Michael Neufeld - The Rocket and the Reich

Attending that day was a powerful delegation of observers: Speer, Milch, General Fromm, General Leeb, and his Navy counterpart, Admiral Witzell, along with many others. Tension and excitement ran high, as the Nazi armaments elite, Dornberger, and the center leadership waited for the first launch from Peenemünde itself. The visitors, who were perched on the roofs of the main buildings, must also have been stunned by the mere sight of the world’s first large rocket, just as Dieter Huzel would be in the summer of 1943. Finally it lifted off, but it disappeared into low-hanging clouds only 80 meters above the ground. (It is possible that the launch was rushed because the presence of the VIPs.) The vehicle made it through Mach 1, but soon thereafter its battery failed and the engine quit because of the missile’s rapid rolling, which began immediately after launch. The A-4/V2 was next sighted falling through the clouds tumbling, with no visible fins. It crashed into the sea only 600 meters (less than half a mile) from the shore. 57

That disappointing result seems not to have discouraged those in attendance. In the high-level meeting that took place afterward, Albert Speer announced his intention to give the A-4 the newly created superpriority rating of “DE” (the German initials for “urgent development”). The Armaments Minister also promised Dornberger help in acquiring more manpower, as did Erhard Milch, who said he would provide some designers and production planners from the aircraft industry. But Milch was being somewhat two-faced, for he announced in the same breath the Luftwaffe’s “Cherry Stone” missile based on the Argus pulsejet. 58

At the meeting Dornberger also requested Speer’s help in finding a director for a Production Planning Directorate, which von Braun had suggested as a way to get the problem-plagued transition to manufacturing moving again. Almost a month later the Armaments Ministry nominated Detmar Stahlknecht, an engineering manager with experience in the quantity production of aircraft. The task of Stahlknecht’s Directorate was to produce a new set of production drawings and to organize the manufacture of parts and subassemblies. At the end of the summer Walter “Papa” Riedel was placed under Stahlknecht’s command to supervise the creation of the drawings. The design bureau chief was replaced in his former job by an energetic diploma engineer who, by an odd coincidence, had a virtually identical name. Walther Riedel had worked on alternate 25-ton engine designs at the Technical Universities of Dresden and Berlin. 59

Speer’s support made him an indispensable ally in the Führer’s personal entourage, but Dornberger continued to view the Minister’s role as one of giving advice and setting overall priorities, while the details of A-4 production remained in the hands of Army Ordnance. Following the Führer’s request to Speer to study the manufacture of 3,000 missiles a month, Dornberger had concluded, in April discussions with Ministry officials, that 1,000 per month might be feasible, if more liquid oxygen plants were built and if the ethanol fuel, which was produced by fermenting potatoes, was diluted with methanol, at the cost of a slight loss of performance. Under pressure to produce a launch success, however, he and the Peenemünders pushed that rather optimistic manufacturing goal into the background as the responsibility of the Production Planning Directorate and the Ordnance A-4 Working Committee. Speer himself did not intervene during the spring and summer of 1942, presumably because he saw that the time was not yet ripe. What was needed to secure Hitler’s go-ahead was a demonstration that the rocket actually worked. As a way of pushing the rocket group, in August Speer formally approved a “DE” rating, but for the completion of twenty test missiles only. 60

It nonetheless took time to analyze the failure of the A-4/V2 and to modify the V3 for firing. The problem was soon traced to a roll-rate gyro malfunction, which occurred immediately after the June launch. Wind may have contributed to the problem by rolling the vehicle faster than the guidance system’s ability to compensate, just as in the case of the A-3s. Von Braun’s group decided that the best solution was to incorporate a version of Helmut Hoelzer’s electronic “mixing device” and to eliminate the rate gyros altogether, as had been planned for the later “test series” missiles. That change added two more weeks to the schedule. Also eating up time were other alterations to the A-4/V3 to increase the vehicle’s control over the roll axis. 61

Finally, on August 16, 1942, the second launch attempt was made—this time for a more restricted audience. Shortly after noon, the missile lifted off in conditions of much better visibility. Once again, awesome rumbling filled the sky and hope skyrocketed with the V3’s flight. The black-and-white markings on the missile showed that it did not roll. For the first forty-five seconds, things appeared to go very well, but at a speed of 2,345 kilometers per hour (about Mach 2) the engine suddenly stopped. (Full burn time for an A-4 was about a minute.) As a result, the control system was no longer effective, since the jet vanes could not exert any force when the engine was off. At that point the atmosphere was still sufficiently dense to overpower the vehicle’s marginal stability. The rocket began to veer away from the direction of flight, its nose was ripped off by aerodynamic forces, and flames erupted from both ends. The fins came off, and what was left of the vehicle tumbled into the Baltic 8.7 kilometers from the launch site. Postflight analysis suggested that acceleration had slowed abnormally after thirty-seven seconds and then the engine had stopped altogether because of a failure of the steam generator or turbopump. Unfortunately, the new telemetry system for radioing data to the ground had quit only four seconds after launch, leaving ground-based movie film as the only evidence. 62

That flight was an improvement over the first, but a new round of modifications to the next flight vehicle, the A-4/V4, was necessary, including strengthening the nose. (Dornberger’s plan to launch the V7 first had been dropped in the meantime as holding up the schedule yet further.) It was not until the end of September that the missile was ready to be launched. On the eve of the next attempt, the chief of Wa Prüf 11 sent a memorandum to Peenemünde summarizing in dramatic terms what was at stake:

After presentations to the Reich Minister for Armaments and Munitions [Speer], the Chief of Army Armaments and the Commander of the Replacement Army [Fromm], and the Chief of Ordnance [Leeb], the situation for HAP [Peenemünde-East] is, at the moment, the following:

1) the Führer does not believe in the success of the guidance system and therefore in its ability to achieve the desired accuracy,

2) the Reich Minister… doubts our success. He is supported in his opinion by Hauptamtsleiter Sauer [Karl Otto Saur, Speer’s deputy] and Field Marshal Milch,

3) [General Fromm] has lost trust in our ability to meet our deadlines because, at the end of 1942, we still have not achieved a long-range shot, [and]

4) the Chief of Army Ordnance is beginning to doubt our word.

Dornberger went on to outline a number of specific measures for speeding up operations, with the overall goal of “launch, launch, launch.” He wanted all twenty first-priority missiles fired by December 31(!). As a means to that end, he asked the management and labor force of Peenemünde to work long hours, seven days a week, and to push all other projects into the background. 63

Weather and other problems delayed the next launch a few more days. Finally, on October 3, at two minutes before four in the afternoon, the A-4/V4 lifted off and arced out over the Baltic on a perfect fall day. The rocket, which carried on its side a Woman in the Moon logo, continued straight on its course until all that was visible was a glowing dot at the end of a white exhaust contrail. When the shifting winds at high altitude turned the contrail into a zig-zag of “frozen lightning,” many thought that the missile had gone awry. Nonetheless, it continued unperturbed, and at fifty-eight seconds the engine made a normal, if slightly early, cutoff. On the roof of the guidance division’s Measurement House, Dornberger and Zanssen wept and hugged each other with joy. As the measurement tone whined over the loudspeakers in the background, conveying in audible form the Doppler tracking of the rocket’s velocity, the two rushed down to meet the launch crew celebrating at the Test Stand. Just before the five-minute mark, the tone suddenly stopped. A-4/V4 had smashed into the sea about 190 kilometers (120 miles) away, after brushing the edge of space at an altitude of nearly 80 kilometers (fifty miles). All world records for altitude and velocity had been obliterated. It was a marvelous achievement and—as subsequent failures would show—also a lucky one. 64