacks are confronted by two advantages. One is the fact that rockets do not need guns. Guns are expensive pieces of precision workmanship. Rockets need only launching tubes which are neither expensive nor works of precision. The second advantage is that one can bank almost as many launching racks together as one feels like. The result is a very heavy volume of fire. It takes longer to load a launching rack than it does to load a gun, especially modern guns with automatic or semiautomatic loading mechanism. But for each salvo the volume can be much heavier.
My final conclusion was, when I wrote that article, that long-range powder rockets could not be built, that it would need a liquid-fuel rocket motor to make long-range rockets possible. Anything that need
s a mass-ratio higher than 1:1 must have liquid fuels—and there is a disadvantage connected with that. One of the liquids is liquefied oxygen, and liquid oxygen cannot be regarded as a storable fuel, at least not in the sense in which powder is storable. You can, of course, store liquid oxygen for a few days, even weeks, if the quantity is large enough, but military projectiles are often stored for a year or more.
Liquid-fuel rockets, therefore, could be used only from a base where liquid oxygen is available, they could not be carted around in the field in the same manner as, say, a heavy howitzer and ammunition. But liquid-fuel rockets, if you only make them large enough, have a long range which makes up to a large extent for their lack of mobility. Very heavy guns are not very mobile either, except those mounted on a floating base called battleship.
What Professor Oberth told Colonel Kesselring must have been about the same I wrote in that article. Then Oberth would draw the following conclusions:
A. Liquid-fuel rockets can have a long range only if they have a high mass-ratio. They can have a high mass-ratio only if it is possible to evolve a lightweight high-capacity pump so that the fuel can be pumped from the tanks into the combustion chamber. That way the tanks can be thin-walled since they do not have to stand a higher internal pressure than the weight of the fuel multiplied by the acceleration of the rocket plus an added safety factor. The first job to be done, therefore, is the development of such a pump. Oberth probably pointed out that he had a design for such a pump which would work, or, if not, could at least be used as a starting point.
B. Once such a pump has been developed it is possible to build a high mass-ratio rocket for very long range, up to about six hundred miles. (Beyond that the mass-ratio would grow so big that a step-rocket would be required.) Six hundred miles, considering European conditions, is very long. Such rocket batteries, when stationed in Berlin, could sweep a circle outside the prewar German border in any direction.
C. Being able to build a certain mass-ratio at all is almost equivalent to being able to build rockets of that mass-ratio in any order of magnitude, within reasonable limits. (One probably could not build such a rocket with a total weight of only twenty or thirty pounds.) Thus, if one can produce a rocket having a mass-ratio of 6.5: 1—which, for fuels like alcohol or gasoline, amounts to saying “a rocket with a range of two hundred fifty to three hundred miles”—it is mostly a matter of choice, or of military considerations, how big the final weight is going to be.
D. Considering the range over which they could be fired, the accuracy of these rockets is going to be high and the remaining lack of accuracy could be made up by using poison gas which will spread over a certain area.
E. While there are many theoretical reasons why rockets should not have wings, it is possible to build a rocket-propelled airplane. It should be short and squat and generally bat-shaped rather than bird-shaped and should leave the ground vertically as long as the fuel tanks are full. I have a drawing of the general appearance here on page 280 of my book, if the Herr Oberst will be good enough to glance at it—
I did not invent this conversation, not even the wording. It can be found almost in its entirety and with almost the same words, in Oberth’s “Wage zur Raumschiffahrt.” I merely got the rather scattered references together and condensed them considerably. But this is how Oberth saw the problem of the long-distance war rocket as far back as 1929 and I still remember a conversation we had at that time.
Oberth and I spoke a good deal about long-distance mail rockets then and I wondered about a certain difficulty. The problem was this: if the mail rocket was to travel over a distance where the use of rockets would really involve a saving of time, it would have to be a high mass-ratio rocket, from about 5:1 up. Now such a mass-ratio was impossible without a pump—still to be invented—and that pump, no matter what shape it took, would have a certain minimum size. This automatically decreed a minimum size for the whole rocket and probably a large size, the payload available might come out as high as a thousand pounds.
“And do you think, herr professor, that there will be a need for rockets carrying a thousand pounds of mail over five hundred kilometers?” (About three hundred miles.) Oberth looked at me with the smile which old-fashioned pedagogues reserve for people whom they call “my dear young friend” and said after a while: “There will be need for rockets which carry a thousand pounds of dynamite over five hundred kilometers.”
Oberth convinced Kesselring about such a need.
First, Swedish observers say, Oberth was provided with a camouflaging job in Germany. In ordinary German academic life it would have been impossible to give Oberth a professorship at a German university. The major obstacle was that he lacked a doctor’s degree, the secondary obstacle was that he had been neither assistant professor nor privatdozent— “private lecturer,” meaning one who receives no salary from the university—anywhere. The term “professor” as applied to him meant that he was teacher at an ordinary high school in, of all countries, Rumania. Normally he would have to fulfill both the requirements mentioned to be even eligible for a full professorship.
The Nazis made him “Professor of Physical Astronomy” at the University of Berlin, which, under the circumstances, conformed to academic tradition about as much as a foreign-born president would conform with the Constitution of the United States.
He may have taught astronomy for a while, provided that the Hitler youth was interested in astronomy, unless ordered to be. But from all we know and can know at this moment the founding of the laboratory near Peenemiinde fell into the time of Oberth’s professorship in Berlin.
No doubt that this laboratory was not only built in extreme secrecy, but that it was also endowed with all the safety measures and precautions which could be thought up by the Gestapo on the one hand and Military Security on the other. It is certain that none of the technicians and scientists working there knew the full program, each one learned only as much as he needed for doing his own job right.
Naturally nobody employed there could be permitted to go home. The actual construction work began most likely with the construction of homes for the people to be employed there. The fact that Peenemunde could pass as an inexpensive seashore resort helped: Kraft durch Freude built one of its innumerable Ferieuheime— “vacation resorts”—at Peenemiinde. If any member of the Labor Front of which Kraft durch Freude— “Strength through Joy”—was only a part, had any special reason for wishing to spend his vacation in Peenemiinde and applied for that particular resort he was assured that there was no room. If he insisted he was probably investigated as a spy, not dreaming about the real reason for the investigation.
Of course the answer was not even a lie, this particular resort was filled up, with engineers and physicists, presumably with everybody who had, in the past, shown interest in rockets and who had been passed by the Gestapo.
There was more than one laboratory, not only in the sense that the laboratories occupied a considerable number of buildings. The whole Institut, as it was probably referred to, was subdivided into several branches, certainly more than two, probably four. Of the two we know definitely, they might now be conveniently labeled V-1 and V-2. If the rocket weapons used by the German soldiers in the field were also developed at Peenemunde, as seems likely, the powder laboratory or laboratories formed the third branch. And if the propulsion unit for the rocket-propelled Messerschmitt 163 was developed there we get a fourth branch or department.
Oberth was not the head of the whole, but he probably was the department head of the V-2 branch. That he developed the V-1, the well-known jet-propelled robot bomb, was claimed when this weapon was new, but it is highly unlikely. While the V-2 bears many of the earmarks of Oberth’s thinking and reasoning, V-1 not only lacks all of them but embodies some features which Oberth would never have used, if his word had counted.
The French physicist and collaborationist Georges Claude, otherwise a justly famous
man, has recently been arrested because he is said to have invented V-1. It is quite likely that Claude contributed to the design, but the nature of V-1 is such that no one man can be called its inventor. The idea of an aerial counterpart to the naval torpedo, a self-propelled, unmanned and explosive-laden airplane —just as the naval torpedo is a self-propelled, unmanned and explosive-laden small submarine—is by no means new, in fact the United States developed such a weapon in 1918, too late for actual use. It did not only carry a “bomb” of the same weight as V-1, it had four hundred miles range as compared to the V-1 ‘s one hundred and fifty miles.
Nazi-controlled newspapers have named one Heinz Bunse as “inventor” of the V-1 after the initial assault on London was made. This mention caused a great search through biographical reference works, but the search was fruitless. Heinz Bunse could not be found, he probably was—or still is—a Nazi protege, presumably placed in command of the V-1 development section for purely political reasons.
Some other candidates for the somewhat doubtful honor of having invented V-1 have also been named—I myself among them—usually on the strength of certain features of the robot bomb, covered by patents owned by the men in question. While it is quite possible that these patents were utilized, there is no guarantee of any kind that the men in question were even informed about it.
The results of the research work done at Peenemunde, as they emerged on the battlefields, are the following:
Adventures in Time and Space Page 46