In 1936 the army and Luftwaffe met to agree the layout of the vast new research centre at Peenemunde on the German Baltic coast. The army occupied the western half, the Luftwaffe the eastern. It cost 11 million marks in 1936, with a further 6 million in 1937. Becker’s annual operating budget was 3.5 million marks. These figures represented a large amount for what was, after all, speculative research; but the total German military expenditure in 1935/6,2.772 thousand million reichsmarks, rose to 5.821 the next year.24 The rocketeers owed much of their success in achieving these resources to the ‘entirely new, fantastic, unbureaucratic, fast moving, decisive’ character of the Luftwaffe administration.25
Perhaps the greatest irony of the rocket was in its secrecy; rumour and dread might have been of some effect as a deterrent in 1938 or 1939; as it was, when news of the rocket began to leak out in 1943 it provoked serious alarm, as will be seen in a later chapter. Hitler is quoted as saying, when he had observed a film of a successful launch, that “if we had had these rockets in 1939 we should never have had this war.”26 But by 1943 it was too late; Britain was too committed to the war, had powerful allies, and the future seemed too bright for the rocket to have anything but a nuisance effect.
The thrust of the rocket was designed to be 55,000lbs (25 tons). Its eventual range was around 200 miles, reaching a height of 60 miles on its journey. It would weigh 2.87 tons empty, and contain a launch weight of 4.9 tons of liquid oxygen and 3.8 tons of alcohol. It was maintained in position during ascent by gyroscopes, and was controlled during the initial firing only, following a ballistic path thereafter. Power was cut off after a predetermined time by a gyro functioning as an integrating accelerometer, although some 10% of missiles were produced with the originally planned radio controlled cutoff system, which the Germans believed would be subject to allied electronic interference. These devices operated servomotors which controlled tabs on each of the rocket’s four large fins, together with four graphite tabs in the jet nozzle.27 The missile was not ‘radio controlled’ in the sense that it followed a guide beam for its whole journey, although some 20% were guided for the first few moments of flight in this way28. It was launched from a small concrete platform by mobile teams, although vast bunkers to store, protect and launch the missile and its fuel were also built (chiefly at Hitler’s insistence).
Another idea for long-range bombardment, which has a surprisingly long history, was that of the pilot-less aeroplane. Victor de Karavodine patented a pulse jet engine, that is, an engine which works by a rapid series of gas explosions inside a combustion chamber, in Paris in 1907. In the same year Rene Lorin proposed the use of a pilot-less aircraft, stabilised by gyros and with an altitude control using the pressure of the atmosphere, for long-range bombardment. His proposed machine was to be powered by either ram jet or a pulse jet. By 1909 Georges Marconnet had designed an improved pulse-jet.29
In Germany Fritz Gosslau, who had designed radio controlled target drones in the Great War, gained a degree in aeronautical engineering, and in 1926 began work in the aero engine department at Siemens, transferring to the Argus Engine Company in 1936. Here he designed a radio controlled target drone, the Argus AS292, of which the Luftwaffe promptly ordered a hundred.
In 1939 Dr Ernst Steinhoff, of the Luftwaffe Research Centre at Peenemunde, called for a pilot-less aircraft for use against enemy targets, and Argus took up the challenge. However, their design, powered by a piston engine, had a speed of only 280 miles per hour, which would have made it hopelessly vulnerable to fighter attack. The flying bomb would wait for war, for a perfected pulse jet engine, and the need to arrest the declining political fortunes of the Luftwaffe, before its full development. The reversal of the Versailles treaty, the occupation of the Rhineland, the absorbtion of Austria, the destruction of Czechoslovakia by treaty and then by seizure, a cold pact with the Soviet Union and the renewal of tension on the frontiers of Poland were all to hasten those fateful events.
In the meantime science in the Third Reich, although well funded, lost some of its best brains. Between 1901 and 1932, German Jews won more Nobel prizes for science than the whole of the United States, gaining a quarter of all those awarded to Germans.30 This collection of intellect in so small a circle – some two million souls – seems as notable, and as inexplicable, as the intellectual greatness of Periclean Athens, itself set in the glories of Greece, as the Jews were set amid the formidable talents of their German Christian compatriots. Perhaps the acquisition of two languages in the formative years assists in abstract thought, at which they excelled. They excelled in the theatre, in literature, in music. They excelled in business and finance. Although Germans first – some 12,000 died in the war – they were part of an international community of Jewry; but in a similar manner, scientists and scholars were themselves part of an international community, although losing none of their patriotism for that reason.
But the European Jews had also excelled in revolution. In Hungary, in Russia, in Germany itself, Jews were at the forefront of the revolutionaries. The regime in Hungary, led by the Jewish Bela Kun, had 25 of 32 of its commissars Jewish; in Germany, Rosa Luxemberg, Eisner, Toller, Levine were Jewish: five of the seven leaders of the Bavarian revolution were Jewish; in Russia Trotsky, Zinoviev, Kamenev, Litvinov were Jews, and Lenin had some Jewish ancestry. The great and unforgivable fault of the Jews, their Achilles heel, was that they seemed to excel in everything, for good or ill, in revolution or stable government, in extortion or religion, as criminals or lawyers, as well as mathematicians and scientists. They could thus be accused of being at the heart of virtually anything you wished. For this dangerous excellence German Jewish scholars were expelled from their posts in the German academic world.
With this extraordinary measure the popular dictator gained his revenge, satisfied his constituents, and imperilled his nation. The nature of Nazism was unveiled to the wide world, the implacable antagonism of a gifted group was aroused, and the powers of the west were stirred from their dreams of peace and security. A historian in the fourth millennium, pursuing his dusty and obscure researches into the long vanished world of the second world war, might, amid the crimes which will undoubtedly stain the third, be less surprised by those of the second millennium; but his incredulity will surely be aroused by the deliberate rejection or exile of a scientific community, which constituted Germany’s strength in peace and war, by a leader who was very well aware of the value of technically superior weapons31. A more ruthless and cynical man might have dissembled his hatred, and attracted as many scientists or technologists as he could – what could a more stupid man have done?
Thus the growing scientific community at Peenemuende continued their clandestine researches while the potential of the wider scientific base around them, although still large, was contracted. Abstract science, from which new technologies grow, was scorned; national socialist science and technology, under the pressure of war and defeat, would gradually turn to an enchanted world of heroic self sacrifice and gigantism, where salvation seemed to lie in child warriors who would pilot flying bombs or powered gliders against modern bombers, or in tanks weighing 120 tons, or in wooden jet fighters or rocket aeroplanes which would glide back to earth after each mission. As this lurid glow gradually penetrated the gloom of defeat which fell over the Third Reich as the second world war progressed, the liquid fuelled rocket would seem more and more promising, not as a battlefield weapon, but as a bringer of retributive terror.
PART II