Michael Neufeld - The Rocket and the Reich

Just as the increasingly disastrous war made the political atmosphere at Peenemünde touchier, so too did it make daily life more of a struggle. During the summer of 1944 three successive daylight American heavy bomber raids (on July 18, August 2, and August 25) inflicted extensive damage on Test Stands VII (the original A-4 launch site) and XI (the former Production Plant test stand used for calibrating mass production engines). Peenemünde-West was also attacked for the first time. On the Army side, a few dozen people were killed, but the dispersion of the preceding year had worked; those raids failed to have any lasting impact on the way the facility operated. Nevetheless, the attacks, along with the repeated air raid alarms that occurred throughout the period, slowed development and testing. 19

The state of the war created numerous other difficulties too. The Allied bomber offensive made gasoline hard to obtain; travel became problematic even between the dispersed facilities of Electromechanical Industries. Liquid oxygen and many other materials became increasingly difficult to acquire as well. For the staff of Peenemünde, rationing became ever tighter in the fall of 1944, while work hours became even longer. In September the sixty-hour week was officially introduced for all employees. Finally, the country’s manpower crisis created relentless pressure from the draft authorities to cancel previous exemptions, plus pressure from the Mittelwerk to transfer more workers and managers, which eventually resulted in a nasty feud between the two companies. By January 1, 1945, Electromechanical Industries had shrunk to 4,325 Germans, a loss of more than 10 percent of its staff in less than five months. 20

In circumstances of decreased efficiency and labor shortages, it is not surprising that the technical work of the center suffered. But development at Peenemünde was distorted even more by the demands of the increasingly catastrophic military situation.

In the first six months of Electromechanical Industries’ brief existence, most of its development work fell into two categories: regular projects that suffered only limited eleventh-hour intervention and true desperation projects that expressed the Third Reich’s growing flight from reality. But the best example of the distorting effects of the military emergency was a project that fell between the two: the A-9 or A-4b, as the missile was renamed in October to take advantage of the A-4’s high-priority ratings. On the one hand, the revival of the winged A-4 was merely a continuation of research halted in October 1942 to concentrate resources on A-4 production and Wasserfall development. On the other hand, as the A-4b, the glider missile began to function primarily as a further justification for the existence of von Braun’s engineering team, which was threatened by draft callups and pressure from Kammler for instant results. Improvisation and desperation marred work on the A-4b, which had to be rushed to the launch pad as soon as was feasible.

The A-9 project was first revived in mid-June 1944 on a very small scale. Probably as a result of Air Ministry pressure, Ludwig Roth was ordered to hand over his remaining Luftwaffe people to the Wasserfall detail design group run by the Flak Experimental Center. With the four staff members he had left under his direct supervision, he was to restart work on the A-9. Passing references in documents from the intervening years show that this missile had always been regarded as the next project in the series, presumably because it promised a relatively low-cost way to increase range. The fact that a decline in A-4 development work was on the horizon may also have been a factor in the A-9 decision. Roth immediately complained to von Braun that he could not make worthwile progress with so few people. To make matters worse, Hermann’s aerodynamics group was unavailable until October, as it was completing the reconstruction of its wind tunnels in the Bavarian Alps. Nothing much could be done about those problems, however, except for writing a couple of contracts with universities to make trajectory calculations. As a result, the A-9 project moved very slowly in the summer of 1944. 21

Only after the German position in France collapsed in August did Kammler begin to pressure Peenemünde to find urgent ways to extend the A-4’s range. Fortunately for the missile batteries and unfortunately for London, the Allied advance slowed to a crawl in September, leaving German-occupied areas in western Holland that were still within 300 kilometers of the British capital. The heavily bombed bunker at Wizernes had been abandoned during the retreat, as were a number of prepared sites for the mobile batteries, but the rocket troops launched their missiles from completely unprepared areas. As Dornberger had foreseen, this method worked quite well. No one in the High Command could guarantee, however, that a further withdrawal from the Netherlands would not happen. Although more V-2s were eventually fired at the Belgian port of Antwerp than at London, it was important to Hitler to retain the capability to attack Britain directly. His desperate strategic concept hinged upon knocking the British out of the war by terrorizing the war-weary civilian population of the enemy capital. The glider missile could fill the bill, since its projected range of 500 kilometers (310 miles) would permit firing on London from northwestern Germany. Alternatively, if Holland was retained, the A-9 could be used to attack more distant British cities. 22

From early September, von Braun and Roth therefore ordered shortcuts in the A-9 program to accelerate the launch date. The revival of the subscale A-7 (an A-5 with wings) was abandoned, as were any extensive improvements over the A-4. For the first test models, the swept wing favored in pre-1943 wind tunnel experiments would merely be grafted on to an A-4 fuselage. The biggest unsolved problem was creating air vanes and vane servomotors powerful enough to deal with the increased demands on the control system. As was true with Wasserfall, the enlarged air vanes were the only system available for stabilization and maneuvering after engine burnout. But in the case of the A-9, even launch was a problem, because wind forces on the large wings made roll control difficult. Notwithstanding that difficulty, on October 10 von Braun proposed the construction of a “Bastard” version of the A-4b, as the missile was now called, using an A-4 tail with slightly enlarged air vanes. According to his rationale, that would be a way to investigate problems of the launch and transition through the sound barrier. No attempt would be made to have the vehicle glide upon reentry. 23

Werner Dahm, an aerodynamicist who worked under Ludwig Roth, interprets those actions politically. Von Braun’s aim, he says, was to “keep the [Peenemünde] group together” and to signal to the authorities that “there is something coming.” Von Braun was also responding to pressure from above to produce an increase in missile range as soon as possible in view of the war situation. The best way to demonstrate progress to Kammler and others was to launch quickly, even if that violated a more rational development process. No attempt would be made to glide because, as Dahm notes, that would only demonstrate that the “Bastard” A-4b could not sustain stable flight during its descent. 24

When it came time to launch the improvised vehicles, which were among the last assembled by the Peenemünde shops, the results were not surprising. On December 27, 1944, the first “Bastard” A-4b crashed within seconds as a result of a roll that began at launch. The control system on the missile was simply too marginal to deal with winds or suboptimum performance by guidance equipment. After some emergency improvements, Peenemünde fired the second “Bastard” in late January. It came through the launch phase in good shape, but a wing broke off during reentry. Since gliding was not included in the test, that failure was unimportant, but it too demonstrated how far Peenemünde had to go before it could produce a workable glider missile, let alone one that was militarily useful. 25