Hitler's Rockets: The Story of the V-2s

by Norman Longmate

  On 15 May 1942 a Photographic Reconnaissance Unit pilot in a Spitfire fitted with long-range tanks, on a routine mission to cover Kiel, also brought back some pictures showing a new airfield and buildings on the island of Usedom. The ‘second phase’ interpreter at Medmenham, concerned with developments not requiring immediate operational response, duly noted ‘heavy constructional work’, in the shape of large circular earthworks like open rings. The ‘third phase’ interpreter, to whom the pictures were then passed, a WAAF officer called Constance Babington Smith, whose job it was to look for long-term trends on the enemy side, mentally registered the name Peenemünde, which was new to her, before filing the photographs away. The Scientific Intelligence Branch of the Air Ministry, where it might have produced some response, was not informed.

  The section headed by Dr Jones was in fact badly overworked. Although it had expanded since 1939, he was still one of only five professionally qualified people trying to keep track of evidence of forthcoming changes in German weapons and equipment in the torrent of paper, amounting to an average of 150 foolscap pages, which descended upon them every day. On 20 November 1942 – a month after the Germans’ first successful test of an A-4 – he wrote to his immediate superior, the Assistant Chief of Air Staff (Intelligence), pleading for more staff:

  There is an extreme danger that something vital will be missed. In view of Hitler’s recent statement that German inventive genius has not been idle in developing new weapons of offence against the country,2 we cannot afford to relax our watch as we have been forced to do. . . . Unless some relief is forthcoming, the present Assistant Directorate cannot accept responsibility for surprises which are likely to be sprung upon us by the enemy without the timely warning which has been achieved in the past.

  Dr Jones had always believed that a few outstandingly able recruits were more valuable than an army of indifferent intellects, not least because the best way of ensuring that one piece of information was correlated with another was the mind and memory of a single individual. His appeal rapidly resulted in his receiving some first-class reinforcements, including a physicist with pre-war industrial and defence experience who spoke German, French, Dutch and Russian; a former RAF intelligence officer with a science degree; and a professor of mathematics, appointed to his chair at the age of twenty-nine. A key position was that of Dr Jones’s assistant, Charles (later Sir Charles) Frank, an Oxford contemporary of his own, and a chemistry specialist, who had worked for two years in Berlin. ‘A theorist’, in Dr Jones’s judgement, rather than ‘an experimenter’, he had nevertheless, while in Germany, done a little unofficial spying on German radar developments at his friend’s request, and had finally joined him at Broadway in November 1940. Charles Frank’s special role was to study closely but critically the material that flowed into the office, including the often long but rarely very informative transcripts of the interrogation of prisoners of war, and the shorter, but not necessarily more reliable, telegrams that arrived from British representatives abroad.

  Just before Christmas 1942 a telegram, dated 18 December, arrived from Stockholm reporting that a new source, soon afterwards identified as a Danish chemical engineer, had ‘overheard conversation between Professor Fauner of Berlin Technische Hochschule and engineer Stefan Szenassi on a new German weapon. Weapon is a rocket containing five tons explosive with a maximum range of 200 kilometres, with a danger area of 10 kilometres square’. This was much more specific than the vague rumours from unnamed informants so often featured in reports from abroad and its implications were still being considered when a second message, dated 12 January 1943, arrived from Sweden. ‘The Germans’, it asserted, ‘have constructed a new factory at Peenemünde, near Börfhöft, where new weapons are manufactured. . . . The new weapon is in the form of a rocket which has been seen fired from the testing ground.’ As so often, the accuracy of the whole report was called in question because it included one detail too many, which seemed highly dubious. The rocket, it was stated, ‘was previously tested in South America’. Nevertheless the informant seemed genuine, since he included photographs of German airborne radar aerials, of obvious value to the British, their authenticity being soon afterwards confirmed when a night-fighter equipped with them landed in Scotland, its crew having decided they had had enough of the war.

  Between the second Stockholm dispatch and this unexpected confirmation of it, three other reports had also reached London, allegedly originating in Germany during February. One referred to both rockets and ‘rocket guns’, said to exist in large numbers. A second spoke of a rocket 50 – 60 feet in length, 13 to 16½ feet in diameter, with a warhead of 550 lb, already successfully tested at Peenemünde. A third claimed that a rocket with a range of 75 miles, built by Krupps, was ‘being installed on the Channel coast’. This contradictory testimony, all too typical of the raw material of intelligence work, was sufficient merely to arouse suspicion, but other evidence, far more suggestive, was now to arrive from a far more promising source.

  On the afternoon of Saturday, 27 March 1943, a comparative calm hung over the SIS headquarters at 54 Broadway. Several officials had left to enjoy the weekend, and Dr Jones and Dr Frank, who shared an office, were quietly catching up on their paperwork. Charles Frank was, as so often, reading the transcript of a conversation between German prisoners, but this was an unusual one. Prepared five days before, it recorded the exchanges between two German generals, brought together in a ‘bugged’ room after five months of separation following their capture in North Africa. The inadequate microphones of the time meant that the transcript included some frustrating gaps, but what General von Thoma had said to his old friend, General Crüwell, once Rommel’s second-in-command, was still sufficient to arouse the suspicions even of someone not specifically looking out for references to the rocket.

  Von Thoma, realizing that they were near London – probably in fact at Ham Common near Richmond, though he could not have guessed this – began by expressing surprise that they had heard no loud explosions, which suggested that ‘No progress whatever can have been made in this rocket business’. He went on:

  I saw it once with Feldmarschall Brauchitsch. There is a special ground near Kunersdorf [i.e. Kummersdorf]. . . . They’ve got these huge things which they’ve brought up here. . . . They’ve always said they would go 15 kilometres into the stratosphere. . . . You only aim at an area. . . . The major there was full of hope; he said ‘Wait until next year and the fun will start!’

  Von Thoma was, as R. V. Jones knew, the ‘most technically informed’ of the senior officers captured by the Allies, so Jones needed no convincing when ‘Charles Frank . . . looked up and said, “It looks as though we’ll have to take these rockets seriously!” ’ However, much more information was needed before any worthwhile appreciation of the nature of the rocket threat could be made, and as, in his own phrase, ‘a watchdog’ on enemy activities he considered it essential not to ‘bark’ too soon, or too often. He therefore contented himself with informing Lord Cherwell of his anxieties and putting in hand ‘a perfectly normal, if exhilarating’ search for the truth, establishing which was ‘a straight intelligence problem’ involving recognized procedures:

  Agents could be briefed; and in particular there was hope of information coming through the army of foreign labourers that had been recruited to work at Peenemunde. P.R.U. could be asked to photograph the Establishment there. . . . Felkin and his colleagues [who interrogated German airmen] . . . could also be briefed.

  Dr Jones also tried ‘one very long shot’, asking Bletchley and the ‘Y’ Service to keep track of the movements of the 14th and 15th companies of the German Air Signals Experimental Regiment, likely to be called on if the rocket were to be tracked during trials by radar.

  Unfortunately the same transcript was seen by the War Office, which, instead of believing that intelligence material should be kept until a complete picture emerged, favoured distributing the ‘raw’ sources to operational departments piecemeal, so that they c
ould see the evidence, and not merely the experts’ conclusions. As a result, while the Air Ministry was preparing quietly to gather all the information it could about the rocket, the War Office hastened to raise the alarm. On 12 April 1943 General Archibald Nye, Vice-Chief of the Imperial General Staff, informed his fellow Vice-Chiefs of the apparent danger, and, in the absence of the Chiefs of Staff abroad, they agreed that the Prime Minister and Herbert Morrison, Minister of Home Security, responsible for Civil Defence, must be told. General Nye had already consulted two eminent scientists, whose names were later to recur during the rocket investigation : Professor C. D. (later Sir Charles) Ellis, scientific adviser to the Army Council; and Dr A. D. (later Sir Alwyn) Crow, Controller of Projectile Development at the Ministry of Supply, the nearest Great Britain possessed to a Dornberger. The number of people who knew about the rockets now multiplied almost by the hour, for the War Cabinet Secretariat took a hand. One of its senior officials, Brigadier (later Major-General Sir Leslie) Hollis, a regular point of contact between the Cabinet and the Paymaster-General, urged that every department with any possible inerest in the subject ought also to be alerted, including the technical branches of the Air Ministry and the Ministry of Aircraft Production, and perhaps also the Scientific Advisory Council, a high-level panel of scientists from a variety of backgrounds. He also recommended that the Joint Intelligence Sub-Committee, on which all three services were represented and which reported to the Chiefs of Staff, should be asked to study the subject, thus removing it from the Air Ministry’s exclusive concern. By background a soldier, not a civil servant, Hollis may himself have felt that all this might involve endless committee meetings and memo writing and little action, for he went on to make a further suggestion:

  In view of the importance of the subject, the Vice-Chiefs of Staff might care to consider recommending to the Prime Minister that one individual, who could devote a considerable amount of time to the matter, should be appointed to take charge of the investigations, so as to ensure that no aspect is overlooked and that the work is pressed on with all speed.

  The Vice-Chiefs went one better, arguing that the person selected should be drawn from outside the existing intelligence agencies, which ruled out the obvious, Air Ministry, candidate, Dr Jones.

  On 15 April 1943 Major-General Sir Hastings (‘Pug’) Ismay (later General Lord Ismay), who was Chief of Staff to Churchill in his capacity of Minister of Defence, and his personal representative on the Chiefs of Staff Committee, gave formal recognition to the rocket threat in a note to the Prime Minister:

  The Chiefs of Staff feel that you should be made aware of reports of German experiments with long-range rockets. The fact that five reports have been received since the end of 1942 indicates a foundation of fact even if details are inaccurate.

  4

  A DECISIVE WEAPON OF WAR

  The Führer considers that this is a decisive weapon of war.

  Albert Speer, German Minister of Munitions, 8 July 1943

  The cheerful atmosphere that hung over Peenemünde after the spectacularly successful test of 3 October 1942 soon evaporated. To produce the A-4 on a large scale for operational use by December 1943, the earliest practicable date, it needed to be given super-priority at once, not merely for chemicals, machinery and a variety of ancillary items but, in Dornberger’s words, for ‘production planners, statisticians, designers and engineers’. The ordinary channels were quite inadequate to cope with a totally new weapon of this complexity. ‘The state’, wrote Dornberger, ‘must either make up its mind at last to put the A-4 project into operation in earnest . . . or else work on the long-range rocket ought to be given up.’ Dornberger pressed his case in memos ‘to the highest authorities both civilian and military’, prepared in octuplicate, no less, and made numerous ‘begging expeditions’ (as he called them) to Berlin, but, he complained, ‘nothing was said about any raising of priority or orders to the Ministry of Munitions to give us all possible assistance’.

  Dornberger’s frustration was understandable, but he was not as ill used as he suggested. On 22 December 1942 Hitler signed a decree drafted by his Munitions Minister, Albert Speer, authorizing the mass-production of the A-4, though failing to give it special priority. On the following day the German War Office officially confirmed that the pilot factory at Peenemünde had as large a claim on German resources as any other ‘giant industrial concern’ and gave Dornberger plenary powers over its production both there and at Friedrichshafen, where the managers of the Zeppelin works had offered floor space for a production line. At a meeting in Berlin on 8 January 1943 Albert Speer promised on his own authority as head of the Todt organization, responsible for major constructional projects, to put in hand the building of launching sites on the Channel coast and, in his capacity of Minister of Munitions, assigned one of his most dynamic officials to take charge of A-4 production in cooperation with Dornberger – Gerhard Degenkolb, a successful businessman with little regard for established procedures, a German ‘Beaverbrook’.

  Dornberger took against Degenkolb the moment the latter entered Speer’s office:

  In came a man of middle height and middle age, with a well nourished appearance. In his round, sallow, face, the obliquely set, keen blue eyes darted restlessly hither and thither. Prominent swellings above his eyebrows and the clearly-marked veins in his temples were evidence of a hasty temper. . . . Degenkolb’s completely bald and spherical head, his soft, loose cheeks, bull neck and fleshy lips revealed a tendency towards good living and sensual pleasures, while the restlessness of his powerful hands and the vigour of his movements were evidence of vitality and mental alertness. . . . Degenkolb shook hands with me and promised to work in the closest possible collaboration with me. Then he started telling me about his great successes as chairman of the locomotive production committee. . . . I found myself admiring his energy, his achievements and his ideas. . . . If only the indications of conceit and the repulsive complacency had not been so clearly evident! . . . Many of his phrases indicated a cynically unsympathetic attitude to any organization or scheme which he had not started himself. His claims to exclusive competence were brutally stressed. . . . I noticed that Degenkolb had an absent air and did not even listen to some of my remarks. . . . Degenkolb seemed to belong to that brand of industrialist who automatically assumes that everyone in uniform must be reactionary, narrow-minded and in need of enlightenment. I could already see some stiff fights ahead.

  Degenkolb was, Dornberger admitted, ‘outwardly most friendly’. His reception from the head of the central office of Speer’s Ministry, Karl Otto Saur, was very different. Saur made no secret of his hostility to the whole rocket enterprise, and Dornberger considered him ‘our greatest adversary’, thanks to his contempt ‘for all industrial work initiated or directed by the army’. Certainly on this occasion he behaved with a remarkable lack of discretion:

  Just as I was going to my car, Saur appeared and accosted me.

  ‘I suppose you think you’ve struck it lucky today. . . . But don’t be too sure. . . . You haven’t yet convinced or won me over, any more than you have the Fuhrer.’

  On 11 January 1943 Dornberger attended a meeting at the Army Weapons Office in Berlin where an initial target of around 6000 missiles was agreed, half to be built at Peenemunde and half at Friedrichshafen, and on 15 January Speer formally nominated Degenkolb chairman of the new A-4 committee, responsible for equipping these two assembly plants and subcontracting out the manufacture of the individual components of the A-4. On 24 February the planning board which reported to Degenkolb’s committee circulated its detailed programme, prepared by Detmar Stahlknecht, a former director of a division at the Ministry of Munitions with great experience of organizing the mass production of aircraft and the handling of high-quality steel and lightweight alloys. Unlike Degenkolb, he enjoyed Dornberger’s confidence, and the figures he produced were sensible and realistic. The factory at Peenemunde, he proposed, should turn out five completed A-4s in April 1943, ten in M
ay and twenty in June. Thereafter production would gradually be shared between Peenemunde and Friedrichshafen until each factory was turning out 100 a month, a rate that would rise to 200 in April 1944, 300 in May, 500 in June, 550 in August and 600 in September. This would see 5150 rockets delivered by the end of 1944, a respectable total if not the flood which Dornberger would have preferred. These figures were not, however, good enough for Gerhard Degenkolb, who had his reputation as an industrial miracleworker to consider. ‘He acted’, Dornberger complained, ‘like a burly, unendingly foul-mouthed and dreaded slave-driver’, who refused ‘to grasp that instead of engine bogies we were dealing with extremely delicate potentiometers’ and having ‘inspected the experimental missiles assembly hall and many workshops’ threw off a stream of impractical suggestions for ‘the improvement of working processes and . . . simplifying construction’. Degenkolb now raised the targets from 80, in October 1943, to 300, and from 100, in December 1943, to 300, earmarking an additional factory for the purpose, the Rax works at Wiener Neustadt. This programme Dornberger considered ‘a mere illusion’ which could not possibly be reached, but it was by no means the worst of his troubles, all of which he now attributed to the hated Degenkolb. ‘For him,’ Dornberger complained bitterly after the war, while the memory still rankled, ‘competent authorities, “channels” or any limitation of his scope did not exist. He negotiated over the heads of superiors with anyone he pleased and set people wherever it suited him without the slightest regard for any work they might be doing.’