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

We had made a beginning.

Major-General Walter Dornberger, recalling December 1934

When in the early evening of Friday, 8 September 1944, two loud explosions echoed across London they caused no particular alarm. The population had become accustomed during five years of war to unexplained noises in the distance, even when, as on this occasion, no warning had sounded. In Whitehall, however, these sudden detonations were not misinterpreted. In many an office ministers, civil servants, government scientists and intelligence officers looked pointedly at each other, aware not merely that a new phase in the bombardment of London, but that a new era in the whole history of warfare, had begun. To the enemy armoury of manned bomber and pilotless aircraft had been added a new and even more formidable weapon, the long-range rocket.

The history of the rocket as a short-range, tactical weapon was in fact longer than that of ordinary firearms. Rockets had been employed by the Chinese in defence of a town besieged by the Mongols in AD 1232, and had been used by a rebellious Indian ruler against the British around 1780. In 1807 the British themselves had employed ‘Congreve’s Rockets’, named after the Colonel Congreve who had developed them, against Boulogne. They made their appearance in the United States during the attack on Fort McHenry, Baltimore, in 1814 and became immortalized in a famous poem later adopted, under a different name, as the United States national anthem:

So popular did rockets become during the nineteenth century that they seemed for a time likely to replace conventional artillery, but the development of rifled barrels and more powerful explosives had by 1900 restored the pre-eminence of the field-gun and mortar. Rockets had invariably up to now been battlefield weapons, not used for long-range bombardment, and by far the longest flight of a projectile achieved in the First World War was that of the 25 lb (11.5 kg) shell fired by the ‘Paris Gun’ which between March and July 1918 bombarded the French capital from a range of 75 miles. (To the fury of artillerymen, it was often wrongly described as ‘Big Bertha’, a conventional heavy mortar used on the western front.)

The Treaty of Versailles, by limiting the calibre of weapons with which the future German army, also severely restricted in size, could be equipped, encouraged the Army Weapons Department in Berlin to search for new types of armament which would not violate its provisions while providing the maximum fire power. Numerous articles in technical and popular magazines drew attention to the progress, usually vastly exaggerated, supposedly being made in rocket development. ‘Each individual inventor’, observed one young scientist with a special interest in ballistics, Walter Dornberger, ‘maintained a feud with everyone else who took an interest in rockets’, and to boost their claims to public money the researchers ‘were forced to resort to the inflated language of publicity propaganda’. All this was now to change, for in 1930 the Ballistic Council of the Army Weapons Department selected Dornberger to run its rocket research programme, a post for which he was ideally suited by both background and temperament.

The son of a pharmacist, Walter Dornberger had joined the artillery in August 1914, at the age of nineteen, and served throughout the war, later attending the Berlin Technical Institute before rejoining the army. In 1930 he was a thirty-five-year-old captain, intensely interested in rockets but with his feet firmly on the ground. ‘We wanted’, he wrote later, recalling his first two years of struggling with impractical visionaries, ‘to have done once for all with theory, unproven claims and boastful fantasy and to arrive at conclusions based on a sound scientific foundation.’ During his visits to the airfield in Berlin where the Amateur German Rocket Society carried out its experiments, he was, he later admitted, ‘struck ... by the energy and shrewdness with which’ one ‘tall, fair young student, with a broad, massive chin, went to work and by his astonishing theoretic knowledge’. When General Becker, in charge of the Army Weapons Office, authorized the creation of an expanded research unit, this young man, Werner von Braun, headed Dornberger’s ‘list of proposals for technical assistants’.

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.