Norman Longmate - Hitler's Rockets

Word of the forthcoming test had spread, and it had become a matter of prestige to be present, as well as one of genuine scientific curiosity:

In the end about one hundred and twenty men of science and engineers had assembled. Anyone connected in any way with our rocket wanted to be there. We had had to set a limit to the number, but… when I finally came to check the list I found that the telephone operators were doctors of physics and mathematics, the M. T. drivers qualified engineers, and the kitchen staff made up of designers and experts in aerodynamics. Even the humblest posts were occupied by technicians or enthusiastic executives…. Then it started raining. The rain poured down and the wind rose. It whistled over the island from the north, whipped the bare branches of the stunted trees and blew through the window crevices of the houses. It tore up the tent. It hurled gigantic waves against the island and thunderous breakers dashed over the stone walls of the harbour. The cold became intense. The bad weather forced us to postpone operations. But it went as quickly as it had come. The sky grew clear and the wind blew steadily from the east. The weather forecast sounded favourable. We made final preparations…. We now had to work fast. The rocket would have to be launched before winter storms set in and the Baltic froze between the islet and the mainland. We baptized our missiles with liquid oxygen. Then at last we were ready for them. One of the chests was carefully hauled out of the tent and on to the platform. After the top and bottom had been removed the box was pushed against the overturned four-legged firing table and set upon it by means of a block and tackle…. Scaffolding protected by awnings gave access to the parts of the rocket which had to be serviced before launching. The checking began, but we were held up again and again by short circuits, insulating difficulties, trouble with the control gear, the reducing valve and the fuel valves…. The specialist engineers toiled, fetched missing spare parts from the mainland and checked over connections…. At last we were able to fix a time for the first launching. The ferry-boat delivered liquid oxygen. The rocket was tanked up and the control gear given current. The working scaffolding was taken down…. The rocket now stood in the vertical position on the firing table. Its slender, gleaming body in its aluminium skin was some 21 feet long, with a diameter of nearly 3 feet.

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.