by Brian Ford
Amazingly, a piloted version of the primitive V-1 was flown and several leading test pilots were killed while attempting to land because they could not adapt to the high stall speed. The most successful German test pilot during World War II was a former medical student, Hanna Reitsch, who was awarded the Iron Cross First Class. She was the first-ever female test pilot and made test flights later in the war, successfully landing in the V-1 several times. Because Germans were prohibited for many years from flying powered aircraft, Reitsch turned to gliding after the war, and some of her records remain unbroken to this day.
Hanna Reitsch was interrogated by American Intelligence officers as the war ended and she told them that she wished to kneel down in reverence at the Führer’s bunker and her dearest wish would have been to die with Hitler. She remained loyal to Nazi ideals to her death in 1979. An American journalist, Ron Laytner, was the last to interview her and quotes her as saying: ‘Our great army has gone soft. Soldiers wear beards and question orders. I am not ashamed to say I believed in National Socialism… Many Germans feel guilty. But they don’t explain the real guilt we share — that we lost the war.’
THE PILOTS
Despite the advanced technology, there were problems with the V-1s that couldn’t have been foreseen. A German pilot recalled the problems they came up against:
Because there were no launch sites left in France and Belgium, the V-1 rockets were struggling to reach central London, so in October [1944] we began to fly with them. The main problem with them was the wind. If we didn’t judge the wind right we missed London. Also, many of our V-1s got shot down by English flak. We had to climb to 500 metres before we could let go of the V-1, that is if the English fighters didn’t get us first… By the time the V-1 came in, we still had a little hope that we could win the war, but not much, as the Allied air power was so superior.
Ernst Eberling, Imperial War Museum Sound 11389
As the numbers of V-1s over England increased, the RAF pilots sought alternative methods to deal with them, rather than relying on anti-aircraft fire. Of the first 144 missiles that reached the coast in the first V-1 attack, seven were downed by British fighter pilots. The Hawker Tempest was discovered to be the best aircraft for shooting down the rockets due to its speed and 20mm cannon, but by late June pilots discovered that they could also ‘tip’ the V-1 over by flying alongside and banking their aircraft — the missile could not cope with the change of direction, and so would fall to the ground. Squadron Leader Berry was the most successful at downing a doodlebug, claiming 60 V-1 rockets:
There is a new kind of battle going on in the skies over London — Spitfires versus the German Flying Bombs… Mind you, I can say from personal experience that the Doodle Bug doesn’t go down easily… You have to aim at the propulsion unit — that’s the long stove-pipe, as we call it, on the tail. If your range and aim are dead on, you can see pieces flying off the stove-pip. The big white flame at the end goes out, and down goes the bomb.
Squadron Leader Joseph Berry, BBC radio interview
The British were at a loss as to how to defend themselves against the relentless attacks. They began to use barrage balloons that were large hydrogen-filled blimps, such as those discussed earlier in this book, with lines of steel cables hanging down in a long array. These were intended to intercept flying bombs as they approached, but the leading edge of the V-1 was able to cut the cables and only about 300 buzz-bombs were claimed to have been brought down by the barrage balloons. The Allies also began to use simple analogue computers to calculate the aim of anti-aircraft guns in June 1944. Just 17 per cent of the flying bombs were brought down by gunfire during their first week on the south coast, but with the assistance of the simple computers this rose to 60 per cent by 23 August and 74 per cent by the end of that month. On the best day, 82 per cent of the V-1s launched were destroyed by Allied guns.
Aircraft were relatively ineffective against the V-1. The fighters that were fast enough to catch them included the Hawker Tempest, the Mustang and the Griffon-engined Spitfire XIV. On several occasions — but not many — a V-1 was brought down by being tipped off-balance by the wing of a fighter flying alongside. In the closing months of war, the Gloster Meteor jet fighter was rushed into service with 616 Squadron to catch and disable V-1s. Some 13 of the buzz-bombs were shot out of the sky by this new British jet fighter.
In 1944 there were discussions on how to mislead the Germans about the results of their V-1 attacks. The obvious way to feed false information would be to report the weapons as overshooting the target; the Germans (if they believed the reports) would adjust their flight times to compensate and have the weapons falling in Kent, rather than on the capital. This was not considered realistic. The sites of impact were being reported by the newspapers, large and small, to which the Germans could have access through neutral nations. Instead it was decided to feed information about all the genuine hits to the north of London. The cumulative effect might be that the Germans would conclude they were overshooting the capital — and the reports would be confirmed by those they saw in the newspapers. This ruse seems to have worked, and post-war calculations held that the number of fatalities had been reduced by half as a result. Nonetheless, it was a V-1 that made the last enemy attack on British soil in the war, when the final missile hit Datchworth, Hertfordshire, on 29 March 1945.
The pulse jet was brought into other designs, too; one was for an attack vessel filled with explosives and a prototype was built from a Sprengboot — a wooden craft crammed with high explosive — with a pulse jet screwed to the top. In didn’t work, and such craft were experimentally fitted with conventional piston engines from then on. Pulse jets were also used by the Japanese. An Argus pulse jet was taken to Japan by sea in 1943 and the Kawanishi Baika was the result, though it existed only as a design and was never constructed. The Japanese also proposed building the Mizuno Shinryu, a kamikaze plane powered by pulse jet, though it, too, was never built. Post-war France manufactured versions of their own (modified from the German blueprints) to use as target drones under the designation CT-10 — some of which were later sold on to Britain and the United States.
The Soviets brought back components of the V-1 when they occupied Blizna, Poland. The version produced in Russia was the Izdeliye-10 and test launches were made at a range in Tashkent. They also considered the mass-production of a piloted version but these plans were abandoned when their chief test pilot died in the crash of a modified Izdeliye-10. They continued to work on modifying the V-1 design into the 1950s, by which time onboard television monitoring was offering radical new ideas for cruise missile design.
The United States began work on their version of a V-1 before the war ended. In 1944 they shipped parts of recovered V-1 missiles to America from Britain and by September they had built their own version, a prototype Republic-Ford JB-2 known as the Loon. The design was almost identical to the German V-1 but with a slightly increased wing area, the JB-2 having 61ft2 (5.6m2) compared to 55ft2 (5.1m2) for the original V-1. The wingspan was an extra 2.5in (6.4cm) wider and the entire fuselage was 2ft (0.6m) longer. The original intention was to use these German-designed missiles against Japan as a key component of what was code named Operation Downfall. A Navy version, the KGW-1, was also designed and ready. Plans were in place to produce 1,000 of these missiles per month, and an order for 75,000 was planned, but by the war’s end none had ever been fired in action by the United States. Within a few years research had been transferred to more modern projects, but the influence of the V-1 remains with us. It was the world’s first successful cruise missile and those that have followed owe much to the original German research. Today’s cruise missiles are equipped with sophisticated navigational and communications technology, and can be monitored and controlled over a vast distance. Thanks to the internet and satellites, the operator need no longer be even on the same continent. But, when we consider today’s weaponry, it is a simple matter to think back to how it started, and to imagine the threatening
growl of an approaching V-1 in World War II. From that to the cruise missile of today is a leap in time — but not in principle.
CHAPTER 4
THE ROCKET
Germany began her re-emergence from the shadows of World War I as the established disciplines — after stopping dead in their tracks as that war ended — began slowly to recover. The industry of Germany had already shown its pre-eminence in fields such as chemical engineering, particularly in drugs and dyes, and in manufacture, where names like Mercedes, Daimler, Benz and Diesel remain to this day as hallmarks of German excellence and innovation. These crucial fields had fostered an elevated cultural position for engineering in German society. To be addressed as an engineer in Germany is on a par with being a surgeon or a film director. In many Western societies an engineer is the person who replaces the drive belt in your washing machine or overcharges you for what should have been a routine service on your car. For Germans, the problem solving that engineers use and the mental disciplines of the design process are among the greatest and most admirable of traits. This is as true today as it was in a previous century.
A sense of reassertion was the inevitable rebound against the disgrace imposed by the Treaty of Versailles. Throughout the Weimar Republic, which flourished between 1919 and Hitler’s coming to power in 1933, Germany had lived within the humiliating constraints of Versailles. There were lists of restrictions on the machinery of war; but they served only to optimize the German effort in the post-World War I years. The German Army was set at a maximum limit of 100,000 soldiers and so, because of this burdensome constraint, the authorities had to ensure that every single member of the forces was of the highest possible quality. In consequence, although the German Army was one of the smallest, it soon became by far the most highly qualified and efficient army in the world. There were strict limits on artillery and on gun manufacture, so enormous emphasis was now being placed on maximizing every aspect of development in these fields. Because there was little military interest in rocketry during World War I, rockets were omitted entirely from the provisions in the Treaty of Versailles. This curious fact was to underpin the progress towards World War II, and to mould the conduct of all future wars. Whoever was responsible for this omission gave a massive impetus to the study of rockets and, eventually, to the landing of a man on the moon. The story of the rocket epitomizes the development of modern warfare, and the unexpected legacy of ill-thought-out restrictions imposed by victorious nations on the vanquished foe.
The young German elite of the Weimar Republic were not simply thinking of Germany’s current role, but were looking to the future. All around the world, there was a sense of rebirth. In an era when the brutality of world war seemed to have been conclusively ended, brave new horizons opened up. The Tsar and his family had been eliminated in Russia and the reign of the Kaiser had been ended in Germany. In this resurgent nation of Germany it was felt that dreams could perhaps become reality. The greatest dream of all was that humans could leave the earth and travel into space — and suddenly even this seemed to be on the verge of possibility in the minds of many. The twentieth century marked the time when space rockets emerged from being the hallmark of futuristic fiction into the full glare of reality, and it was the pressures of World War II that were harnessed to bring it about. German rocketry during World War II did more than any other single aspect to shape the post-war world and its story is rich in resonances of the national culture, and of the time. It is timely to look for the origins of this great new adventure, and we can also see how resurgence was greeted differently in Germany to how it was received elsewhere. There are lessons here to learn. No wonder the word that we use for this sense of time is not English, but German: Zeitgeist.
FIRST ROCKETS
No reader will be surprised that the origins of rockets as agents of warfare lay in China. There have been occasional references to ‘fireworks’ in antiquity, though nobody can be sure whether these connote anything more than the use of incendiary devices. Gunpowder was long in the making, and we can be certain that alchemists had experimented with inflammable powders for centuries before explosives were perfected. The discovery of black powder is agreed to have been in ninth-century China, and emerged from experiments by Taoist philosophers. Rockets were an inevitable consequence. The first rockets were made by packing black powder into stems of bamboo, and the Mongol ruler Genghis Khan and his son Ögedei used them successfully against Europeans in the thirteenth century. And so rockets were being used in warfare 700 years ago.
Yet it was in India that the first metal rockets were designed and built. The British East India Company fought for decades to subdue the kingdom of Mysore and in 1792 rockets made of iron were designed and built for the rulers of Mysore, Haider Ali and his son Tipu Sultan. The metal casing was some 8in (20cm) long and gave these rockets a range of over half a mile (about 2km) and they so surprised the British that attempts were made to copy them. Examples were sent back to the Royal Arsenal at Woolwich, London, where Sir William Congreve developed the design and introduced the (better-known) Congreve rocket which was successful in the Napoleonic wars. Although the Congreve rocket deserves a place in the history of rocketry, it was the Indian craftsmen who had produced the first successful iron rockets. They were launched in their thousands and deserve a conspicuous place in military history.
These rockets were stabilized by having a rod protruding from the rear, just like today’s firework rockets launched from a bottle. In 1844 a self-taught British inventor, William Hale, improved the design so that the thrust was slightly vectored to produce spin along the axis of travel like a rifle bullet. The flight path was stabilized by this design change and the stick was no longer needed. The largest Congreve rockets had weighed up to 32lb (15kg) and Hale’s design allowed this to be doubled to 60lb (about 28kg). These were used by the Americans during the Mexican — American War of 1846–48 and the British Army also used Hale rockets during the Crimean War of 1853–56.
It was in the early years of the twentieth century that matters began to develop in several countries. A Russian high school mathematics teacher named Konstantin Tsiolkovsky published a paper entitled The Exploration of Cosmic Space by Means of Reaction Devices which was the first scientific work on rocketry. He proposed the use of liquid hydrogen and oxygen as propellants and calculated the maximum exhaust velocity they could generate. The publication date of this far-sighted book was 1903.
Knowing nothing of his Russian predecessor, a French aviator named Robert Esnault-Pelterie delivered a lecture to the French Physics Society (Societé Française de Physique) in 1912 entitled ‘Consideration of the Results of the Unlimited Lightening of Motors’ in which he included similar calculations on the output of rocket engines, and even advocated nuclear power (from half a ton of radium) as an energy source for long-distance space travel. Esnault-Pelterie was later in contact with Romanian-born Hermann Oberth, who was destined to become one of Germany’s greatest authorities on military rockets.
It was also in 1912 that the American enthusiast Robert Goddard began his study of rockets. He proposed a small combustion chamber as the best source of power and even outlined the use of multi-stage rockets. Goddard was a highly enterprising visionary and ensured that his ideas were patented in 1914. He patented two inventions. The first was for a rocket using liquid fuel; the second was for a two- or even a three-stage rocket propelled by solid fuel. Two years later he compiled a paper on rocketry at Clark College in Worcester, Massachusetts. In 1919 the Smithsonian Institution published this paper as a modest book entitled A Method of Reaching Extreme Altitudes. In the following year Goddard was published in the prestigious science journal Nature where he began with these propitious words:
It is the purpose of the present article to state the general principles and possibilities of the method of reaching great altitudes with multiple charge rockets, from which the exploded gases are ejected with high efficiency.[4]
Goddard spent time over the next few yea
rs perfecting his design for a rocket with liquid fuel and his first successful rocket flight took place on 16 March 1926 at Auburn, Massachusetts. It flew from a 6ft (1.8m) gantry on a short, explosive flight that lasted no more than 3 or 4 seconds; but it proved that the concept worked. Within three years his improved specifications gave steadily improving results — his small rockets could now travel some 200ft (70m) at speeds of up to 60mph (about 95km/h). In 1930 he logged an altitude of 2,000ft (6,000m) and a velocity of 500mph (800km/h). This was truly astonishing progress.
Little general interest was shown in Goddard’s work at the time, and what comments were published had an unenthusiastic tone. Goddard never had the satisfaction of seeing his views take root. Those who knew of his work regarded him largely as a crank.
One of Goddard’s most influential inventions was a portable rocket-powered shell that could be launched by a soldier. With a colleague, Clarence Hickman, Goddard had given a successful demonstration of his invention at the United States Army Signal Corps at the Aberdeen Proving Ground, Maryland, in November 1918. The demonstration was a complete success, but the war ended two days later and the proposal did not develop further. It was revived in World War II, and went on to evolve into the bazooka, which became one of the best-known rocket-powered devices in history.
