PEENEMÜNDE AND THE A-4
A new test facility had been in the minds of the rocket group for some time before von Braun’s June 1935 memorandum. According to Dornberger, “our area at Kummersdorf had long since become too small for us. Even at the firing of our powder rockets we were never quite at ease” because of the possibility that the devices might go astray. Liquid-fuel rockets were likely to be even more unreliable. For that reason the A-2s had been launched from Borkum, but that involved an elaborate and inconvenient expedition. Secrecy was another consideration; engine testing was very noisy. Finally, developing a large ballistic missile obviously required much more extensive facilities, something that became feasible with the free-spending Luftwaffe on the scene.17
Dornberger, who returned to head rocket development on March 1, 1936, recalls that von Braun had been searching for an appropriate firing range along the Baltic coast since mid-December 1935. The young engineer found an excellent location on the island of Rügen, but the German Labor Front, the mandatory Nazi union for all workers and employers, had claimed it as a beach resort. It was thus quite by chance that von Braun found the perfect site:
Christmas 1935 I went home to my father’s farm in Silesia. I told my parents about the new prospects, adding that we were on the lookout for a suitable site from which it was possible to fire rockets over several hundred miles; safety reasons required this site to be situated on the coast.
“Why don’t you take a look at Peenemünde” my mother suggested. “Your grandfather used to go duck-hunting up there.”
I followed her advice and it was love at first sight.
His mother, a baroness in her own right, had grown up on a family estate in the region near the town of Anklam.18
The new site was located on the northern tip of the island of Usedom, about 250 kilometers north of Berlin. It was a sylvan wilderness of dunes, marshes, and forests inhabited by deer and many kinds of wild birds. The relative inaccessibility of the site provided good security, and an offshore island, the Greifswalder Oie, was available as secluded and safe launch site. But Peenemünde was not totally remote. A number of popular summer beach resorts began just south of the site along the coast of Usedom.19
Once von Braun had found the site, things moved quickly. On January 6, 1936, von Horstig and von Richthofen, both now lieutenant colonels, met at the Air Ministry regarding the layout of the new joint center. Twelve days later Ordnance sketched out a division of territory roughly corresponding to the eventual Luftwaffe and Army facilities at Peenemünde-West and Peenemünde-East. Construction was assigned to the Luftwaffe. Dornberger says that decision was made because the rocket group were enamored of the Luftwaffe’s architectural style, which ran toward Nazi neoclassicism. Of much greater importance, however, was the “entirely new, fantastic, unbureaucratic, fast-moving, decisive” character of Luftwaffe administration, to use the words of project engineer Arthur Rudolph. The Ordnance group had often been frustrated by the ponderous and penny-pinching Army bureaucracy in the early years of the program.20
Choosing a site was one thing; arranging for the money to pay for it was another. The Air Ministry started the ball rolling with a promise of 5 million marks. The remaining funds came from the Army in a display of interservice rivalry. Von Braun gives this account:
General Becker… was wrathfully indignant at the impertinence of the Junior Service.
“Just like that upstart Luftwaffe,” he growled, “no sooner do we come up with a promising development than they try to pinch it! But they’ll find that they’re the junior partners in the rocket business!”
“Do you mean,” asked [Lieutenant] Colonel von Horstig in astonishment, “that you propose to spend more than five millions on rocketry?”
“Exactly that,” retorted Becker, “I intend to appropriate six millions on top of von Richthofen’s five!”
In this manner our modest effort[,] whose yearly budget had never exceeded 80,000 marks, emerged into what the Americans call the “big time.”21
The Luftwaffe leadership had little problem spending such a large amount of money on the rocket, but the Army High Command needed further convincing. According to Dornberger, “Becker told me in January 1936, ‘If you want more money, you have to prove that your rocket is of military value.’ ” In March—probably not long after Germany successfully remilitarized the Rhineland in defiance of the Western powers—the Commander-in-Chief of the Army, General Werner Freiherr von Fritsch, was brought to Kummersdorf for rocket motor firings and a detailed briefing. After hearing Ordnance’s plans for the future, he posed the blunt question: “How much do you want?” The answer must have been even more than the 6 million marks promised by Becker. The estimated construction cost of the Army side of Peenemünde alone was 11 million for 1936 and 6 million more for 1937–39, both amounts to be shared equally with the Luftwaffe. A yearly operating budget of about 3.5 million marks was projected for the Army facility.22
Ultimately, to plan for the facilities and to justify this expense to the Army leadership, the ballistic missile had to become more concrete. In late March Walter Dornberger, Wernher von Braun, and Walter Riedel met to specify the characteristics of the A-4. The probable size of the engine was already known. According to Rudolph, the next engine-thrust goal had been set in late 1935 quite arbitrarily at 25 metric tons (55,000 pounds), nearly seventeen times more powerful than the 1,500-kg A-3 engine. Starting from that figure, estimates of engine efficiency, and the ratio of fueled to empty weight of the missile, it was possible to calculate combinations of range and payload. Dornberger cut through the discussions of his subordinates by laying down the following specifications:
I am an old long-range artillerist. The most famous gun up to that time was the Paris gun…. This gun fired 22 pounds over a range of 78 miles, but possessed terrible weight in the firing position and a terrible dispersion.
I wanted to eliminate this unhandy weight of the gun in the firing position by using a single-stage liquid fuel rocket to be launched vertically, and to be programmed later into an elevation of 45 degrees. The rocket should carry a hundred times the weight of the explosives of the Parisian gun [i.e., 1,000 kg]… over twice the range…
Furthermore, he wanted accuracy superior to conventional artillery: 50 percent of the missiles were to fall within a circle of two to three “mils”—artillery language for 0.2–0.3 percent of the total range. At the specified range of about 250 kilometers this accuracy was about half to three-quarters of a kilometer, far better than was feasible, it turned out. The missile’s fins were also to be narrow enough to fit through a standard European railroad tunnel.23
Dornberger’s specifications reveal the flawed thinking that lay behind the German missile program from the outset. The Paris Gun had been the greatest technical accomplishment of German artillerists up to that time, yet it had failed to have much effect on the French in 1918. The gun was a triumph of narrow technological thinking: the technical fascination of being able to break through traditional limits and fire over such unprecedented distances had overwhelmed any rigorous analysis of its likely impact on enemy morale. The interwar German artillery community completely failed to grasp that point, however. Those specialists, led by Becker, saw the gun only in terms of artillery reaching its technological limits in muzzle velocity and range.24 Using the rocket as a ballistic missile certainly promised to eliminate the massive railroad-borne gun carriage and supporting equipment, to abolish all limits on range and to increase payload vastly. Yet the Army Ordnance missile enthusiasts must have understood that the investment required by the Reich would be huge, even if they underestimated the ultimate expenditure on Peenemünde and the A-4 by many times.