In London his report was dismissed as an invention, deliberately planted by the Nazis to confuse the British authorities. But then it came to attention of a brilliant young physicist, R. V. Jones, recently appointed Churchill’s head of scientific intelligence. He felt that the breadth and coherence of the document was a sign of its reliability; all the scientific details checked out and he was convinced that it could not possibly be a work of fiction, planted to deceive. Jones was a key figure in the development of radar, and noted that the Germans were also trying to bring radio direction finding (RDF) into use. Jones vehemently argued against the accusation that the information was planted. If the Germans were doing this, he maintained, they wouldn’t wish to give the game away. And if they weren’t, their failing to have done so would be an obvious admission of failure. Only a ‘genuinely disaffected’ person would write thus, argued Jones, if he wished to reveal everything he knew.
The British Admiralty were not impressed and they continued to maintain that the Oslo Report was a work of fiction. They argued that no single person could have such a broad knowledge of so many different fields. In Britain, as in the United States, and even in Nazi Germany, cooperation and contact between the Army and Navy were virtually non-existent. They saw themselves as rivals, not comrades. But Jones knew that a socially well-connected person could have friends in many places, and insisted that the Oslo Report must be true. In one paragraph it claimed that ‘wireless controlled rocket gliders’ were being developed at Peenemünde, and so were what Mayer described as ‘rocket shells’ 30in (80cm) in diameter. Today we cannot tell which the ‘rocket gliders’ might have been. Drones had been developed, but work on the prototypes of the V-1 was still in the future. The ‘rocket shells’ would have been the A-3 rocket, which had a diameter of 27in (68cm) — a reasonable estimate.
In May 1940, just as the teams at Peenemünde were close to designing a monster rocket, Hitler convinced himself that events were moving his way, and the war would soon be over. The British Expeditionary Force that had been dispatched to fight the German Army had been quickly defeated. The Allies had retreated, becoming marooned around Dunkirk on the coast near the border between France and Belgium. They had abandoned their heavy artillery, and feared destruction by the Luftwaffe and the German Army. But, seeing that fighting had virtually ended, Field Marshall Gerd von Rundstedt, Chief of the General Staff, called a halt to hostilities. The lull in action provided a chance for the soldiers to be rescued and, in London, Churchill instructed everyone available with a ship or boat to bring home the troops. Almost 1,000 vessels set off for the coast of the continent, and 338,226 soldiers (123,000 of them French) were brought safely back to Britain by sea. A further 40,000 Allied soldiers remained on the continent; many continued fighting the Germans, some were captured, others made their own way home — some even travelling through neutral Spain to find a way back to England.
Hitler heard reports of the British retreat with immense satisfaction and sensed that they were a spent force. He now began to convince himself that hostilities would be over in a year or so, and he ordered that work should stop on all projects that could not be completed by the time the war was likely to end. Development at Peenemünde was curtailed; and for the next year the very future of German rocketry was under threat.
A fascination with rockets was shared by many private individuals and armed forces around the world, including the USSR, the United States and Britain.
The capricious influence of personal ambitions was felt in Russia, as in Germany. Although Russian research into rockets is often overlooked, Russia had the first rocketry society. In 1924 in Moscow, Fridrikh Tsander proposed the formation of a Society for the Study of Interplanetary Travel and it was constituted under the aegis of the Military Science Division of the N. E. Zhukovsky Air Force Academy. This was essentially a discussion group, and was soon renamed the Society for the Study of Interplanetary Communication.
Among the other societies that formed in the 1930s was the Group for the Study of Reaction Motion in Moscow (MosGIRD) and a similar group in Leningrad (LenGIRD). Sergei Korolev was a key member of MosGIRD and in due course he became senior designer of the Soviet space rockets. Tsander spear-headed the design of a pioneering experimental projectile, the GIRD-X rocket.
The Jet Propulsion Research Institute (RNII) was created in September 1933 through the merger of the Gas Dynamics Laboratory (GDL) in Leningrad — now St Petersburg — and MosGIRD in Moscow. Ivan Kleimenov, the former chief at the GDL, was assigned to lead the RNII which began work on liquid-fuel ballistic missiles. Engineer A. I. Polyarny worked on an experimental R-06 rocket which was successfully launched in 1937. It reached an altitude of over 13,000ft (4,000m).
During the following year, the RNII was renamed NII-3. The initiative was short-lived, however, for a tragedy was about to happen. In June 1937, Soviet citizens heard the shocking news that Marshall Mikhail Nikolayevich Tukhachevsky, a leading member of the Bolshevik party, had been dramatically executed by order of Stalin as an ‘enemy of the people’. Tukhachevsky was a patron of NII-3, and the Institute’s director and his deputy were soon executed, while leading engineers Sergei Korolev and Valentin Glushko were given long prison terms. Research on liquid-fuel rockets was abandoned, and NII-3 could henceforth produce only unguided short-range Katyusha rockets. Just as Hitler had curtailed rocket research in Germany in 1940, Stalin’s personal paranoia had destroyed Russia’s high-technology rocketry research. The most successful missile the Russians perfected was the Katyusha rocket which was launched in batches from trucks, tractors, trains and tanks. The launchers were also installed on ships. The early production-line Katyusha was officially designated the M-13 and was 71in (180cm) long, 5.2in (13cm) in diameter and weighed 92lb (42kg). The propellant was a simple solid charge of nitrocellulose with a single nozzle surrounded by four stabilising fins. A warhead of 48lb (22kg) could be propelled up to 3.4 miles (5.4km). The impact of the Katyusha was in the mass delivery — a battery of several launchers would deliver more than 4 tons of high explosive as rockets rained down across a 10 acre (4 hectare) area. Although it then took time to reload and re-set the launcher, the effect of the bombardment was devastating — and the characteristic sound of so many rockets roaring through the air simultaneously was highly demoralising to the enemy.
In Japan there was a clear recognition of the potential importance of rockets, but relatively little that the Japanese scientists could do about it. Japan is a nation that lacks natural resources, and at the time had limited industrial experience. Like many centralized states, it had a cumbersome bureaucracy and a tendency for rival organizations to seek to outdo each other.
In the early years of World War II, both the Imperial Japanese Army and Navy were looking at developing 8in (20cm) rockets. The Army’s 8in rocket was a spin-stabilized projectile equipped with six vents to impart both spin and propulsion. It was designed to be launched from a Type 4 Rocket Launcher, in reality a mortar. By contrast, the Japanese Navy developed their own rival version. Their 8in rocket was designed to be launched from simple wooden troughs or even from holes in the ground.