Secret Weapons (15 page)

In June 1933 they attempted their first launch of a test rocket at nearby Wolmirstedt, but it did not even leave the 30ft (10m) launch tower. The only successful flight was from Lindwerder Island in one of the numerous lakes that surround Berlin. It is reported to have reached 3,000ft (1,000m) before crashing to the ground only 300ft (100m) from the launch pad, which must have been a highly stimulating experience for the panicking launch crew. Some further tests were conducted from a boat moored in Lake Schwielow in August 1933, but the results were a disappointment with some of the rockets looping uncontrollably across the sky. Eventually, the whole Magdeburg Project was closed down and Nebel received just 3,200 Reichsmarks of the promised grant for his efforts.

The chief of the Army Ordnance Bureau (the Heereswaffenamt), Colonel Carl Becker, was an expert on ballistics. In 1926 he had drafted a short paragraph on military rockets for the
Army Textbook of Ballistics
and in 1929 he issued instructions to contact any amateur rocket societies whose enthusiasts might have useful insights into how rockets could perhaps be developed. Becker was aware that rockets had not been referred to in the Treaty of Versailles, and he knew that there could be no restriction on further research into this potentially important area of ballistics. In the following year, Captain (later Major-General) Walter Dörnberger joined Becker’s office to start work on a possible new solid-fuel rocket with a range of up to 5 miles (8km).

Bureaucracy was quick to play a part. It was decided that the proposals for solid-fuel rockets could best be advanced if there was an official development and testing facility, and the result was the establishment of the Army Ordnance Bureau’s Research and Development Department (the Heereswaffenamt-Prüfwesen, conveniently known for short as the Wa Prüf) at Versuchsstelle Kummersdorf-West. This would become a development laboratory and a testing site for missiles. The Heereswaffenamt-Prüfwesen had been established in 1919 as the Reichwaffenamt (RWA), and adopted the name Heereswaffenamt (HWA) in 1922. As the Nazi Party began to assert its position and Germany began to move to a warlike posture during the 1930s, the task of overseeing the rearmament was handed over to the Army Acceptance Organization (the Heeresabnahmestelle, abbreviated to the Abnahme), a subsidiary of the Army Ordnance Bureau. Whether those involved ever understood it all is far from clear.

For a while, Dörnberger covertly provided funds for the Society for Space Travel but this stopped when he encountered a conflict between his interests in military rocketry, and the enthusiasts’ focus solely on space flight. However his engineers were pragmatists, and research on the solid-fuel rockets quickly showed that their applications would always be limited. Dörnberger soon realized that they were heading nowhere. He knew that he had to speak again with the enthusiasts. Many of them had academic interests in the technology of liquid-fuel rocket development. He was also aware that building rockets is a costly affair and the Society for Space Travel was always short of funds. When in 1932 Von Braun was offered the chance to become a professional rocket developer, rather than amateur enthusiast, he was delighted to accept. His ambitions to develop bigger and better rockets were suddenly within reach, while Dörnberger knew that he was establishing a new facility that would lead him to military pre-eminence. At the time Von Braun joined there was little official enthusiasm for rocketry, but the increased military tensions allowed the Kummersdorf administration to claim a steadily expanding budget. By 1936 the total number of staff was 60, and by the outbreak of war it was almost 300. They were the cream of German rocket enthusiasts and were a new breed; so too were the weapons they were starting to develop.

Dörnberger and Von Braun had very different personal priorities. Dörnberger could envisage the crucial influence of missiles in the military arena, while Von Braun always wanted – more than anything else in the world – to build bigger and better rockets. When the Nazis swept to power in 1933, Dörnberger sensed that the ultimate quest was military supremacy, and he knew that the new generation of rocketry enthusiasts could offer untold benefits to the army of an expansionist state. These new weapons could lead Germany towards world domination. For Von Braun it was different. It was the majesty of the space rocket that lured him on. Dörnberger could see that his military career offered the chance of spectacular professional success, whereas Von Braun recognized that the growing might of the German military machine could be tapped for all the funding, all the technical support and all the security that his private passions demanded.

Under Dörnberger, the research institute at Kummersdorf had established itself as a major facility for the development and testing of a number of rocket-assisted take-off units for aircraft, using solid fuel. Von Braun found himself responsible for conducting the tests under Major Wolfram von Richthofen and Ernst Heinkel. Under Dörnberger’s leadership, the team designed and built their first liquid-fuel Aggregate-1 (A-1) rocket. It was powered by liquid oxygen and alcohol. The fuel and oxidant were forced into the combustion chamber by pressure from a liquid-nitrogen tank and the rocket could develop a thrust of about 660lb (300kg). A heavy gyroscope was installed in the nose cone to stabilize the rocket during flight. Tests showed that the design of the A-1 was flawed. The small liquid oxygen tank concealed within its alcohol fuel tank was prone to failure, with catastrophic consequences. Furthermore, the gyroscope was too far from the middle of the rocket to stabilize it effectively. As a result, the A-1 was abandoned.

The A-2, which soon followed, had alcohol and liquid oxygen tanks that were safely separated from each other, and the gyroscope was located near the middle of the rocket between the two fuel tanks. In December 1934 the first two A-2 rockets were ready. They were dubbed Max and Moritz after cartoon characters in German comics. The cartoons had first emerged in 1865 from the pen of the German caricaturist Wilhelm Busch, who is said to have had a profound influence on the then-new comic strip industry in the United States. The two rockets bearing the affectionate nicknames were launched from Borkum, an island off the Dutch coast in the Baltic Sea. Both reached about 6,500ft (2,000m) and the military authorities were pleased with the results. In 1935, Carl Becker (now a general) put together a proposal to Hitler in which he advocated the development of a large long-range rocket for the bombardment of enemy territory. It would, he impressed upon the Führer, offer a highly intimidating weapon against any future enemy of the Reich. Hitler considered the proposal, and rejected it out of hand. There was no future for large rockets in the German military, concluded the Führer. When they wanted to dominate a nation, they would use political power or military might to do so. Army missiles need not feature in his plans.

Nevertheless, Eugen Sänger, whose proposals for the ‘antipodal bomber’ we have already encountered, was thought of by the engineering fraternity as a leading figure in rocket development and was invited to join the research teams at the Air Force Research Centre at Trauen (between Berlin and Bremen) to investigate the improvement of rocket motor design. Eschewing highly volatile fuels, and determining to work with more prosaic ingredients, Sänger designed a liquid-fuel rocket motor that ran on ordinary diesel oil and liquid oxygen. He soon had engines running on a static bench for half an hour, at the time an incredible feat. Other specialists were assigned to develop specific areas – telemetry (control systems), fuel combinations and so on – so that the rocket designers had an increasingly detailed knowledge base on which to rely. The majority of these research workers had no idea that they were jointly working on mechanisms that might eventually be used in giant rockets; they were brought in for a specific research project, and secrecy over its eventual purpose was strictly maintained. To the military strategists, and even (at the time) to the German High Command, rockets remained a curiosity and were still seen as being more useful for delivering small payloads, or for assisting the take-off of planes from aircraft carriers. The engineers were aware that they needed to keep the research moving ahead, even if their Führer could not see the point; and so plans for monster rockets were soon to emerge.

Public protests about the noise and danger from the test firings at Kummersdorf meant there was a clear need for a new facility, well away from large populations and with plenty of space for testing larger rockets. In 1935 the decision was taken to find a new, remote location and enquiries began. During the Christmas holidays that followed, Von Braun accepted an invitation to spend some time with friends near the coast of the Baltic Sea. They lived at Anklam, between Stettin and Straslund, by the Peene River. There was an island named Usedom nearby, with just a few inhabitants living on an isolated, rural existence; the Baltic island of Greifswalder Oie lay on the horizon, and beyond that stretched the open Baltic – it was the perfect location for a rocket base. Von Braun reported back to Dörnberger, who asked for more details and later went to inspect the area personally. It was quickly resolved to transfer the research to this new base at the mouth of the Peene River – in German, Peenemünde.

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.

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.