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

by Norman Longmate

  On 8 July 1944 I was described by Kammler, in the presence of General Buhle and two other generals, as a public danger. He said I ought to be court-martialled . . . [and that] for years I had been weakening Germany’s armament potential by tying [up] . . . both . . . men and material. . . . It would be a crime to devote another penny to so hopeless a project.

  On 20 July there came the attempt on Hitler’s life, in the aftermath of which the SS seized an even closer grip on the whole war machine, including the rocket. Dornberger’s ultimate superior, General Fromm, C-in-C of the Home Army, was arrested and his post taken over by Himmler. Promotion for Kammler soon followed. He became a lieutenant-general in the Waffen SS and, on 8 August, special commissioner for the whole A-4 programme, the post Dornberger had ‘been fighting for years to obtain’. It was, even for the naturally doleful Dornberger, a particularly gloomy period:

  Thus, after nearly all the obstacles to the tactical employment of the A-4 had been overcome, a complete layman took the leadership, a man who only a month before had clearly professed his disbelief in the project. . . . The first two months after Kammler’s appointment were hard and bitter ones. I had to endure a whole series of humiliations. I had to submit to a chaotic flood of ignorant, contradictory, irreconcilable orders from this man who was neither soldier nor technician. They took the form of a hundred telegrams a day. . . . In those two months I reached the limit of man’s endurance. But I had made rockets my life’s work. Now we had to prove that their time was come.

  8

  NO IMMEDIATE DANGER

  No serious attack by rocket . . . was likely, at any rate before the New Year.

  Minutes of War Cabinet Defence Committee, 18 November 1943

  On 27 August 1943, while the American Fortresses were bombing the suspected ‘projector’ at Watten, Duncan Sandys issued his eleventh interim report. It included the full text of a message that had recently arrived from ‘a quite unusually well-placed and hitherto most reliable source’, which at last dispelled, or should have done, the confusion surrounding the whole secret-weapon investigation. It began by stating categorically that ‘there are two different rocket secret weapons under construction’ and after referring to a ‘pilotless aircraft’ went on to give by far the fullest account yet of the rocket, including its correct German name:

  A-4 is 16 metres long and 4.15 metres in diameter. . . . The explosive charge is stated to have an effect equivalent to the British four-ton bomb. The A-4 is launched from a projector . . . [and] has vanes at the rear end like a bomb. The range . . . is 200 kilometres, with maximum altitude approximately 33,000 metres. . . . So far approximately 100 A-4 projectiles have been fired and a further 100 are at present in hand. The accuracy of aim is most unsatisfactory. . . . The construction of parts . . . is distributed throughout Germany. . . . Assembly and tests . . . are carried out . . . near Peenemünde. . . . Some concrete emplacements for A-4 projectors are now ready near LE HAVRE and CHERBOURG. More are under construction. These concrete emplacements are for protection but are not essential as the projectors can be placed in open fields if necessary. . . . About June 10th Hitler told assembled military leaders that the Germans had only to hold out, as by the end of 1943 London would be levelled to the ground and Britain forced to capitulate. . . . October 20th is at present fixed as zero day for rocket attacks to begin.

  In his covering note Duncan Sandys reported confirmatory evidence, of a kind, from Stockholm. A Swedish engineer recently back from Germany claimed ‘to have been present at a trial firing of the long-range rocket in July’. Sandys made no comment on either report but, in an appendix, listed the plans already agreed to meet the rocket threat, to which had now been added a ‘Confusion Plan . . . employing smoke and flash simulators . . . with the object of making it difficult for . . . reconnaissance planes to make accurate observations’.

  Four days later, on 31 August 1943, the Chiefs of Staff, with various ministers and Dr Jones in attendance, heard from Air Chief Marshal Portal that it was estimated that it would take six months to make good the damage at Peenemünde, while Sir Malcolm MacAlpine, when shown the post-raid picture of Watten, had commented that ‘it would be easier for the Germans to begin again elsewhere’ than try to repair the wrecked site. Meanwhile Lord Cherwell once again repeated that ‘he was still sceptical’ about the whole affair. ‘Many of the reports were inconsistent and some of them scientifically incorrect.’ The chief ‘prorocket’ advocate among senior ministers was now Herbert Morrison, who would, he said, ‘feel happier if he could construct a further 100,000 Morrison shelters and press on with the reinforcement of surface shelters’. So far all he had been able to do was warn ‘Regional Commissioners to move Civil Defence workers to London if required. . . . If serious bombardment started,’ he warned, ‘a move of the seat of government might have to be contemplated.’ This prompted the committee to agree that the Chancellor of the Exchequer, who, as head of the Treasury was responsible for the civil service, should ‘examine and report on the implications of reviving the “Black Plan”’, which covered this contingency.

  On 14 September Kingsley Wood duly did so, though the tale he had to tell the Defence (Operations) Committee was not encouraging:

  A large proportion of the accommodation at one time earmarked in connection with the ‘BLACK’ plan had now been taken up for various purposes. This and other difficulties. . .made it practically impossible to revive. . . .

  It was generally agreed [recorded the Minutes] that the plan should not be revived but that the ‘Citadel’ accommodation available in London should be reviewed and arrangements made to ensure that the essential work of government departments could continue to be carried out in London.

  Soon afterwards the Prime Minister made his first, distinctly veiled, reference to the whole matter, in the House of Commons on 21 September:

  The speeches of the German leaders contain mysterious allusions to new methods and new weapons which will presently be tried against us. It would, of course, be natural for the enemy to spread such rumours in order to encourage his own people, but there is probably more in it than that.

  The danger of attack by pilotless aircraft was now increasingly dominating the secret-weapons scene and, despite all the evidence to the contrary, there was a tendency to assume that this must also be the ‘rocket weapon’ to which so many reports referred. Lord Cherwell in particular was determined to discredit belief in a separate long-range missile and on 15 September, after consulting Dr Crow, also a known sceptic in the matter, drafted a list of seventeen ‘loaded’ questions designed to be put to Dr Crow and three other leading scientists. The first was typical: ‘Could a range of 160 miles possibly be obtained with a single-stage rocket?’ The questionnaire purported, quite falsely, to have been drafted by Duncan Sandys and Herbert Morrison. When Cherwell sent this dubious document to Ian Jacob at the Cabinet Office, the latter, very properly, sent copies of it first to its two supposed authors, who had never seen it before. Morrison’s response is not clear, while Duncan Sandys neatly outmanoeuvred the Paymaster-General, proposing that if the questionnaire were put to anyone it should be to his own ‘Bodyline’ Scientific Committee, nineteen strong. Cherwell rejected this idea as ‘hardly . . . practical’ and when his questionnaire was not sent to its intended, and supposedly sympathetic, recipients, complained of ‘gross negligence to say the least’ within the Cabinet Office.

  Meanwhile the ‘prorocket’ party were also active. On 29 September 1943 the head of the Secret Intelligence Service, known as ‘C’, circulated a document entitled ‘German Long-Range Rocket. Report on Reliability of Evidence Collected’, which came in fact from the fertile and convincing pen of his scientific adviser, Dr Jones. The paper selected a number of ‘keystones’ in the case for the rocket’s existence, particularly the report from the ‘unusually well-placed’ source recently circulated by Duncan Sandys – the informant was, he now revealed, on ‘the staff of a high officer in the German Army Weapons Office’. D
r Jones first disposed of those twin nightmares of all intelligence officers, that they might become the victims of a hoax or a deliberate ‘plant’ of false evidence:

  For the rocket story to be a hoax, it is necessary to suppose that information . . . has been planted upon many of our secret sources and upon German prisoners of war, over a long time and in many places. In addition, the effort of building a fake establishment . . . would have been enormous and beyond human thoroughness. . . . If the rocket story is a complete hoax, it is the most consummate ever conceived. Such a hoax could only be played for a very important object.

  What could such an object be? ‘It has been suggested’, went on Dr Jones, ‘that long-range rockets are a cover for radio-controlled pilotless aircraft.’ But was this really likely?

  While looking for the one we should almost certainly stumble across the other. Supposing that we believe in the threat of a bombardment by pilotless aircraft, then those reports which mention both rockets and aircraft are confirmed by this belief. . . . Much of the critical evidence points to both weapons and it is at least plausible that while the German army is developing the one there is keen rivalry with the air force developing the other. . . . There are obvious technical objections which, based on our own experience, can be raised against the prospect of successful rockets, but it is not without precedent for the Germans to have succeeded while we doubted.

  Here was the stumbling block which so many eminent scientists found it hard to overcome, including some members of the ‘Bodyline’ Scientific Committee, reporting to Duncan Sandys, which included many outstanding physicists, among them the ‘father’ of British radar, Robert (later Sir Robert) Watson-Watt. To assist this large and imposing body, a smaller Fuel Panel was set up, on which sat Dr Crow, in whose judgement Lord Cherwell placed so much faith. By its third meeting, on 4 October, it had concluded that ‘the necessary range cannot be achieved by a single-stage rocket and that the possibility of such a development in Germany can be ruled out’. A multi-stage rocket, in which one missile lifted another into the sky, was also agreed to be impractical. A suggestion from the panel’s chairman, Sir Frank Smith, an electrical engineer, that it should consider the practicality of ‘a rocket with a range of one hundred miles or more and an explosive content of one ton’, as well as the 60 ton monster with the 10 ton warhead on which Cherwell had poured such scorn, was never really pursued. Even more strangely, the panel does not seem to have grasped the significance of the information provided by the country’s two leading authorities on liquid-fuelled rockets, Isaac Lubbock – a Cambridge-educated engineer employed by Shell International, who had successfully experimented, though only on a test stand, with a rocket motor burning high-octane petrol and liquid oxygen – and his assistant, Geoffrey Gollin. Lubbock was one of the scientists who had, as mentioned earlier, recently returned from America – he had in fact been summoned back by Gollin specifically as an expert in this area. With help from Duncan Sandys’ assistant, Colonel Kenneth Post, and other experts, he had immediately sketched out the possible design of a long-range rocket burning liquid fuel based on the photographs brought back from Peenemunde. Far from being welcomed by the scientists on the Fuel Panel, at its meeting on 11 October there were complaints that this new evidence had been introduced without warning. More attention was paid to a drawing prepared from the Peenemunde photographs. Dr Crow suggested that the torpedo-shaped objects seen there on heavy-duty wagons were obviously ‘inflated barrage balloons’ – prompting Colonel Post to ask, since they were being carried by rail, if they were heavier than air. The chairman summed up the opinion of the meeting as being that, ‘having seen the sketch submitted to us, we are of the opinion that it may be a rocket’, whereupon Lord Cherwell walked out.

  At Duncan Sandys’s request, Isaac Lubbock went on to prepare a more detailed blueprint for a long-range rocket, four-fifths of the weight of which would be fuel, very close to what the Germans had in fact achieved. Dr Crow considered such a missile impracticable, but eventually the ‘Bodyline’ Scientific Committee, of which the Fuel Panel was an offshoot, produced a compromise report. Twelve of its members, including Lubbock and Gollin, signed it. The report examined the possible range and warhead weight of both a solid-fuel multi-stage rocket and ‘a single-stage rocket using existing American technique for liquid jet motors’ and concluded that an improved version of the latter was possible and ‘that a rocket projectile . . . possessing the performance estimated . . . could have the dimensions of the object seen at Peenemünde’. Dr Crow agreed to the estimates concerning the solid-fuel rocket but added a dissenting note to the effect that he did not ‘consider the performance given’ in the two liquid-fuelled version ‘to be possible’. The two other members of the committee refused to sign the report at all. A majority of the committee, consisting of the best-qualified men in the country to consider the matter, had, however, decided that the rocket could be a reality and they also attempted an assessment of its accuracy:

  We consider it reasonable to assume that half the rounds fired would fall within a circle of about five miles radius round the Mean Point of Impact at a range of 100 to 130 miles. The dispersion would be proportionately greater at longer ranges.

  On 24 October 1943 this important report was circulated to members of the Defence Committee (Operations), which met on the evening of 25 October. Lord Cherwell’s was the rudest, and most dominant, voice heard that evening. Isaac Lubbock, who was present and who unquestionably knew far more about rockets than Cherwell, was dismissed to his face as a ‘thirdrate engineer’ whose views should be ignored, and Cherwell repeated his conviction that ‘At the end of the war, when we knew the full story, we should find that the rocket was a mare’s nest’. Churchill proved more open-minded. He asked the South African leader, Field Marshal Smuts, a former lawyer, who happened to be present, for his opinion. ‘The evidence’, replied Smuts, ‘may not be conclusive, but I think a jury would convict!’ The Prime Minister himself was clearly beginning to come round to the same opinion. That day he sent a private signal to President Roosevelt about the rocket. ‘Scientific opinion . . .’, he admitted, ‘is divided, but I am personally as yet unconvinced that they cannot be made.’

  Cherwell’s hostility to the rocket remained unrelenting, even when evidence was forthcoming of the very kind he had himself suggested should exist. When a number of German airmen who had actually been stationed at Peenemünde described seeing ‘very large, dark objects’ accompanied by a ‘flaming yellow mass’ rising slowly and almost vertically into the sky – just what he had argued that Swedish fishermen should be reporting – he ignored the information. Those witnesses who could not simply be disregarded he did his best to suborn and at midday on 28 October 1943, shortly before the meeting of the Defence Committee scheduled for 6.30 that evening, called a meeting in the Cabinet Offices in Great George Street of the ‘Cherwell Four’, the scientists to whom he had previously unsuccessfully tried to have his questionnaire submitted.

  The group was highly impressive. Beside that already unwavering opponent of the rocket, Dr Crow, it included a highly distinguished engineer, Sir Frank Smith, and two former Cambridge academics, both Fellows of the Royal Society, Professor Geoffrey Taylor and Professor Ralph (later Sir Ralph) Fowler, both authorities on the application of mathematics to ballistics and engineering. No doubt under pressure from Cherwell they now agreed, as Cherwell reported to Churchill’s meeting that evening, that ‘there were many formidable difficulties in the way of accepting the object photographed at Peenemünde as the long-range rocket, and that no adequate solution of these difficulties had yet been put forward’. At the same meeting, for good measure, Cherwell mustered a whole series of reasons to ‘prove’ to his non-scientific colleagues that the rocket was a technical impossibility. He doubted if ‘the ratio of two-thirds fuel to one-third weight in metal’, necessary if the rocket was to reach London, ‘was practicable since it was far in excess of anything our experts had been able to achieve’. Even
if some breakthrough in fuel had been made, he questioned whether ‘the metal of which the combustion chamber was made could withstand the very high temperatures which would be necessary’. It would be impossible for such a rocket to lift off under its own power, but a projector would ‘be very difficult to aim’ and would have to weigh 700 tons ‘in order to stand the force of recoil’. If launched, the rocket could not be kept on course, since ‘no gyroscopic method of control was likely to be effective’, while if kept on course it could do no damage, since ‘it would be extremely difficult to fit a warhead to the hemispherical nose’. ‘In view of the difficulties . . .’, the minutes recorded, ‘he did not agree that the object photographed at Peenemünde was, in fact, a long-range rocket.’

  Perhaps Cherwell had overstated his case. At all events the most prominent scientist present, the scientific adviser to the Army Council, Professor C. D. (later Sir Charles) Ellis, who had been first consulted as far back as April, now said flatly that ‘he believed in the possibility of the rocket’, while Isaac Lubbock bravely pointed out that ‘his calculations’ about the possible form a liquid-fuelled rocket might take ‘did not substantiate any of the criticisms made by Lord Cherwell’. The Prime Minister refused to come down firmly on one side or the other, but summed up that ‘unless it could be shown scientifically that a rocket was impossible we could hardly ignore the existence of unexplained facts’. He proposed to set up a special Committee of Inquiry to settle the matter once for all, starting work the following day, and invited Lord Cherwell to chair it, but the latter, affronted at having his opinions rejected, walked out, pleading a previous engagement for the time proposed. The job was then passed to Sir Stafford Cripps, who was asked to begin work at 9.30 the following morning.