As we kept on pestering the army chiefs for money for continued development, we were told that we should only get it for rockets that would be capable of throwing big loads over long ranges with a good prospect of hitting the target. In our youthful zeal we promised all that was asked, never suspecting what difficulties would arise in consequence.
For professional reasons, too, Dornberger was eager to produce a missile of sensational range and power:
I had been a heavy gunner. Gunnery’s highest achievement to date had been the huge Paris Gun during the First World War. It could fire a 21 cm [8.2 in] shell with about 25 lb [11.5 kg] of explosive about 80 miles. My idea of a first big rocket was something that would send a ton of high explosive over 160 miles . . . double the range of the Paris Gun.
Already by the spring of 1936 the main features of the real objective of the research team, an operational rocket soon to be known as the A-4, were emerging. Dornberger constantly reminded his colleagues that they were not engaged in a search for knowledge for its own sake, pioneering though their work was, but in producing a practical weapon in the foreseeable future. One essential was accuracy:
I stipulated a number of military requirements, among others that . . . for every 1000 feet of range a deviation of only 2 or 3 feet was acceptable, either too far or too short, and the same for lateral deviation . . . stricter than is customary for artillery.
Another need was mobility:
I limited the size of the rocket by insisting that we must be able to transport it intact by road and that it must not exceed the maximum width laid down for road vehicles. If carried by rail the rocket must be able to pass through any tunnel. These points determined the main dimensions, although we were all certain from the start that a slender body would involve less air resistance and give us greater range. It would be for the engineers to find the ideal flying shape.
Because of the lack of knowledge about how such a large object would behave at supersonic speeds, Dornberger and von Braun decided that they needed their own wind tunnel, and a far larger one than any so far built; up to now they had made do by borrowing the tunnel belonging to the Technical High School at Aachen. Even their most loyal supporter, Karl Becker of the Army Weapons Office, ‘looked grave’ when asked to find an estimated 300,000 additional marks (£26,500) but eventually agreed provided another of the twelve departments within the Army Research and Development Branch would share the cost. Dornberger tried them all and struck lucky with the very last. Soon the huge wind tunnel, ‘expected to be the most efficient in the world’, was adding its shape to the hitherto unspoiled skyline of Usedom.
The team now needed a wind-tunnel specialist and successfully ‘poached’ the academic who had helped them at Aachen. They also recruited the leading authority on rocket motors, Dr Walter Thiel, who had formerly had a desk job at Research Branch headquarters and now moved to a test bench at Kummersdorf. Thiel, although ‘extremely hard-working, conscientious and systematic . . . was’, admitted Dornberger, ‘tremendously ambitious and aware of his own worth. He took a superior attitude and demanded equal devotion from his colleagues. I had to smooth over a good deal of friction’. However, this proved a price worth paying, for this prima donna of the laboratories soon began to make a major contribution, including one immediate advance, ‘the use of welded sheet-steel chambers’ for the rocket motor instead of the light alloys previously considered indispensable.
Another valuable recruit, Dr Steinhoff, was spotted by von Braun at a conference and invited to visit Peenemünde, where, von Braun correctly anticipated, he would be captivated ‘by the big-scale modern plant, the freedom to work, and the prospects of the rocket’. Dornberger found him wandering about Test Stand I, and was astonished when this ‘young man, apparently in his late twenties . . . seized my hands with every appearance of genuine enthusiasm and exclaimed “Sir, you must take me! I’m all yours! I want to stay!” ’ Stay he did, not merely abandoning the academic post he was about to take up but drawing ‘a whole train of skilled scientists after him’.
By May 1937 work on Peenemünde was sufficiently far advanced for most of Dornberger’s team, now totalling nearly a hundred, to move there, though Dr Thiel and five of his assistants did not follow them until the summer of 1940. Ultimately Peenemünde was to cost the German taxpayer between £25 and £40 million, but little of this had yet been spent and conditions were still primitive when it was decided to test the first completed A-3 at the new test centre on Greifswalder Oie, the tiny island, five miles from Usedom and seven and a half from the nearest town, Rügen, which Dornberger had identified on his first visit as ideal for the purpose. A mere 1100 yards long by 300 wide, ‘with a steep, loamy coast, lashed by storm and surf in winter’, and standing only 60 feet above the surrounding waves, Greifswalder Oie in 1937 contained only a handful of houses, a lighthouse, linked to the main settlement by a single rough road, and an inn, presided over by an innkeeper of ‘inexhaustible good humour’, which doubtless increased still further as the island became ‘like a swarming anthill’, producing a sensational increase in his trade.
Dornberger was fully conscious of the drama which surrounded the successive tests of the rockets. For none were preparations more elaborate than for this first trial of the A-3 for all the facilities had to be brought by sea to this remote islet and the test stand had to be constructed under conditions more appropriate to the front line than to a sophisticated scientific research project. Dornberger’s sharp eye noted, and recorded in loving detail, each new arrival in the ‘tiny fishing harbour on the south-west coast’ of Greifswalder Oie:
One day a number of small motor launches filled with building personnel and surveyors . . . arrived in the little harbour. Next came a large vessel of unusual appearance, such as had never been seen before in that part of the Baltic. She carried building materials and . . . had been a car and passenger ferry. . . . A typical example of mid-nineteenth-century shipbuilding, she possessed large cabins with decrepit furniture upholstered in red plush, a quantity of gleaming brass fittings and mountings, towering upper works and a high funnel. . . . The next to arrive were the harbour dredgers and barges.
All this was only the start of months of frenzied activity:
A bustle now began with which the island was wholly unfamiliar. The harbour was dredged. Berths and landing facilities had to be created for big vessels and heavy cargoes. The cart track to the uplands was given a firm surface of planks. In front of the storm-topped coppice that stood to the east of the track a square concrete platform went up. A pit was excavated opposite to it, at the edge of the forest, and a dug-out was built.
The builders and builders’ labourers departed. Engineers and craftsmen took their place. Then came more builders. Lines and cable after cable were laid between the shelter and the central point of the platform. Dug-out, lighthouse and inn were connected by telephone. The dug-out was transformed into an observation post with lookout slits and gauges of all descriptions on the walls. . . . In the coppice immediately behind the shelter two big open clearings were made and levelled off. . . . Generators were unloaded at the harbour and brought to the coppice. Wiring was laid for electric light. Petrol, materials and tools arrived by sea. Weeks passed in a whirl of activity.
It was a red-letter day when the rockets themselves arrived:
One day at the end of November the ferry-boat delivered two large boxes painted dark grey. They were 21 feet long and 4½ feet in depth and breadth. These giants’ coffins were unloaded with great care and cautiously conveyed in a heavy lorry to the tent. There they were guarded day and night. Shortly afterwards two further chests of this type were unloaded and taken into the tent.
Word of the forthcoming test had spread, and it had become a matter of prestige to be present, as well as one of genuine scientific curiosity:
In the end about one hundred and twenty men of science and engineers had assembled. Anyone connected in any way with our rocket wanted to be there. We had had to set a li
mit to the number, but . . . when I finally came to check the list I found that the telephone operators were doctors of physics and mathematics, the M. T. drivers qualified engineers, and the kitchen staff made up of designers and experts in aerodynamics. Even the humblest posts were occupied by technicians or enthusiastic executives. . . . Then it started raining. The rain poured down and the wind rose. It whistled over the island from the north, whipped the bare branches of the stunted trees and blew through the window crevices of the houses. It tore up the tent. It hurled gigantic waves against the island and thunderous breakers dashed over the stone walls of the harbour. The cold became intense. The bad weather forced us to postpone operations. But it went as quickly as it had come. The sky grew clear and the wind blew steadily from the east. The weather forecast sounded favourable. We made final preparations. . . . We now had to work fast. The rocket would have to be launched before winter storms set in and the Baltic froze between the islet and the mainland. We baptized our missiles with liquid oxygen. Then at last we were ready for them. One of the chests was carefully hauled out of the tent and on to the platform. After the top and bottom had been removed the box was pushed against the overturned four-legged firing table and set upon it by means of a block and tackle. . . . Scaffolding protected by awnings gave access to the parts of the rocket which had to be serviced before launching. The checking began, but we were held up again and again by short circuits, insulating difficulties, trouble with the control gear, the reducing valve and the fuel valves. . . . The specialist engineers toiled, fetched missing spare parts from the mainland and checked over connections. . . . At last we were able to fix a time for the first launching. The ferry-boat delivered liquid oxygen. The rocket was tanked up and the control gear given current. The working scaffolding was taken down. . . . The rocket now stood in the vertical position on the firing table. Its slender, gleaming body in its aluminium skin was some 21 feet long, with a diameter of nearly 3 feet.
What followed on that December day in 1937, three years after the first research had started at Kummersdorf, proved a massive disappointment. The launching turned out such a failure that Dornberger could not bring himself to describe it and ‘eyewitness accounts from the staff were wildly contradictory’. But Dornberger was not the man to give up at the first rebuff:
We decide to venture on a second launching. I watched, from the lighthouse, how the second rocket rose from the ground. The same thing happened again. Soon after the start it made almost a quarter-turn about its longitudinal axis, turned into the wind and, after climbing a few hundred feet, ejected the parachute. Then the motor stopped burning and the rocket fell into the sea near the precipitous east coast of the island.
Before they could try again, having decided to leave out the recovery parachute, the fog came down and the scientists crowded into the inn for a melancholy inquest on the recent failures. The moment the fog cleared they went back to the launching site:
According to the weather forecast, rain, snow, gales and a cold snap were to be expected within a few days. We had to hurry. But even the next two launchings gave no better result. Immediately after rising the rocket took the line of least resistance, turned into the wind and at a height of between 2500 and 3500 feet turned over and fell into the sea.
This premature splashdown, so different from the triumphant flight they had hoped for, left the rocket team depressed, and it was a sad voyage back to the mainland:
As we ran into the Peene estuary in our motor-boats late in the afternoon, when it was already getting dark and blowing hard, the icy north-westerly gale sent high black waves slapping down on the foredeck and away over the upper works. Rain and snow made visibility difficult. We were feeling subdued, almost despondent. But not hopeless. Despite all our failure we were still convinced that we should pull it off.
Already they had decided that the four A-3s they had tested had simply been blown off course from the start by the stiff north-east wind and that what was needed was a tenfold increase in the power of the control gear and in the speed of the rudder vanes it operated. Like a general who, with centre and flanks crumbling, plans to attack, Dornberger decided to abandon the A-3 and press on to a far more ambitious model, the A-5, designed specifically to provide data applicable to their real goal, the A-4. The motor, the outstanding success of their work so far, remained unchanged, and efforts were now concentrated on the control mechanisms and the missile’s aerodynamic properties. The famous Zeppelin aircraft works at Friedrichshafen provided a wind tunnel to test ‘the stability of the A-5 with the new tail surfaces’, the Graf Zeppelin Flight Research Institute at Stuttgart devised two new types of parachute to slow it down and return it to earth, while a draughtsman at Kummersdorf came up with a money-saving idea, making the rocket’s external vanes of graphite instead of molybdenum, which cut the cost of this item from 150 RM to 1.5 (£13.25 to 13p). By the autumn of 1938 four A-5 rockets, complete except for the guidance mechanism, had been launched from Greifswalder Oie. All had reached a height of five miles and had approached the speed of sound without the A-3’s instability; that was one giant hurdle climbed.
In March 1938 Austria was forcibly incorporated in the Reich, in September Britain and France were publicly humiliated at Munich, and in March 1939 the rest of Czechoslovakia was seized in plain defiance of the recent agreement. These events simply seem to have passed Dornberger and his subordinates by. Of far greater important to them was the Führer’s visit that same month to Kummersdorf, though it was not an obvious success. Hitler said barely a word, even when watching the testing of a horizontally suspended rocket motor, which usually set visitors gasping in admiration. He did show a flicker of interest in the A-4 and asked how long it would take to develop – Dornberger was evasive in answer – but spoiled things by telling his hosts, over his frugal lunch of mixed vegetables and mineral water, that his only previous contact with the rocket world had been back in his Munich days, with a rocket enthusiast who was a hopelessly impractical dreamer. Hitler, Dornberger decided – a verdict from him which came close to disloyalty – ‘had no feeling for technological progress’, but he consoled himself with the knowledge that ‘Colonel-General von Brauchitsch’ – Fritsch’s successor as army Commander-in-Chief – ‘and the few others who had seen the demonstration had given . . . expression to their admiration and approval of what we had accomplished in so few years’.
Von Brauchitsch’s support was now to prove all important. On 5 September 1939, two days after Britain and France had declared war on Germany, he agreed to give the A-4 project the highest possible priority, and Dornberger returned from his headquarters, jubilant, to witness the first A-5 tests on the Greifswalder Oie. It was a glorious autumn day on which the previously inhospitable island looked its best; permanent buildings had now replaced the tents and huts of two years before, and Dornberger looked around at these signs of progress with warm approval:
Facing north, in the direction of the firing point, stood the long and massive Measurement House, dazzlingly white in the sunshine, with its workshop, oscillograph room, offices, and flat roof reached by an outside stairway. There were concreted roads, concrete observation shelters, and a concrete apron of considerably enlarged size. The scaffolding which covered the awnings had been replaced by an armour-plated working tower which could be wholly closed in and lowered for the take-off. To bring the rocket, painted bright yellow and red, to the firing position, it was pushed through the detachable roof of the lowered tower and both were then raised by means of a cable winch.
What happened when the rocket was launched was also very different from that day of unhappy memory nearly two years before:
The first rocket shot up from the firing table. It rose vertically in the azure sky. It did not turn about its longitudinal axis and did not yield to the wind. The projectile rose steadily higher and higher, faster and faster on its course. . . . The backs of our necks ached as we stared aloft. . . . At a height of nearly five miles, after 45 seconds of burning time
, the tanks run dry. . . . The speed of the rocket caused it to rise still higher, though it had lost its motive power. At last it reached the peak of its trajectory and slowly turned over. At that moment von Braun pressed the button transmitting the radio order for parachute release and a tiny white point appeared close to the flashing, sunlit body of the rocket. This was the braking parachute. Precisely two seconds later von Braun pressed another button, which released the big supporting parachute. The rocket . . . glided slowly down, hanging quietly from the shrouds . . . and after a few minutes it dropped in the water outside the mole with a splash that glittered in the sunshine. . . . Our launch immediately left the harbour and in little more than half an hour the rocket, its bright paint easily seen among the dark waves, was hauled aboard.
The A-5 had achieved, on its first flight, a range of eleven miles and reached a height of seven and a half miles, leaving Dornberger well content:
What we had successfully done with the A-5 must be equally valid, in improved form, for the A-4. . . . I could see our goal clearly and the way that led to it. I now knew that we should succeed in creating a weapon with a far greater range than any artillery.
Hitler's Rockets: The Story of the V-2s Page 3
