Michael Neufeld - The Rocket and the Reich

The origins of the V-1 go back to the Paul Schmidt pulsejet experiments, which the Air Ministry and Army Ordnance had co-sponsored since 1935. By 1938, Dornberger was convinced that Schmidt was making too little progress toward a usable air-breathing propulsion system based on rapid, intermittent explosions. The work seemed of little interest to the Army anyway. In spite of those doubts, Ordnance did not actually withdraw its financial contribution until 1940. Meanwhile, the Luftwaffe had become convinced by 1939 that Schmidt was moving too slowly and asked an aircraft engine firm, Argus, to develop a pulsejet based on principles it outlined. Only later did Argus hear of Schmidt’s experiments, and its final engine incorporated only one element from the original inventor’s system. The Argus engine was tried out on aircraft in 1941–42, including a small fighter prototype, but its incredible noise and vibration made it virtually worthless for manned airplanes. (The characteristic sound of the engine later inspired the well-known Allied nickname, “the buzz bomb.”) 27

How that engine came to be linked to the flying bomb idea is not entirely clear. The concept of an unmanned, explosives-laden airplane that could automatically dive on its target was by no means new; experimental propeller-driven flying bombs had been tried but never deployed by the United States and Britain in World War I and later. A jet-propelled “aerial torpedo” had also been proposed independently by Hellmuth Walter and Paul Schmidt in 1934. Argus outlined a similar concept in 1939. At any rate, in a few months between March and June 1942, undoubtedly in response to the Army’s A-4, the Air Ministry pulled together a team to design what today would be called a cruise missile, based on the already available Argus pulse jet. Another factor was Hitler’s demand for vengeance following the Royal Air Force’s first effective night raids against civilian populations, beginning with the historic city of Lübeck at the end of March. Milch picked the small aircraft firm of Fieseler to design the missile, which received the official designation Fi 103 and the code-name “Cherry Stone.” On June 19, 1942, immediately after Milch had witnessed the first A-4 launch attempt, a conference in the Air Ministry formally gave the go-ahead to build “Cherry Stone” on a crash basis. 28

Given the ensuing interservice battle, most writers have pictured the Army-Luftwaffe relationship after 1942 as one of rivalry. But the story is actually much more complex and mirrors the larger relationship between the two services. From the day of its creation, the Luftwaffe had striven for independence from the Army, but as a primarily tactical air force it was closely tied to its parent service nonetheless. Thus we need to look at the other side of the story: the ongoing collaboration in rocketry. That is particularly important because 1941–42 was a transitional period that set the pattern for the rest of the war.

Despite the end of the formal interservice rocket-aircraft program in 1939–40, informal collaboration had continued and perhaps even increased, especially in guidance and control. Ernst Steinhoff, with his close relationship with the Luftwaffe, had cultivated his contacts in the Air Ministry out of both necessity and inclination. In the areas of guide beams, radio equipment, servomotors, and gyroscopes, the benefits of cooperative development and exchange of data were considerable. For the A-4’s guidance system, it was also a matter of life and death that the Luftwaffe collaborate if large numbers of gyros and vane motors were to be manufactured in firms like Siemens’s aircraft instruments division, now spun off as a subsidiary. Because those components were to be taken from regular aircraft manufacturing lines, and because Peenemünde needed Siemens’s mass production capability, Steinhoff had to and did secure the Air Ministry’s acquiescence in the fall of 1940 to ordering thousands of gyros and hydraulic servomotors. 29

In addition to guidance, another area of informal but intense Luftwaffe–Army collaboration was the daily operation of Peenemünde. Luftwaffe aircraft used for drop tests, guide beam experiments, and transportation flew from the airfield at Peenemünde-West. Among the pilots using the runway was Wernher von Braun, who was provided with a fast single-engine plane for business trips. In planning and building the housing settlement, the electrical power plant, and the new commuter train system, the Production Plant also had to coordinate its activities with the smaller Luftwaffe test center. According to Gerhard Reisig, head of the measurement group until 1943, interpersonal relations were cordial as well and were largely untouched by battles at higher levels. In the later war years, when the two competing long-range missiles were being launched, East and West cooperated in tracking them. 30

During the interlude from 1940 to 1942, however, the only formal interservice rocket project was the liquid-oxygen/alcohol takeoff-assist system. The Air Ministry had contracted with Army Ordnance in January 1939 to develop two egg-shaped pods, each containing a 1,000-kg-thrust motor, to be strapped under the wings of heavily loaded bombers. After burning for thirty seconds, the pods were to be dropped off and parachuted back to earth sufficiently undamaged for reuse. The Air Ministry imposed stringent requirements for safety and simplicity of function, since explosions or failures of one unit to ignite were clearly to be avoided at all costs. The first aircraft drop test was carried out at the end of August 1940, followed by dozens of experimental takeoffs from Peenemünde-West over the next year and a half. 31

But the project ran aground in the latter half of 1941, when the designated manufacturer, Schmidding, failed to produce the preliminary models of the mass production version. Instead, the company’s engineers redesigned the units according to their own ideas, encouraged by the responsible person in the Air Ministry Technical Office. That was precisely the sort of slipshod administration that had flourished in the office under the tenure of General Ernst Udet. The famous ace had been installed by Göring in 1936 in part to undercut Milch, whose administrative competence the “second man in the Reich” found threatening. In the end, Udet’s bungling of aircraft development and production led to his dramatic suicide. On November 17, 1941, Udet shot himself, “scrawling on the wall before he died that Göring had betrayed him to the Jews in the Air Ministry.” 32One week later, Wa Prüf 11 warned the Luftwaffe that Schmidding’s new version of the takeoff-assist system was dangerous and that much time had been lost. The following February the Army rocket group washed its hands of the whole affair and left it to Schmidding and the Air Ministry to decide which version would be produced. In fact, no liquid-oxygen systems ever saw active service with the Luftwaffe, which had more sensible but less powerful solid-propellant and hydrogen peroxide units anyway. 33

The failure of the takeoff-assist project was the low point of formal Army-Luftwaffe collaboration in rocketry. In 1942, however, an important new field of cooperation would open up: anti-aircraft missiles. The story of Wasserfall (“Waterfall”), the missile that became the second most important Army rocket project in the latter half of the war, had its origin in the spring of 1941. On May 7 of that year, Dornberger phoned Stegmaier and asked him to study the possibility of a liquid-propellant anti-aircraft missile with a maximum altitude of 15 to 18 kilometers (about 50,000–60,000 feet). 34

Using rockets to shoot down airplanes was an old idea and had been considered by the Ordnance group from the outset. But unguided solid-fuel rockets could never match the accuracy of anti-aircraft guns, the responsibility for defense against airplanes became the preserve of the Luftwaffe, and the Army’s liquid-fuel rocket program focused on the creation of an offensive weapon that might justify its exorbitant costs with “war-winning” results. It is therefore certain that Dornberger’s request originated in the Air Ministry. A few advocates inside the Luftwaffe had pushed the anti-aircraft missile repeatedly over the years, and Rheinmetall-Borsig, an artillery and munitions manufacturer with its own line of solid rockets, had made a proposal. In February 1941 the Inspector-General of Flak (anti-aircraft artillery) had called for missile development because of the failure of guns at night against British bombers. Probably in response to that call, Henschel Aircraft, a builder of rocket-assisted glide bombs, presented the Ministry with a missile proposal in June 1941. 35