Michael Neufeld - The Rocket and the Reich

That memorandum included a novel argument for the ballistic missile. It is the first extant Ordnance document that clearly advances a terror bombing rationale for the A-4, which corresponds to Dornberger’s own recollection that he began to think in those terms only after the Luftwaffe’s costly losses over Britain in 1940–41. He now presented the missile as “significant relief for the employment of aircraft against England, and especially London and the port cities.” The lack of any “means of defense,” the “accuracy” of the missile, and the ability to launch “day and night at irregular times and regardless of weather” would make it a particularly effective contribution to “the defeat of England.” The obvious implication was that it would be employed as a psychological weapon against civilian populations. 3

Although von Brauchitsch must have been preoccupied with the huge battles then unfolding in the East, he accepted the gravity of the threat to Peenemünde and appreciated the new rationale for the missile as well. Interservice rivalry further contributed to the Commander-in-Chief’s sense of urgency on this issue. Already disturbed at the favor shown to the Luftwaffe in the “redirection” orders, von Brauchitsch no doubt learned of Ordnance’s paranoid reaction to an expression of interest in the rocket program by the air force, after Air Ministry officials visited Peenemünde in mid-June to investigate new joint projects in anti-aircraft defense. The Commander-in-Chief immediately began looking for an opportunity to make a presentation to Hitler. Reaching the Führer could fend off threats from both Todt and Göring, while simultaneously giving the Army a bigger role in the defeat of Britain. 4

For most of July to September, the priority struggle proceeded on two unconnected levels. In one, Todt became ever more threatening in his tone, while demanding cutbacks in what he now saw as an extravagantly built production facility at Peenemünde. In a tart July 30 letter to General Fromm, who stood between Leeb and von Brauchitsch in the chain of command, he complained:

In Peenemünde they are building a paradise. The housing, the social provisions, the clubs and apartments, the warehouses and factory halls, all present the highest amount of expenditure one could possibly imagine. I am convinced that the 5,500 construction workers [there] are quite sufficient to carry out a far larger program in a relatively shorter time, if one were only to build in a manner appropriate to the achievement of a wartime objective.

As a means to that end, he demanded that rough wooden barracks-style construction be applied as much as possible, in line with the guidelines he had issued earlier in the month. That prospect particularly distressed Schubert, the head of the Production Plant, who had laid out the factory in peacetime as a model manufacturing facility. 5

Even before the Armaments Minister had made those demands, von Brauchitsch prepared to make an end run around Todt. He decided that the Führer would be more likely to take an interest in the rocket program if his protégé, Dornberger, were to visit headquarters. On July 31, one day before the chief of Wa Prüf 11 had a chance to see Todt’s letter, Dornberger drafted a memorandum for presentation to Hitler. On von Brauchitsch’s order, he avoided complaining about the previous troubles of Peenemünde. Instead, he emphasized that the A-4 could, “in addition to the material damage, have a particularly large impact on morale, even when air superiority is no longer present.” Dornberger also discussed joint projects with the Luftwaffe, a winged A-4 (the A-9) for longer ranges, and a two-stage missile to hit the United States. 6

A possible design for an “America rocket” (in modern terminology, an intercontinental ballistic missile or ICBM) had emerged during the preceding year in the studies of the center’s Projects Office. That division, headed by Ludwig Roth, had investigated placing the A-9 on top of the proposed 100-metric-ton-thrust A-10. To reach the United States, however, it would be necessary to increase the A-10’s power almost twofold to 180 tons (about 400,000 lbs of thrust), and even then the A-9 would be only marginally able to hit East Coast cities after a hypersonic glide. The concept was actually far beyond Peenemünde’s technological grasp: The guidance requirements were too extreme, the aerodynamics were unknown, and the materials did not yet exist to prevent the upper stage from burning up during reentry into the atmosphere. But the idea appealed to the vivid imaginations of von Braun and his engineers. It also provided Dornberger and the Army with another weapon against Luftwaffe competition, since the idea of hitting America undoubtedly appealed to the Nazi leadership at that time. Confidence in the imminent defeat of the Soviet Union was high, while worry about the possible entry of the United States into the war was rising; the Luftwaffe had its own plans for a bomber that could fly to America and back. 7

After a wait of nearly three weeks, the Army Commander-in-Chief’s campaign finally paid off. On August 20, 1941, Dornberger, von Braun, and Steinhoff met the Führer at his Wolfsschanze (“Wolf’s Lair”) headquarters in East Prussia. Also present were Fromm and the head of the OKW, Field Marshal Keitel, but von Brauchitsch was absent. Dornberger began by showing a propaganda movie that included footage of the A-2 and A-3, the construction of Peenemünde, launches of the A-5, and rocket-plane and rocket-assisted takeoff experiments. The film, which had been made in October 1940, ended with an ominous warning about foreign competition. The rocket program’s chief followed with a lecture in line with his script. According to his August 21 memorandum—the only existing account of the meeting—the Führer said that “this development is of revolutionary importance for the conduct of warfare in the whole world. The deployment of a few thousand devices per year is therefore unwise. If it is deployed, hundreds of thousands of devices per year must be manufactured and launched.” The “if” was significant; in spite of Hitler’s newfound enthusiasm for the A-4, he continued to withhold a mass production order until the outcome of its development was known. 8

The Führer’s comments were an interesting mixture of perceptiveness and absurdity. In the long run the ballistic missile was a revolutionary weapon, just as its advocates had been saying since the early 1930s, but not in the limited, conventionally armed form of the A-4. The Germans seem not to have made the connection between atomic weapons and the missile, because their nuclear project never proceeded much beyond preliminary reactor experiments and theoretical studies of a bomb. In any case, by early 1942 the German leadership decided that the gigantic industrial effort required for an atomic weapon was not feasible during the war. (The bombs later produced by the Manhattan Project weighed more than 4 metric tons—too heavy for an A-4.) Although Hitler never understood the concept of nuclear weapons, he appears to have correctly perceived, on August 20 at least, the minimal strategic impact of small numbers of A-4s, so he asked for hundreds of thousands. But the raw materials and manufacturing capacity needed to fulfill that demand made it absurd. Despite Hitler’s often masterful command of the details of weaponry, he had once again demonstrated his inability to comprehend the liquid-fuel missile. He saw it as merely a big artillery shell, bearing out Speer’s observation that the Führer was comfortable only with World War I technology. 9

Notwithstanding Hitler’s faulty understanding of the missile and his refusal to issue a mass production order, von Brauchitsch’s carefully planned effort to bypass Todt and outflank Göring was clearly a big success for the Army. Keitel approved the promotion of the production facility to first priority (“SS”), the same as development. The whole center was provided with the further protection of being included among the “special enterprises,” a category invented in 1941 to introduce more gradation into a poorly differentiated priority system. To cement the factory’s new status, Ordnance merged it into one center with what was now officially called the “Development Works.” The acting Commander, Major Gerhard Stegmaier, assumed the same title over the whole center, while remaining the military head of the development side. (Peenemünde’s Commander, Colonel Leo Zanssen, was absent from mid-1941 until April 1942, leading a solid-fuel rocket battery on the Eastern Front.) Schubert’s factory was renamed the “Pilot Production Plant,” with the task of pioneering large-scale manufacturing for later transfer to industry. 10