Michael Neufeld - The Rocket and the Reich

Another irony of the airburst problem was that the A-4’s warhead often came down successfully, just as Dornberger had witnessed. Why then did the Army rocketeers devote so much effort to eliminating missile breakup? One reason is that they had so long emphasized the added explosive effect produced by the supersonic impact of the 4-ton rocket body that they were trapped by their own propaganda. While von Braun did indicate in early April 1944 that the best solution might be a separable nose cone, as became standard in postwar nuclear missiles, nothing ever came of his suggestion, in part because of earlier promises. But it is also true that it was rather late to introduce a major design change into the production process. 56

Because the warhead could not be separated, the danger that airbursts would cause it to explode forced the employment of a less sensitive fuse on operational A-4s (V-2s), at least until the airburst problem could be reduced. As artillery expert Adolf Hitler had pointed out to Wernher von Braun in July 1943, the A-4 needed a very sensitive fuse or it would penetrate too deeply before triggering and would “throw up a lot of dirt”—that is, explosive energy would be wasted. In the wake of the airbursts, that scenario came true, further reducing the military effectiveness of a weapon that made little sense to begin with. 57

How long the airburst problem actually delayed the operational debut of the A-4 is another question, but the delay does not appear to have been more than two or three extra months. The V-2 campaign began before Peenemünde had secured a significant reduction in the rate of airborne explosions; in any case, there were many other problems holding up deployment in the first half of 1944. The provision of a sufficient quantity of ground equipment for the mobile units proved to be a particular headache. After the Peenemünde raid, the modification and wiring of the special vehicles had been moved to unused railroad tunnels west of the Rhine. Because that facility was in a wine-producing region, it was code-named Rebstock (Grape Vine); because it was highly specialized and secret, it remained a branch of Peenemünde. By one account, a subcamp of the Natzweiler concentration camp was set up at Rebstock to supply slave labor for either construction or production. In any case, the special vehicles emerged more slowly than expected, probably because of manpower shortages, delays in finishing construction at Rebstock, and problems with parts production in the overstrained electrical sector. The result was further delays in the outfitting and training of the operational rocket units. 58

Of greatest import for lagging deployment, however, were the delays in A-4 production. The air raids set final assembly back four months; the fifty missiles shipped from Mittelwerk in January 1944 about equaled the likely output of the Peenemünde Production Plant in September. But the problems did not end there. The raid on the rocket center had destroyed the test models of the electrical and guidance devices, producing even more disruption in that sector. Moreover, the first few dozen A-4s produced underground proved to be so riddled with leaks, bad welds, poor connections, and faulty parts that they had to completely overhauled in the Peenemünde shops or at the DEMAG company’s Falkensee facility outside Berlin. DEMAG did the installation of electrical components and the final testing until Mittelwerk could take over those operations later in 1944. 59

The poor quality of the first production A-4s inevitably set off yet another crisis in the program, coinciding as it did with the rash of launch failures and airbursts. The new difficulties had their roots in old problems: a missile prematurely forced into mass production and a development organization ill-prepared for large-scale manufacturing. Months before, in early September 1943, von Braun had promised the Long-Range Bombardment Commission that “the development of the A-4 is practically concluded.” In November Degenkolb had made “bitter complaints” to Speer about statements of that sort from the “development people”—and not without reason. According to Rudolph, a complete parts list for the missile was unavailable until mid-1944. Moreover, the situation in component production remained confused well into that year. After the Peenemünde raid, all the principal sections of the missile were to be subcontracted to companies like Zeppelin, which would in turn manage the relevant component contracts. Whether that reorganization ever really functioned is doubtful, because it conflicted with the concentration of production at Mittelwerk as Allied air raids disrupted suppliers. But even at the outset of the move underground, shifting responsibility to subcontractors proved difficult, because it clashed with the “everything-under-one-roof” origins of the production program and the state of A-4 development. Von Braun’s engineers were accustomed to dealing directly with manufacturers and were forced to do so, because the immature state of the A-4’s technology and shortages of critical materials imposed constant alterations in the details of various components. 60

The result was poor-quality parts—at least until mid-1944—and ever changing specifications from Peenemünde. By the end of the war the center had issued about 65,000 changes to the A-4 blueprints, a number that seems high but was consistent with aircraft production. Few of the modifications touched the basic missile design. Although a standard “Series B” missile had been set down even before the air raid, in contrast to the Peenemünde-built test rockets, now designated “Series A,” the A-4’s gross configuration remained essentially that of 1941. Only in the case of guidance were there significant alterations. The two-gyro “Vertikant system” was unchanged in principle, even when Siemens gradually supplanted Anschütz as the main manufacturer, but Peenemünde had to alter its original plan to put radio cutoff and guide beam equipment on every missile. Difficulties in producing sufficient quantities of both systems and making them transportable by road, plus a growing concern with Allied electronic jamming in 1943–44, resulted in the guide beam’s being incorporated on only about 10 percent of Mittelwerk rockets, while the Müller-type gyro accelerometer became the dominant engine cutoff system. One by-product was a further reduction in missile accuracy and effectiveness. During the V-2 campaign, the average error was at least twenty times worse than Dornberger’s unrealistic 1936 goal of a less than a kilometer. 61

The blizzard of drawings and specifications changes therefore involved myriad details, but they were very important details if the A-4 was to ever to be a functional weapon. What the program needed, and what it got only after months of hard work in 1943–44, was a coherent process for incorporating design modifications into manufacturing. The first keystone was “Production Supervision,” an organization formed in Peenemünde before the raid and headquartered near Mittelwerk after May 1944. It assigned center engineers to companies to supervise the incorporation of changes and proved essential in straightening out the confusion. Another important innovation was the creation of a “Drawings Change Service” at the Baltic coast center, but it was not functioning until at least the spring of 1944. Finally, the engineers at Peenemünde and Mittelwerk agreed on the incorporation of changes in blocks of missiles at roughly the same time, thereby minimizing the chaotic intervention that had prevailed as a result of Peenemünde’s lack of manufacturing experience and the underdeveloped state of the missile. 62

There was one other important factor in the A-4 manufacturing crisis of 1944: the prisoners. Their murderous conditions during the winter, compounded by their lack of skill and experience, undoubtedly contributed to terrible workmanship in the first Mittelwerk missiles. Conversely, the improvement of their physical condition in the summer helped to make the factory function more efficiently. While six thousand prisoners died or were transported to certain death in the first seven months of operation, from April to October 1944 the toll declined to about a thousand in Dora and the other subcamps that had been created, mostly to provide a labor supply for Kammler’s Fighter Staff underground projects. Conditions at the new camps, notably Ellrich and Harzungen, approached Dora at its horrifying worst, while the original camp became much better. The walkways and roll call square were paved, the barracks were finished, and a number of amenities were completed, such as a cinema and a sports field. Those latter facilities were reserved, however, for the Kapos, block captains, and other privileged inmates. In August Dora recorded 52 deaths, less than 7 percent of the 767 dead in March. The lower rate was gained to some extent by dumping weak prisoners on the other camps, but it was mostly a product of the evacuation of the “sleeping tunnels,” the end of mining operations in the main plant, the summer weather, and an improvement in the food supply. 63