Thus began what was to prove one of the classic scientific partnerships of all time. Von Braun’s family were Prussian aristocrats – his father was a former government minister – and his ‘scientific bent’, Dornberger learned, had at first aroused their disgust. Born in March 1912, von Braun developed while at boarding school on the Friesian Islands in the Baltic a passionate interest in astronomy, went on to become a student at the Berlin Technical College, and in 1927 joined the newly formed German Society for Space Travel. By the time he was recruited to Dornberger’s team one important conclusion, which was to have a decisive influence on the whole rocket story, had already been reached. ‘It is not even possible to say with certainty’, wrote Dornberger later, ‘who first gave expression to the idea of using liquids of high energy content instead of powder for propulsion in airless space’ – but this was the first of the giant leaps forward which were to lead to those explosions in London in 1944 and ultimately to the conquest of space.
Hitherto rocket technology had barely progressed since the Chinese had first invented fireworks. The basic principle remained unchanged: the continuous combustion of chemicals in a confined space generated hot gases which, unable to escape except at the rear, forced the rocket forward until they burned out, after which it continued its flight for a time under the thrust already developed. Up to now, however, the weight of fuel needed to achieve the sort of range and payload – i.e. high-explosive warhead – already achieved by ordinary artillery had made the rocket impractical. By using liquid fuel Dornberger hoped to prolong the combustion period and to provide a continuous thrust powerful enough to carry a militarily significant weight far further than any shell so far fired. What, Dornberger rightly saw, was needed was not a single short-lived explosion but an actual motor able to sustain a flight of several minutes at a speed which would carry the missile upwards into space until it curved back to earth at a distance so far unattained by any man-made projectile. Dornberger set his sights initially on a liquid-fuelled engine able to provide a thrust of 650 lb. ‘We meant’, he wrote, ‘to bring this motor to a high level of performance, to gather experience, tabulate laws and principles and so create a basis for further construction.’
Even for established scientists this was totally new territory, and to explore it Dornberger needed men who, like von Braun, combined soaring imagination with a firm grasp of basic scientific principles, accompanied, if possible, by experience in this thinly populated field of technology. Remarkably, he rapidly discovered the ideal person to serve as his test designer and chief engineer, Walter Riedel, then working for the Heylandt company near Berlin, a firm which had actually handled liquid-propelled rockets until a fatal accident had stopped development of their pet project, a rocket-powered racing car. Temperamentally, too, he seemed just what was needed:
Riedel was a short, sedate man, with a permanently dignified and serious expression and a somewhat phlegmatic temperament. He was a most versatile practical engineer. He seemed to me to provide the right counterpoise to the rather temperamental, self-taught technician von Braun. With his calm, deliberate mind, his deep knowledge and his experience in the handling of liquid oxygen he repeatedly managed to guide the bubbling stream of von Braun’s ideas into steadier channels.
The little team began work at the Kummersdorf West Experimental Station, close to an existing firing range in the pine woods seventeen miles south of Berlin. Their accommodation was modest: wooden huts, now converted into ‘improvised offices, a designing room, measurement rooms, darkrooms and a tiny workshop’, where for the first few months ‘everyone was bent over drawing-boards or busy at a lathe’.
Meanwhile, as the pleasant autumn of 1932 gave way to a wintry December and frost flecked the branches of the surrounding pine trees and the raw earth of the scientists’ new home, half an hour’s drive away in Berlin ordinary citizens had more to worry about than either rocket design or the weather. A general election, on 6 November 1932, left the Nazis the largest party in the Reichstag, with 196 seats, well ahead of the Social Democrats’ 121 and the Communists’ 100. Already the brown-shirted stormtroopers swaggered the streets, elbowing Jews into the gutter, and beating up their political rivals. At Kummersdorf, however, the scientists were indifferent to everything except their work. On 21 December 1932, while other German citizens were thinking of Christmas presents and singing ‘Silent Night’, the little group in the clearing amid the Christmas trees were eagerly awaiting the results of the first combustion test of a liquid-powered rocket motor, as Dornberger later described:
The cold bit through the thick soles of my riding boots. It crept up my body until I felt miserably frozen in my short fur jacket. I had snuggled up close to a fir tree. Whenever I showed any sign of abandoning my position I was brought up short by a shout of ‘Keep under cover! Ignition any moment now!’. . . . In the control room the engineer, Riedel, stood on a narrow wooden grating, grasping two big steering wheels. When pressure was right in the spherical containers a turn of the wheels would open the two main valves and let the fuel into the combustion chamber. At the main door of the test stand, von Braun, very cold, was standing first on one leg and then on the other. He was holding a rod twelve feet long with a mug of petrol fastened to the end. Riedel called out from behind the wall that pressure was now correct and von Braun lit his gigantic match and held the flame under the exhaust. . . .
There was a swoosh, a hiss, and – crash!
Clouds of smoke rose. . . . Cables, boards, metal sheeting, fragments of steel and aluminium flew whistling through the air. . . . In the suddenly darkened pit of the testing room a milky, slimy mixture of alcohol and oxygen burned spasmodically with flames of different shapes and sizes, occasionally crackling and detonating like fireworks. Steam hissed. Cables were on fire in a hundred places. Thick, black, stinking fumes of burning rubber filled the air. Von Braun and I stared at each other. We were uninjured. The test stand had been wrecked.
One month later, on 30 January 1933, Hitler became Chancellor of Germany and the Nazi takeover of the state, and its steady preparation for aggressive war, began. On 12 November, in Hitler’s words, ‘the German people restored its honour to itself’, fifteen years after its defeat in 1918, and endorsed Germany’s withdrawal from the League of Nations by a massive 95 per cent vote. A general election on the same day left Nazi-supported candidates forming 92 per cent of the new Reichstag. These events passed the scientists at Kummersdorf by. They were solely exercised, as Dornberger acknowledged, by such problems as how ‘to avoid burning out the chamber and setting the injection nozzles on fire’ when starting up the rocket motor, as had happened during the first test, and by ‘the difficulties of stabilization . . . as the propellant was consumed’. Their dedication to the task in hand was total. In March 1934 three men were killed while testing a premixed solution of hydrogen peroxide and alcohol though well aware this was highly dangerous, but their leader insisted on going ahead and simply ‘telephoned the Mess . . . and asked that help should be sent if there were an explosion. . . . When help came a few minutes later, nothing was left of the test stand except the lead piping of the water supply’. Thereafter such hazardous experiments were discouraged, and these men, wrote Dornberger, conveniently forgetting the thousands of Untermenschen (i.e. non-Germans) who were to perish before his project finally succeeded, ‘were the first and last to give their lives for rocket development under the Army Weapons Department’.
Every advance brought some new problem in its train. A promising plan to use the exhaust gases to steer the rocket’s rudders, for example, came up against the existing limits of metallurgical knowledge. There was, it seemed, no ‘material which . . . would not melt, like butter in the sun, at a gas velocity of almost 6500 feet per second’. But, looking back, Dornberger had no doubt that this was the happiest period of the whole vast and protracted enterprise:
The early years of our activity shine in my memory with imperishable lustre. They were years of groping towards creation,
of the delight of success, of progressive work in common among inseparable companions. . . . Luckily the difficulties were for the most part still entirely unknown to us. We attacked our problems with the courage of inexperience and had no thought of the time it might take us to solve them.
Although money for military research was now plentiful, and the Army Weapons Department could order without difficulty any scientific equipment needed, the full implications of the new regime had not yet sunk in among the bureaucrats in Berlin. The supply of office machinery, for example, still required Treasury approval, and to avoid intolerable delays the Kummersdorf scientists were forced to resort to such devices as describing a pencil sharpener as an ‘appliance for cutting wood rods up to 10 mm in diameter’ and a typewriter as an ‘instrument for recording test data with recording roller’. There was an epic battle over an order for two boxes of children’s sparklers, which were being tried as a means of igniting the rocket’s fuel mixture. In the hope of saving time they were said to be needed for the office Christmas tree, but a whole year later some vigilant official observed that they had been ordered in midsummer, the correspondence being terminated only when he was told bluntly they were for ‘secret experiments’ and no further questions could be answered.
With the problems of fuel and combustion in process of being solved, at least experimentally, those of guiding the rocket once it had taken off became equally pressing, until von Braun discovered in the Gyroscope Company at Brietz near Berlin a former Austrian naval officer ‘full of ideas and far ahead of his time in all questions relating to gyroscopes’. The development of this system of keeping the rocket stable and on course was another major breakthrough, for, Dornberger learned, ‘according to the standard Textbook of Ballistics experiments had proved it impossible to impart a steady flight to bodies with arrow-stability at supersonic speed, but supersonic speed was needed to obtain access to space’. Eventually it became clear that no single gyroscope would suffice, but one working simultaneously ‘on three axes’.
Gradually the Kummersdorf experimenters discovered that most of the existing data about the behaviour of projectiles in flight was invalid when applied to rockets and that the evidence of small-scale experiments was no guide to what happened when the quantities were scaled up. In October 1934 Dornberger was briefly posted away to take command of the first ever German artillery battery armed with rockets – of the conventional, solid-fuel variety – but the work continued in his absence and he kept in touch with it.
By now the main outlines of the first rocket had been agreed. the A-1 – the ‘A’ stood for ‘aggregate’ or ’prototype – marked a tremendous advanced on any missile so far constructed. It was to be 4ft 6½ in (1.395 metres) long, 11⅞ in (0.3 m) wide, and was to weigh 329 lb (149 kg). The propellant, a mixture of liquid oxygen and alcohol, would produce a thrust of 660 lb (300 kg) for 16 seconds, and the missile was to be steered by self-contained gyroscopes and held steady by tail fins, after being ‘fired vertically from a slipway several yards high’. In fact, although its motor worked perfectly during a static test on the ground, it was never built, for the designers had moved on to a more ambitious model, the A-2, and early in December 1934 the first two A-2s were successfully launched over the North Sea from a test range on the island of Borkum. They behaved perfectly, reaching a height of one and a half miles (8100 ft, or 2500 m), a remarkable achievement for a totally new piece of technology, developed from scratch in a mere two years. Dornberger himself was more conscious of the distance still to be travelled, before the rocket became the supersonic, stratospheric, heavy-load-bearing projectile surpassing all known cannon of which he dreamed. ‘We had’, he summed up modestly, ‘made a beginning.’
2
TOWARDS PERFECTION
So long as the war lasts, our most urgent task can only be the rapid perfection of the rocket as a weapon.
Major-General Dornberger, following the first successful test of the A-4, 3 October 1942
By early 1933 the trend of German foreign policy was plain for all to see. In January the Saar, taken from Germany in 1919, was reunited with what was soon to be called the Third Reich. In March Hitler proclaimed the creation of a German Air Force and the return of conscription, in open defiance of the Treaty of Versailles. Meanwhile at Kummersdorf the rocket experiments were visibly outgrowing the existing facilities, and on safety grounds alone a move was overdue to a far larger, more remotely sited, establishment. While Dornberger concentrated on finding the money needed for equipment, ‘an impossible sum running into seven figures’, von Braun searched for a location on the coast, both to secure secrecy and because ‘on safety grounds we must be able to fire out to sea and to observe the entire trajectory from land’. While spending the Christmas holiday with relations near the Baltic coast, he was reminded that his father had once hunted duck on the remote island of Usedom, near a fishing village called Peenemünde. The young scientist’s report brought Dornberger hurrying to inspect it – and he was highly impressed:
The place was far away from any large town or traffic of any kind, and consisted of dunes and marshland overgrown with ancient oaks and pines, nestling in untroubled solitude behind a reedy foreland reaching far out into smooth water. Big Pomeranian deer with dark antlers roamed through the heather and among the bilberry bushes of the woods right to the sands of the lowlying coast. Swarms of duck, crested grebes, coots and swans inhabited this beautiful spot undisturbed for years by the report of the huntsman’s shotgun. The bustle of the watering-places strung along the coast like a necklace of pearls never invaded the lonely islet of Peenemünde. I thought there would be no difficulty in building a railway and roads and concealing the really important installations in the woods. . . . A small island. . . . faced the Peene estuary, the Greifswalder Oie. There we could carry out our experiments unnoticed throughout the year. We had a range of over 250 miles eastwards along the Pomeranian coast.
Now to raise the money. Dornberger had always believed in ‘demonstrating our wares in front of the prominent people who sat on the money bags’, and he now arranged a demonstration for General Wernher von Fritsch, Commander-in-Chief of the German army. Von Fritsch listened patiently to ‘a short lecture illustrated with coloured drawings and many diagrams’ and was then shown three static rocket engines at full thrust. ‘Hardly had the echo of the motors died away in the pine woods’, recorded Dornberger, ‘than the general assured us of his full support provided we used the funds to turn our rocket-drive into a serviceable weapon of war. Bluntly and dispassionately he put the all-important question: “How much do you want?”
By a master-stroke of military diplomacy, Dornberger next managed to interest the head of the Development Branch of the Air Ministry in rocket propulsion, describing ‘in glowing terms the possibilities of using rocket motors for launching heavy bombers’, and the latter next infected General Kesselring, Director of Aircraft Construction, with his own enthusiasm. In April 1936, a decisive date in the rocket story, both Luftwaffe men, plus Dornberger, von Braun and their own chief, General Karl Becker of the Army Weapons Office, met to agree terms for cooperation between the two services. The Luftwaffe Works Department, it was agreed, would build the station, but the army would administer it, and though there would be separate army and Luftwaffe divisions the running expenses would be shared. An Air Ministry official was immediately dispatched to negotiate with the owners of the site, the city corporation of the nearby town of Wolgast, and he telephoned that evening to say the deal was clinched at a price of 750,000 marks, £66,250 at the then rate of exchange.1
For Germany and the world 1936 was the year Hitler occupied the demilitarized Rhineland – and the Western democracies, by doing nothing to stop him, ensured him the wholehearted support of the hitherto hesitant German general staff. For the rocket team it was the year they planned the layout of Peenemünde, saw construction started, and mapped out the future pattern of their research. Already they had realized that to build a projectile large enoug
h to accommodate the complicated motor, fuel and guidance systems they must ‘think big’ and, just as the A-1 had been replaced by the A-2 before the former had ever flown, so now they decided to press on to a more ambitious design still, the A-3, designed purely to give experience and information. This ‘research’ rocket was none the less an impressive sight, standing almost 25 ft (7.6m) high, 2 ft 5 in (0.75 m) in diameter, and weighing 1654 lb (750 kg). The motor developed a thrust of 3300 lb (1500 kg) burning the same fuel as the A-1, a mixture of liquid oxygen and alcohol, as here the research team were sure that they were working on the right lines.
Military and public relations considerations, too, argued in favour of omitting the usual small-scale stages of development, as Dornberger later recalled:
Hitler's Rockets: The Story of the V-2s Page 2
