Michael Neufeld - The Rocket and the Reich

In the aftermath of this decision, the Air Ministry followed its usual philosophy of competition by initiating programs at Henschel, Rheinmetall, and Army Ordnance, which fragmented its overstretched research and development capability even further. As for the Army, Peenemünde-East was promised Luftwaffe personnel to develop both a smaller solid-fuel rocket and a large nitric acid-fueled one (the later Wasserfall). It was a significant new commitment to Army-Luftwaffe collaboration and one that would overshadow the rocket-aircraft program of the 1930s in scale. Thus, while the two services would compete in long-range missiles between 1942 and 1945, they would simultaneously cooperate in anti-aircraft missiles. For Dornberger’s rocket engineers, however, the amount of time spent on formal interservice projects was still minor in 1941–42. During that period, and to a large extent thereafter, one problem dominated all others: getting the A-4 to work and getting it into production.

Until the fall of 1941, the schedule for launching the world’s first ballistic missile remained hypothetical, with the result that it was highly politicized and highly optimistic. During the struggle to win Hitler’s favor that summer, Dornberger was still promising to complete the development of the A-4 by the end of 1941 and to begin firing on Britain in the second half of 1942. By October he was telling the Army General Staff that the first launch would come “at the latest in January,” the completion of development no sooner than the autumn of 1942, and military deployment “is not to be expected before the end of 1942”—in other words, 1943. At the beginning of November his technical people in Peenemünde were estimating the first launch no sooner than mid-February; by January it had slipped to March. 43

At least three things were going on here. First, Dornberger was confident of greater political support and may have felt less need to exaggerate, although his behavior from beginning to end fits a classical pattern of the military-industrial complex: schedule and performance predictions that were overly optimistic, if not actually dishonest. The second factor in the lengthening schedules was the increased emphasis on mass production, with the accompanying A-4 “test series” of six hundred. The purpose of that series was above all to determine statistically, in good artilleryman’s fashion, a “firing table” that would allow launch crews to set the guidance system for a specified target. Firing hundreds of rockets would naturally take some time, even if the project coincided with some of the preparations for deployment. Most important was the third factor: coming to terms with the enormous difficulty of making a radically new technology work reliably. Even the relatively routine A-5 launch operations on the Greifswalder Oie did not adequately prepare the rocket group for the quantum leap in performance the A-4 promised and demanded.

The extent of the delays became apparent only after the first missiles reached the test stands. The initial static-test model, “Injection Aggregate 1,” was hand-built in Peenemünde’s workshops and then moved to Test Stand V in October 1940 for completion. It remained there for the entire first half of 1941. Welding problems and inexperience were part of the problem, but the basic difficulty was creating a reliable and workable system of valves, controls, and switches for the engine assembly. If the eighteen-pot engine was a “plumber’s nightmare,” the brand-new steam generator–turbopump system that moved the propellants from the tanks to the injectors was no less so. (The A-5 still used nitrogen gas pressurization to empty the tanks.) Unless care was taken in the design and installation process, fires and explosions could be triggered in any number of ways, for example, by leaky lines or by propellants reaching the combustion chamber before ignition in the wrong quantities and with the wrong timing. Riedel’s design bureau, working with Thiel’s propulsion group, created at least two valve systems and tried them on Injection Aggregate 1 and its successors by running the fuels through without igniting them. Not until the summer of 1941 were the second and third static-test A-4s finished, and only in late September was the engine actually fired on the first one. 44

Those difficulties were harbingers of worse to come. On October 21 at the A-4 launch site (Test Stand VII) and on November 5 at the engine test stand (I), two missiles exploded. The first caused significant damage to the facilities; two days after the second, Dornberger sent a blistering and revealing memorandum to Peenemünde. He called the leading managers of the center “irresponsible” for leaving “young, inexperienced test engineers with the leadership of tests” on new rockets, especially “in the present life-and-death situation for HVP [Peenemünde-East].” He demanded that von Braun, Thiel, or “Papa” Riedel be present for the first thirty experiments on each vehicle. He reproached them as well for traveling the country trying to arrange mass-production contracts singlehandedly, for indulging in “futuristic dreams,” and for engaging in endless negotiations with the Air Ministry over the Interceptor and anti-aircraft missiles. Until the air force had made up its mind as to what it wanted and supplied the manpower needed, “these totally useless meetings over future hopes will cease and you gentlemen will alone concentrate on the development of the A-4.” 45

Dornberger was annoyed about more than the Luftwaffe discussions. The summer and fall of 1941 was the apogee of planning at Peenemünde for the A-9/A-10 ICBM and, on the margins, for even more exotic possibilities like a manned A-9 and the employment of atomic reactors for rocket propulsion. A small contract to study the latter possibility was given in 1942 to the Research Institute of the Reich Post Ministry, notwithstanding Dornberger’s admonition. Those dreams did not divert many resources from the main task, but they were in line with the character of Wernher von Braun, who, in the words of Dornberger, “reveled in any project that promised to be on a gigantic scale, and, usually, in the distant future. I had to brake him back to hard facts and the everyday.” 46

From late 1941 until late 1942, Dornberger had to do a lot of “braking” in order to concentrate all of the energies of von Braun and his group on the A-4, its production, and the most important follow-on projects. Only six days after his fiery memorandum, Dornberger sent another to Peenemünde, indicating that he had had an argument with von Braun about whether the A-8 or the A-9 should be the next missile. The chief of Wa Prüf 11 ordered a concentration on the A-8, because he felt that developing its nitric acid-oil propulsion system was more feasible than building the glider missile. Much was uncertain about the A-9’s aerodynamics and guidance, yet the leading Peenemünde engineers seemed to prefer the A-9 because it was a more interesting problem. But Dornberger could not make his order stick; some A-9 research continued, as did the design of the A-7, an A-5 with wings that was to serve as a test vehicle for the glider missile concept. 47

Just before Christmas Dornberger sent another memorandum to the leadership of Peenemünde, this time appealing for the concentration of all efforts on launching the first A-4 by the end of February 1942. He also lectured them on the slowness with which scarce materials were being eliminated from various components of the production version. Ever since the audience with Hitler and the mass production planning of the fall, that problem had become urgent because of the severe shortages of many metals, especially aluminum. Dornberger’s demand for a quick changeover, however, was rather unreasonable. The task facing von Braun’s engineers—making the A-4 fly, even though its exotic technology was suffering from innumerable and inevitable “childhood diseases”—was daunting enough without the redesign in steel of critical components like the engine and the turbopump. For anything that came into contact with super-cold liquid oxygen, the change proved extremely difficult because of the brittleness of steel at cryogenic temperatures. Imposing that challenge on top of the one of creating a mass produced ballistic missile threatened to make the design process chaotic. 48