Hitler's Rockets: The Story of the V-2s

by Norman Longmate

  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.

  For the rocket men this, far more than the later first operational firing of the A-4, was the real moment of triumph. Even the normally detached scientists and army officers who had achieved it were caught up in the excitement of the moment, not least Dornberger himself:

  I couldn’t speak for a moment; my emotion was too great. I could see that Colonel Zanssen was in the same state. He was standing there laughing. His eyes were moist. He stretched out his hands to me. I grasped them. Then our emotions ran away with us. We yelled and embraced each other like excited boys. . . . Everyone was shouting, laughing, leaping, dancing and shaking hands. . . . As I went out into the street half the technical staff came dashing towards me. There was a great deal of handshaking. I bundled von Braun into the car and we drove to Test Stand VII. As we shot through the open gate in the sand-built walls surrounding the great arena we beheld something like a popular riot. The test field crews had surrounded Dr Thiel and their chief engineers. . . . I can still see Thiel’s face, with his shrewd savant’s eyes sparkling behind his thick spectacles. . . . His response to my congratulations was a flood of new ideas and suggestions for improvement.

  The actual splashdown, marked by sudden silence from the radio which had been transmitting a continuous note ever since lift-off, came as almost an anticlimax to the shouting, laughing crowd of scientists assembled round the loudspeakers. Young Dr Steinhoff, whom Dornberger had found wandering around the test area several years earlier, was sent off in a Messerschmitt to locate the precise spot, marked by brightly coloured dye in the sea, and returned with more good news: the missile had travelled 120 miles and come down only two and a half miles wide of its aiming-point. Already Dornberger had fulfilled one private ambition. ‘Our rocket today’, he told his excited audience at a celebratory party that evening, ‘reached a height of nearly 60 miles. We have thus broken the world hei
ght record of 25 miles previously held by the ... Paris gun.’ To Dornberger, the artillery-man and First World War veteran, this no doubt meant more than it did to the scientists around him, and just in case the day’s success should set their minds moving again in the direction of that old dream, space travel, he added a stern reminder of their real purpose:

  The development of possibilities we cannot yet envisage will be a peacetime task. . . . So long as the war lasts, our most urgent task can only be the rapid perfection of the rocket as a weapon.

  3

  TAKING IT SERIOUSLY

  It looks as though we’ll have to take these rockets seriously.

  British Air Intelligence Officer, 27 March 1943

  When the war began, the British government had no suspicion that the Germans might be developing long-range rockets, and the possibility was examined seriously only because of a mistake. Hitler’s speech at Danzig on 19 September 1939 boasting that the Nazis might ‘use a weapon which is not yet known and with which we ourselves cannot be attacked’ led to a young government scientist, Dr R. V. Jones, being instructed to search the files of the Secret Intelligence Service for clues as to the identity of ‘Hitler’s secret weapon’. His report, ‘The Hitler Waffe’, running to six foolscap pages, submitted on 11 November 1939, identified seven ‘weapons to which several references occur, of which some must be considered seriously’, the fifth of these being ‘long-range guns and rockets’, although he concluded that in all probability ‘Hitler’s weapon was neither bluff nor novelty, but merely the extensive use of his air force’. This interpretation is now generally accepted as being correct, but ‘The Hitler Waffe’ remains important, since it marks the first systematic study of the rocket threat.

  The secret-weapon investigation helped to make Dr Jones’s unique role, which he regarded as essentially that of keeping an eye open for significant developments in German weapons, especially in the air, well known throughout Whitehall, and his name was constantly to recur whenever such matters were discussed during the next few years. Still only twenty-eight, he had taken a first in physics at Oxford, where he had worked in the Clarendon Laboratory under the famous Professor Frederick Lindemann, known as ‘Prof’ to his students and to his close friend, Winston Churchill. It was thanks to Lindemann that R. V. Jones first became involved in government research, while still doing postgraduate work at Oxford, though the £50 he received for equipment was somewhat less than the millions of marks the Germans were at that time spending on Peenemünde. He had entered the scientific civil service in 1936 with the salary, unprecedented for someone of his age, of £500 a year, and shortly after the outbreak of war had transferred to Air Intelligence Branch AI (I (c)), which was closely linked to MI6, known more commonly as SIS, the Secret Intelligence Service. In this capacity, while working at SIS headquarters at 54 Broadway in Victoria, he had constant contacts with ‘Station X’, at Bletchley Park in Buckinghamshire, which housed the SIS pre-war files and was to become well known as the centre of intelligence obtained from breaking German codes, including the Ultra material enciphered on the Enigma machine. Dr Jones also became personally acquainted with almost everyone else of importance in the intelligence war, including the ‘Y’ Section, responsible for intercepting ordinary German signals traffic, and the staff, military and civilian, of the Royal Aircraft Establishment at Farnborough, Britain’s nearest equivalent to Peenemünde. All these links were to prove of crucial importance, and before long Dr Jones had acquired a well-qualified colleague, Squadron Leader S. D. Felkin, later famous for his skill in interrogating German prisoners. The British intelligence system lacked neither resources nor professional talent. Where it was sadly deficient was in scientific knowledge. ‘The average SIS agent’, Dr Jones wrote later, ‘was a scientific analphabet’ – i.e. he lacked even the ABC of that area of knowledge.

  While still completing his secret-weapon study, Dr Jones found another problem literally dumped on his desk, the sevenpage document known as the ‘Oslo Report’, left a week earlier at the British Legation in Norway, apparently by a German well-wisher to the Allied cause. Dr Jones took it seriously from the first, recognizing that it ‘was obviously written by someone with a good scientific and technical background’, dismissing the suspicions of some of his colleagues that it might be a German ‘plant’. The Oslo Report mentioned, for the first time in any intelligence source, a research establishment at Peenemünde, and the development by the German army of rocket projectiles 80 cm (32 in) wide.

  In May 1940 British military intelligence received information that a scientist called Oberth was collaborating with the Germans on producing a 30 ton rocket with a range of 160 miles at an establishment near Stettin. Most unfortunately it did not reach the Air Ministry, where Dr Jones at least would have recognized the name of Professor Oberth as the ‘father’ of German rocket research and an expert on liquid-fuelled rockets and could have identified the ‘establishment near Stettin’ as Peenemünde. Here the consequences of the intelligence service’s lack of scientifically trained officers were strikingly demonstrated.

  May 1940 was also the month in which Winston Churchill became Prime Minister and took into power with him his private crony and confidant, Professor Lindemann, as his scientific adviser, appointing him to the sinecure post of Paymaster-General. Lindemann’s elevation meant that science was now represented at the very highest level of government, and that the voices of scientists, at least if they enjoyed Lindemann’s highly selective approval, would be heard in Downing Street; but for this there was a high, almost disastrous, price to be paid. Lindemann was a bigoted, mean-minded, grievance-treasuring, malicious snob, and his German accent – he had been born in Baden-Baden in 1886, the son of a very wealthy German engineer who later became a British citizen – was all too likely to pour into Churchill’s uncritical ear supposedly objective advice fatally warped by personal prejudice. It was typical of Lindemann that because he disapproved of the man his sister had married he refused to speak to her for the remaining forty years of his life, and his professional life was riddled with similar small-minded vendettas. Cold and aloof to outward appearance, beneath the surface, he was, according to an admiring biographer, ‘a man alive and raw and quivering with authentic passions, nourishing love and hate with an intensity rare among men, revengeful in thought yet vulnerable to slights . . . his vision was somewhat narrow and his obstinacy impervious to argument’. His own judgement as a scientist too was often spectacularly faulty, and R. V. Jones, while working as a research student under Lindemann, ‘found that he had been leading me up a garden path because he had made some erroneous assumptions he had not troubled to check’. When he disliked anyone – and he disliked a great many people – he was liable to disregard whatever they said, however soundly based; equally, and almost as misleadingly, he was intensely loyal to his friends and would unwaveringly support them even when wrong. His feud with the other major figure offering the government scientific advice, Professor Henry Tizard, had become notorious even before the war and was to have dire consequences during it, for in 1942 Tizard was virtually driven out of Whitehall back into academic life, so that for the whole ‘rocket period’ Lindemann reigned supreme and unchallenged. His response when R. V. Jones (for whom, as a former pupil, he apparently retained a grudging respect) attempted, with Tizard’s agreement, to make peace between the two, was typically ungracious and small-minded: ‘Now that I am in a position of power, a lot of my old friends have come sniffing around!’ Equally revealing was his response to congratulations when, in 1941, Churchill created him a peer, and he took the name of that charming Oxford river, the Cherwell, ‘a gleeful sneer’, and the comment, ‘“Of course . . . it wouldn’t be any use getting an award if one didn’t think of all the people who were miserable because they hadn’t managed it.” ’

  All allowances for Lindemann made, he remains, on the evidence of the documents as well as the recollections of those who knew him, a singularly unpleasant figure who was almost a
lways wrong. His presence in Whitehall was generally disliked, and one former junior minister in Churchill’s wartime government expressed a widespread view when he remarked in a broadcast long after the war that in his view the Germanborn scientist was the most repellent individual ever to have disgraced British public life and that he ‘seemed to have crawled out from under a stone’. In the story of the rocket, however, as the Prime Minister’s private, as well as official, scientific adviser he was to play an important part.

  As one country after another was overrun by the Germans, and an increasing number of decent German citizens came to hate their own government, the problem for British intelligence became less one of too little information than of too much. Into Branch AI (I (c)) at 53 Broadway poured a steady flow of facts, rumours and – most troublesome of all – half-truths, from a variety of sources: the code-breakers at Bletchley, the ‘Y’ Service, the London ‘Cage’ where especially important prisoners were questioned, the numerous other centres where enemy prisoners or suspect arrivals from Europe were interrogated, the reports from agents on the ground in Europe, including an increasing number of slave-labourers, eager to harm the Germans but wholly untrained in intelligence work, and, probably most important of all in detecting new enemy weapons like the rocket, the Central Interpretation Unit, Medmenham, a large country house in Buckinghamshire where every week the thousands of photographs taken by RAF reconnaissance aircraft over Germany and Occupied Europe were scrutinized. As a result of the personal contacts he had established, Dr Jones was uniquely placed to assess the value of the reports that crossed his desk, for he often knew personally the pilot who had flown a particular sortie or the official who had compiled a specific report. Thanks to Lindemann’s sponsorship – though this probably did him little good in the growing number of quarters where Lindemann was already detested – he had as early as 1940 found himself at a toplevel meeting addressing the Prime Minister on the threat from German navigational beams. In February 1941 he became Assistant Director of Intelligence (Scientific Intelligence) at the Air Ministry, a post he combined with that of being scientific adviser to MI6, and thereafter his name became even better known in government circles, increasingly carrying an authority far greater than his rank suggested.