by Brian Ford
By April 1937 the rocket organization was relocated to its new top-secret base at Peenemünde. This was destined to become the birthplace of modern rocketry, and since 1992 it has been part of the Military Research Centre (Heeresversuchsanstalt Peenemünde) an Anchor Point of the European Route of Industrial Heritage. The staff at the Army Experimental Station at Peenemünde (Heeresversuchsstelle Peenemünde) set out to improve upon the successful A-2 rocket and design a successor, the A-3. The result was a 1,650lb (750kg), 21ft (7m) long rocket burning liquid oxygen and alcohol fuel. By the end of 1937 the Peenemünde team had developed and were ready to test the prototypes. The first failed, and so did the test launches that followed. To the engineers it was obvious that the urgent rush to launch had been too swift. Early problems with the rocket had shown that the tail fins needed to be redesigned; and even when this had been done new problems were emerging. The propulsion system of the A-3 was a success but its inertial guidance system still did not function correctly and further work was initiated to solve this technical problem.
A new approach was needed — in future, every aspect would be bench tested separately and proved to work, prior to being incorporated into the final design. And so a revised policy was drawn up, in the remote vastness of Peenemünde. The German researchers laid their plans, confident that their secret location gave them the chance to make progress, away from prying eyes.
In 1938, Germany began encroaching upon the territory of nearby nations. The occupation of the Sudetenland was at first resisted, but by the end of the year the situation had been accepted by the major powers and Hitler’s expansionism suddenly seemed irresistible. Hitler was encouraged to think again about rocketry and began to recognize the need for an effective ballistic weapon. The Army Ordnance Department decided that the Peenemünde teams should proceed to design a ballistic missile. It should have a range of up to 200 miles (about 320km) and deliver a 1-ton explosive warhead. It was agreed that there were constraints upon the size of the weapon, which would need to fit onto existing railways and move safely through tunnels and cuttings. It would also need to be transportable by truck along existing roadways. The new weapon was designated the A-4, but a more modestly proportioned prototype that could fall between the A-3 and the A-4 was designated the A-5. Although the A-5 was designed to be similar to the A-3, it had a more robust construction and employed a simpler, more reliable guidance system. The A-5 was designed to have the exterior appearance of the proposed A-4 rocket but on a smaller scale.
The excited sense of German expansionism was increasingly apparent to her citizens and the feeling in the research laboratories was one of an expanding future. The advent of war had seemed inevitable for some time so that the actual declaration, announced in London at 11.15am on 3 September 1939, had little effect on the teams. The A-5 tests proceeded and rocket development moved steadily ahead right through 1939. Missiles were successfully fired and many were recovered by parachute and launched again. From the start, the A-5 rockets could reach an altitude of 7.5 miles (12km). The era of the long-range rocket was coming closer by the day. However, for many years, Hitler had seen his military destiny in the invasion and subjugation of nations. His personal preferences were not so much for weapons that descended on a distant enemy from the sky, but for hordes of well-disciplined troops that would occupy and subdue a nation. Hitler had seen his troops walk across great swathes of Europe, he had seen the reports of the successful Blitzkrieg over London, and he again began to be less concerned by rocketry, seeing it as something he might not need after all.
English eyes
The British were very strong at gathering intelligence and they were already discovering what was happening at Peenemünde. A confidential document on activity there had been sent anonymously to London by a German physicist. This was the so-called ‘Oslo Report’. It was one of the most important documents of its kind ever recorded. Its author was Hans Ferdinand Mayer who earned his doctorate in physics from the University of Heidelberg in 1920. He became Director of the Siemens Communication Research Laboratory in Germany in 1936 and was able to travel widely. He had many contacts across the whole of military research in Germany, and was an inveterate gossip. Most of the flow of information, though, was one-way; and — as Mayer became increasingly concerned about the Nazi threat — he realized that something had to be done to attempt to stem its flow.
The crucial event for Mayer was the invasion of Poland on 1 September 1939 by Nazi troops. Mayer knew the time had come to act, and arranged a business trip to Oslo for the following month. On 30 October 1939 he arrived in Oslo, Norway, and checked in at the Hotel Bristol. He borrowed an office typewriter from the hotel, and over the next few days he started to type out a seven-page document which set down everything he knew about German military plans. It is an astonishing document. On 1 November he mailed the first introductory section to the military authorities in London. If they were interested in the full report, he would send it by mail, he said; confirmation of the British response was to be in the form of a subtle change to the wording of the German-language transmission for the BBC’s overseas service. Mayer said it should begin with the words: ‘Hallo, hier ist London’. He listened to the broadcast, and heard the coded words. Satisfied that his work was wanted, he completed the rest of the report and mailed it to London, along with a sample of a new proximity fuse that he had secretly obtained from Germany.
Mayer was reported to the Nazi authorities as listening to the BBC, and he was accused of uttering anti-Nazi sentiments, so he was arrested by the Gestapo in 1943 and was imprisoned in concentration camps until the war ended; but the Germans never knew about his Oslo Report. Indeed, its very existence was not revealed until 1947. At the end of the war, Mayer was taken to the United States as part of the top-secret Operation Paperclip, intended to give the Americans the benefit of German wartime research. After a time at Cornell University, he returned to Germany, as Director of the Siemens & Halske research department in Munich for communications technology until 1962. He died there in 1980.
In London his report was dismissed as an invention, deliberately planted by the Nazis to confuse the British authorities. But then it came to attention of a brilliant young physicist, R. V. Jones, recently appointed Churchill’s head of scientific intelligence. He felt that the breadth and coherence of the document was a sign of its reliability; all the scientific details checked out and he was convinced that it could not possibly be a work of fiction, planted to deceive. Jones was a key figure in the development of radar, and noted that the Germans were also trying to bring radio direction finding (RDF) into use. Jones vehemently argued against the accusation that the information was planted. If the Germans were doing this, he maintained, they wouldn’t wish to give the game away. And if they weren’t, their failing to have done so would be an obvious admission of failure. Only a ‘genuinely disaffected’ person would write thus, argued Jones, if he wished to reveal everything he knew.
The British Admiralty were not impressed and they continued to maintain that the Oslo Report was a work of fiction. They argued that no single person could have such a broad knowledge of so many different fields. In Britain, as in the United States, and even in Nazi Germany, cooperation and contact between the Army and Navy were virtually non-existent. They saw themselves as rivals, not comrades. But Jones knew that a socially well-connected person could have friends in many places, and insisted that the Oslo Report must be true. In one paragraph it claimed that ‘wireless controlled rocket gliders’ were being developed at Peenemünde, and so were what Mayer described as ‘rocket shells’ 30in (80cm) in diameter. Today we cannot tell which the ‘rocket gliders’ might have been. Drones had been developed, but work on the prototypes of the V-1 was still in the future. The ‘rocket shells’ would have been the A-3 rocket, which had a diameter of 27in (68cm) — a reasonable estimate.
Peenemünde curtailed
In May 1940, just as the teams at Peenemünde were close to designing a monster rocket
, Hitler convinced himself that events were moving his way, and the war would soon be over. The British Expeditionary Force that had been dispatched to fight the German Army had been quickly defeated. The Allies had retreated, becoming marooned around Dunkirk on the coast near the border between France and Belgium. They had abandoned their heavy artillery, and feared destruction by the Luftwaffe and the German Army. But, seeing that fighting had virtually ended, Field Marshall Gerd von Rundstedt, Chief of the General Staff, called a halt to hostilities. The lull in action provided a chance for the soldiers to be rescued and, in London, Churchill instructed everyone available with a ship or boat to bring home the troops. Almost 1,000 vessels set off for the coast of the continent, and 338,226 soldiers (123,000 of them French) were brought safely back to Britain by sea. A further 40,000 Allied soldiers remained on the continent; many continued fighting the Germans, some were captured, others made their own way home — some even travelling through neutral Spain to find a way back to England.
Hitler heard reports of the British retreat with immense satisfaction and sensed that they were a spent force. He now began to convince himself that hostilities would be over in a year or so, and he ordered that work should stop on all projects that could not be completed by the time the war was likely to end. Development at Peenemünde was curtailed; and for the next year the very future of German rocketry was under threat.
ROCKET DEVELOPMENT BEYOND GERMANY
A fascination with rockets was shared by many private individuals and armed forces around the world, including the USSR, the United States and Britain.
Russian rocket development
The capricious influence of personal ambitions was felt in Russia, as in Germany. Although Russian research into rockets is often overlooked, Russia had the first rocketry society. In 1924 in Moscow, Fridrikh Tsander proposed the formation of a Society for the Study of Interplanetary Travel and it was constituted under the aegis of the Military Science Division of the N. E. Zhukovsky Air Force Academy. This was essentially a discussion group, and was soon renamed the Society for the Study of Interplanetary Communication.
Among the other societies that formed in the 1930s was the Group for the Study of Reaction Motion in Moscow (MosGIRD) and a similar group in Leningrad (LenGIRD). Sergei Korolev was a key member of MosGIRD and in due course he became senior designer of the Soviet space rockets. Tsander spear-headed the design of a pioneering experimental projectile, the GIRD-X rocket.
The Jet Propulsion Research Institute (RNII) was created in September 1933 through the merger of the Gas Dynamics Laboratory (GDL) in Leningrad — now St Petersburg — and MosGIRD in Moscow. Ivan Kleimenov, the former chief at the GDL, was assigned to lead the RNII which began work on liquid-fuel ballistic missiles. Engineer A. I. Polyarny worked on an experimental R-06 rocket which was successfully launched in 1937. It reached an altitude of over 13,000ft (4,000m).
During the following year, the RNII was renamed NII-3. The initiative was short-lived, however, for a tragedy was about to happen. In June 1937, Soviet citizens heard the shocking news that Marshall Mikhail Nikolayevich Tukhachevsky, a leading member of the Bolshevik party, had been dramatically executed by order of Stalin as an ‘enemy of the people’. Tukhachevsky was a patron of NII-3, and the Institute’s director and his deputy were soon executed, while leading engineers Sergei Korolev and Valentin Glushko were given long prison terms. Research on liquid-fuel rockets was abandoned, and NII-3 could henceforth produce only unguided short-range Katyusha rockets. Just as Hitler had curtailed rocket research in Germany in 1940, Stalin’s personal paranoia had destroyed Russia’s high-technology rocketry research. The most successful missile the Russians perfected was the Katyusha rocket which was launched in batches from trucks, tractors, trains and tanks. The launchers were also installed on ships. The early production-line Katyusha was officially designated the M-13 and was 71in (180cm) long, 5.2in (13cm) in diameter and weighed 92lb (42kg). The propellant was a simple solid charge of nitrocellulose with a single nozzle surrounded by four stabilising fins. A warhead of 48lb (22kg) could be propelled up to 3.4 miles (5.4km). The impact of the Katyusha was in the mass delivery — a battery of several launchers would deliver more than 4 tons of high explosive as rockets rained down across a 10 acre (4 hectare) area. Although it then took time to reload and re-set the launcher, the effect of the bombardment was devastating — and the characteristic sound of so many rockets roaring through the air simultaneously was highly demoralising to the enemy.
Rockets in Japan
In Japan there was a clear recognition of the potential importance of rockets, but relatively little that the Japanese scientists could do about it. Japan is a nation that lacks natural resources, and at the time had limited industrial experience. Like many centralized states, it had a cumbersome bureaucracy and a tendency for rival organizations to seek to outdo each other.
In the early years of World War II, both the Imperial Japanese Army and Navy were looking at developing 8in (20cm) rockets. The Army’s 8in rocket was a spin-stabilized projectile equipped with six vents to impart both spin and propulsion. It was designed to be launched from a Type 4 Rocket Launcher, in reality a mortar. By contrast, the Japanese Navy developed their own rival version. Their 8in rocket was designed to be launched from simple wooden troughs or even from holes in the ground.
The Japanese also developed the Type 10 Rocket Motor which was a simple propulsion unit intended as a launch facility for aerial bombs. They later produced a rocket 18in (44.7cm) in diameter; it was an unsophisticated projectile that was used in action on Iwo Jima and had a maximum range of over a mile (2,000m). Although it was inaccurate, it delivered a warhead of 400lb (180kg). Interestingly, this rocket was also spin-stabilized. This rotation around the axis had the potential to stabilize a rocket in flight, just as the Congreve rocket had in a previous century.
The Imperial Japanese Army focused their efforts on developing an air-to-surface missile while the Navy concentrated on the design of surface-to-air missiles. The Army decided to develop their Igo missile, while the Navy’s project was the Funryu (Raging Dragon) rocket.
The Igo-1-A was a winged cruise missile constructed by Mitsubishi from wood and metal. It was 16ft (5.77m) long, and had a wingspan of 10ft 9in (3.6m). It had a launch weight of 3,080lb (1,400kg) and could deliver a 1,760lb (800kg) warhead at a velocity of 340mph (550km/h). The rocket motor was a Mitsubishi Tokuro-1 Type 3 which fired for just 75 seconds. There was also an Igo-1-B produced by Kawasaki which was of similar design but delivered a somewhat smaller payload. Both versions of the Igo-1 were launched from an aircraft at about 5,000ft (1,500m) some 6 miles (about 10km) from the target. An onboard altimeter established the missile on a straight and level path and it was then radio-controlled by the pilot to the target. The missiles left no smoke trail and it was difficult for the aircraft pilot to aim them accurately. The rockets were fitted with a tail light for use at night — but under these conditions, although the pilots could see the drone, they now had difficulty in seeing the target. The final refinement of the Igo rocket was the Igo-1-C, developed by the Aeronautical Research Institute of Tokyo Imperial University. Rather than being guided by radio, the Igo-1-C was ingeniously designed to home in on the shockwaves produced by ships when they fired their guns.
Meanwhile the Navy were developing their Funryu rockets, and planned to produce four versions. Like their Igo counterparts, they would be radio-controlled to the target. In the event, only the Igo-1-A and Igo-1-B went into production, and none was ever fired at the enemy.
Air-to-ground missiles were not seriously considered by the Japanese until March 1944. The Army continued to prefer spin-stabilized rockets, while the Navy wanted devices stabilized by fins. Had the two services combined forces, an optimized design could well have been agreed but, as it was, the age-old rivalry persisted and each service pressed ahead with their own ideas. The air-to-ground missiles were to be fitted to the Kawanishi N1K-J Shiden (Violet Lightning) aircraft which we
re to be specially modified to carry six of the rockets ready to attack the fleet of ships that the Japanese believed to be on its way to invade the homeland. In the event, the aircraft never achieved full operational status before the war’s dramatic end. Japanese plans to fire off a salvo of rockets were never achieved; instead each rocket was launched singly, in the manner of firing off a mortar, and so little useful benefit was ever achieved.
British rocketry
British interest in rockets was far more modest than that in Germany. At the beginning of the war, small 3in (7.6cm) diameter rockets powered by cordite were all that were available. By the end of 1940, a larger 8in (20cm) version had been developed that could be fired in volleys of 128 rockets from a rack known as a ‘projector’. There were many practical problems, and the organization of such a rocket battery had to be worked out from first principles, since there was no practical experience from which to work. On 20 May 1940, in the back room of a public house at Aberporth in Wales, a meeting was convened by the local Ordnance Director and it was decided to try using these batteries of rockets as a routine measure against enemy aircraft. Within weeks a firm in Greenwich, London, named G. A. Harbey had been contracted to mass produce the ‘projector’ racks and by September over 1,000 had been manufactured.
The following month, Churchill’s son-in-law Duncan Sandys (then a major) organized a rocket section to defend the strategic port of Cardiff with 3in rockets, and the first German plane was brought down on 7 April 1941. By the end of 1941 there were three such facilities, known as ‘Z-batteries’, in existence. Two were at Cardiff, and the third was at Aberporth where there is to this day a missile testing range. The UP-3 rocket, as it was then known, was further improved and eventually emerged as a 6ft (1.8m) rocket with a lethal radius of up to 70ft (21m). By December 1942 there were 91 batteries in existence, despite enemy raids which twice razed the factory producing the rocket fuses. A modification of this rocket was produced as an operational surface-to-air missile capable of reaching 1,000mph (1,600km/h). Although the Army showed little interest in these missiles, the Navy began production of six-unit ‘Mattress’ projectors for use at sea. They were used in the landings in Sicily and mainland Italy which were to ensue. After further tests at Sennybridge (also in Wales) the Army began to change its mind and a Land Mattress projector was produced which went into service with Canadian troops when they fought for the Rhine and Scheldt rivers. Towards the end of the war, the Stooge rocket was unveiled. It was designed specifically to attack enemy aircraft, particularly (as it happens) the Japanese suicide squads. This was a 740lb (335kg) 10ft (3m) radio-guided missile with a range of up to 8 miles (13km). It had a top speed of 500mph (800km/h) and delivered a 220lb (100kg) warhead. The British rocket had come of age.
