Michael Neufeld - The Rocket and the Reich

By way of comparison, the Manhattan Project to build the atomic bomb cost the United States about 2 billion 1940s dollars, or four times as much. Since the German war economy was significantly smaller than the American one at its peak, the Army rocket program imposed a burden on the Third Reich roughly equivalent to that of Manhattan on the United States. Such a comparison makes it almost superfluous to explain why the German Army rocket program was, in military terms, a boondoggle. Even compared with Anglo-American conventional strategic bombing, the V-2’s results were pathetic. The total explosive load of all A-4s fired in anger was scarcely more than a single large RAF air raid! Moreover, the 5,000 Allied civilians killed by V-2 attacks (leaving the prisoners aside) were dwarfed by many tens of thousands of dead in single raids on Hamburg, Dresden, and Tokyo, not to mention Hiroshima and Nagasaki. 12

The missile’s psychological and material impact on the Allied war effort was equally unimpressive. Although no one should dismiss the terrible effects of individual V-2 hits, which at their worst killed hundreds of people, outside of East London and Antwerp the missile was little more than a nuisance. Only the onset of the V-1 campaign in June-July 1944 produced popular disquiet in Britain, and that was mastered by the end of the summer, when anti-aircraft defenses became efficient. One of the ironies of the Luftwaffe’s “buzz bomb” (which cost a fraction of a V-2) was that not only did its noisiness create more terror, the fact that it could be shot down diverted much more Allied effort into stopping it. Since there was no defense against the ballistic missile, and the numbers launched were much smaller (3,200, as against 22,400), the Allies expended considerably fewer resources on A-4 countermeasures, mostly for attacks on launch and production sites. In the last analysis, the V-1 was no “wonder weapon” either, but the disjuncture between total expenditure and results was not quite so large in that case. Yet it is clear that the Reich’s expenditure on both weapons—and on no less than four different anti-aircraft missiles—could have been much better directed elsewhere. By the estimate of the United States Strategic Bombing Survey, V-weapons production in 1944–45 alone cost the Third Reich the equivalent of 24,000 fighters at a time when the annual aircraft production was only 36,000. In short, German missile development shortened the war, just as its advocates said it would, but in favor of the Allies. 13

Inaccuracy was one of the main reasons why German missiles were so ineffective. The V-2 could barely hit a giant city with any certainty, the V-1 was even worse, and Wasserfall and the other anti-aircraft missiles were never deployed because guidance problems, above all else, paralyzed their development. As V-weapons historian Dieter Hölsken has argued, World War II electronics and computers were too primitive for missile technology to be cost-effective. Thus the guided missile was not “too late” to change the course of the war, but rather was “too early ” to have any significant effect on it—an important insight that also explains the central paradox of Peenemünde’s missiles: complete short-term ineffectiveness versus profound long-term importance. 14

But Hölsken underestimates a technology that stands even more clearly at the roots of that paradox: nuclear weapons. The ICBM and its twin, the SLBM (submarine-launched ballistic missile), were the truly revolutionary military offspring of Peenemünde—and Los Alamos. Although the exploration of space may in the long run be more important to the future of humankind, the early space race itself would have been impossible without massive investments in rocket technology by the major powers. Those investments made sense only because of the revolutionary strategic implications of the nuclear-tipped long-range ballistic missile. By contrast, the conventionally armed ballistic missile has remained militarily ineffective, in spite of minor propaganda successes in the Iran-Iraq and Gulf wars, and anti-aircraft, cruise, and other missiles with high-explosive warheads, however important, have not had anywhere near the transformative impact of the nuclear missile.

Thus the missile came “too early” because Peenemünde developed the technology before it had either the warhead or the electronics to make it effective. But that fact raises a second important question about the German Army rocket program: Why did the Third Reich invest so heavily in a technology that, in retrospect, had no hope of changing the course of the war? Part of the answer is obvious: The Germans clearly did convince themselves that the ballistic missile could change the course of the war. The question then becomes: What arguments were adduced to prove the war-winning capability of the ballistic missile, and what historical conditions allowed those arguments to prevail?

In the early years of the German Army rocket program, one man was primarily responsible for promoting the technology as decisive: Karl Becker. Without him, it is scarcely imaginable that the program would have gotten off the ground in the early 1930s. Becker was convinced that the surprise introduction of a radical new weapon could produce a stunning psychological blow against an enemy. As an artillery expert, he was also aware that the rocket-powered ballistic missile promised to break through all the technological limits of conventional gunnery. He probably dismissed the failure of the Paris Gun in 1918, a project on which he had worked, as the natural outcome for a weapon that was just not revolutionary enough to produce the desired effect. That was ironic, because the A-4 ended by becoming another, much more spectacular, Paris Gun. It shelled enemy cities with little political or military effect and was, like its spiritual ancestor, the product of a blinkered technological enthusiasm that displayed little insight into the psychology of the enemy.

There were a number of reasons why Becker’s views gained so much support within the Army during the 1930s. The man himself was highly competent, and he surrounded himself with excellent technical officers like Dornberger. His political views and his enthusiasm for the Nazis also speeded his rapid rise to the top of Army Ordnance after 1933. The important role of artillery in the World War I trench stalemate gave officers of that branch an unusual prominence in the Army leadership of the Third Reich as well, which left Becker’s rocket project with an even stronger constituency. For historical reasons the German Army officer corps was also noteworthy for combining high tactical and technical competence with disastrously short-sighted strategic thinking—precisely Becker’s problem.

The rapid growth of the Army rocket program in the 1930s was fostered further by structural and political conditions that were inherent to the Third Reich and its armed forces. Although the Army’s autonomy was steadily eroded by the Nazi regime, and strong ideological affinities existed between the officer corps and Nazism in any case, until the early years of the war the Army did have some room to administer its own affairs and to implement some of the armaments projects it wished to pursue, notably the ballistic missile, which the service’s highest leadership had accepted as decisive. The rapidity of rearmament, the weakness of interservice coordination, and the “polycratic” character of the regime as a collection of competing bureaucratic empires further reinforced the Army’s ability to go it alone on the ballistic missile, if it so desired. The interservice rocket alliance with Göring’s politically potent Luftwaffe did, however, provide an essential boost to the program, enabling the construction of Peenemünde in 1936–37.