Michael Neufeld - The Rocket and the Reich

That night, at the gala celebration in the Officers’ Club, Dornberger delivered a moving speech in which he stated that “the space ship is born.” In his A-4 rhetoric he was never modest in equating the rocket to the wheel, the steam engine, and the airplane as a fundamental new invention in transportation, nor did he shrink from saying that it opened the road to spaceflight. In assigning to the missile this elevated historical role, he was not far from the truth. But Dornberger probably also spoke of the A-4 as the weapon that might change the course of the war for the Third Reich. There is little doubt of his enthusiasm for Hitler and the system, nor can his exaggerated view of the missile’s military impact be denied. In any case, he did say one thing that was incontestable: Peenemünde’s troubles were not over—they were just beginning. It was not enough to have the key technologies in hand, or even to get them to work together once. The rocket group must “launch, launch, launch.” It also must secure Hitler’s approval and find a way to turn its “flying laboratory” into a mass production weapon. If it accomplished those latter objectives, however, the program would become an even more valuable political property. In the wings, the power brokers were gathering. 65

Dornberger was not slow to exploit the October 3, 1942, success. Within a day or two, he and General Leeb were in Speer’s office reporting on the flight and requesting approval for mass production. On the eighth, the chief of Wa Prüf 11 put into circulation a propaganda document laying out the details of the launch and explaining the manufacturing plans for the A-4. Apparently he and Army Ordnance did not have the slightest hesitation about charging ahead before the V4’s feat could be duplicated. But experience would prove to be a bitter teacher. V5 would at least be a partial success, going 147 kilometers on October 21. The next four launches, from November to early January, would be complete and utter failures. 1

The joy that Dornberger felt after October 3 was not, however, completely unsullied. On the ninth he asked Wernher von Braun to report within a week on the Luftwaffe’s “Cherry Stone” (V-1) project. According to Dornberger’s memorandum:

Lately there have been many remarks from government offices, firms, etc., that the A-4 program no longer possesses the importance ascribed to it by the people who work on it. In that connection, confidential hints have been made that “Cherry Stone”… is far more valuable and has every chance of catching up and passing the A-4 program, if not making it altogether illusory.

The A-4 obviously had its enemies and skeptics in the air force and elsewhere. Von Braun was soon able to reassure Dornberger, however, that the poor accuracy and shorter range of the cruise missile made it less than competitive with the ballistic missile, although it had every chance of being a success. Dornberger reported those conclusions to Leeb but expressed his amazement at the Luftwaffe’s ability to initiate a competing program in apparent secrecy from a sister service. 2In view of the many priority battles the Army rocket program had already endured, this evidence of growing interservice rivalry was certainly a disquieting sign. But just as von Braun surmised, the V-1 would never prove a decisive threat to the survival of the A-4 project, although it did at times worry Dornberger.

Meanwhile, V4’s result and Dornberger’s demands for an acceleration of the launch schedule forced Peenemünde to concentrate even more decisively on getting the A-4 into production. “Special Program S,” issued on October 10 by Development Works chief Stegmaier, suspended all activity on most other research projects, most notably the A-9 glider missile and its subscale version, the A-7. Only two engineless, drop-test versions of the A-7 were to be finished, and only because they were subject to corrosion. (They were soon glide-tested, with mediocre results.) Ten people from Ludwig Roth’s small Projects Office, that embodiment of the rocket group’s “most cherished desires and hopes for the future” (Dornberger), were to be sent to other divisions. In line with the new interservice program approved by Göring in September, Roth’s roughly thirty remaining staff members were to draw up plans for anti-aircraft missiles. It would take time for the Air Ministry to mobilize people and resources for those projects, however, so the application of rocket technology to air defense remained only a minor distraction for von Braun’s group in the winter of 1942–43. 3

Although the Wasserfall anti-aircraft missile eventually became Peenemünde’s second major development project, the crash status of the A-4 program was clearly transforming the center into an organization predominantly concerned with missile production. Until December 1942 the transformation occurred with little outside intervention, because of Dornberger’s clout and because of the remnants of the Army’s autonomy within the Nazi system. However, once Albert Speer gained Hitler’s approval for the full-scale manufacture of the A-4, he was no longer satisfied with a limited role. More ominously, Reichsführer-SS Heinrich Himmler began to take an interest in the A-4 as well. As in the war economy as a whole, Army Ordnance’s power over Peenemünde began to decline as first the Armaments Ministry and then the SS began to intrude into its domain. By the summer of 1943 Himmler’s blackshirts had made their presence felt through the supply of concentration camp labor and through the infiltration of agents, but it was Speer and his managers who had come to dominate the organization of A-4 production. As a result, the Army center at Peenemünde reached the apogee of its institutional growth in August 1943, but it had already lost much of its autonomy. The Third Reich’s “muscle men,” to use von Braun’s later term, now set the tone. The first and foremost of these was Speer’s designated commissioner for the missile program, Gerhard Degenkolb. 4

For Albert Speer to extend his power over the A-4, he first had to secure the Führer’s long-sought approval for mass production. Hitler’s attitude toward the ballistic missile in 1942 had been frustrating to its advocates. After having embraced the A-4 so enthusiastically in August 1941, he had again become moody about it. He continued to refuse a production order, although he did nothing to slow down the rate of its development. In June, after hearing Speer’s report on the first launch attempt, he expressed his skepticism about the A-4’s guidance. The Führer’s reaction to October 3 was more positive but still not entirely satisfactory. In Speer’s official minutes, Hitler is described as agreeing that the parallel development of the A-4 and “Cherry Stone” was a “valuable” suggestion, but the ballistic missile “only makes sense if 5,000 projectiles are available simultaneously for an initial mass attack.” That absurd comment again demonstrated Hitler’s failure to understand that the A-4 was not a simple projectile that could be manufactured and fired in huge quantities. When von Braun examined the mass attack in December, he could foresee only a one-time maximum effort of 108 operational launches in twenty-four hours—and a normal rate of twenty-seven a day. 5

The next time Speer presented the issue to Hitler, something had changed. According to the meeting minutes of November 22—three days after the Soviets launched their Stalingrad offensive and two weeks after the western Allies landed in north Africa—“the Führer takes a great interest in A-4 production planning and believes that, if the necessary numbers can be produced promptly, one can make a very strong impression on England with this weapon.” Apparently, in his search for ways to reverse the rapidly deteriorating strategic situation and to exact “vengeance” on Britain for the RAF’s “terror raids” against Germany, he had overcome many of his well-founded reservations about the impact of a small number of missiles on British morale. 6