The most fundamental flaw in their thinking lay in the lack of any well-thought-out strategic concept of how the missile could actually affect the course of a war. Becker, Dornberger, and their associates counted on the psychological shock to the enemy of an unfamiliar and powerful weapon. Once that surprise had passed, they could only picture using the missile as a fairly accurate artillery shell against specific military and industrial targets. Interwar air power advocates, like the Italian General Guilio Douhet, had asserted that the strategic bombing of enemy cities would lead to the collapse of civilian morale, but the artillerists apparently ignored those theories. Dornberger, for example, did not contemplate using the A-4 as a terror weapon against whole cities until 1941. A comparison between the missile and the heavy bomber would have raised uncomfortable questions in any case. The development of that type of aircraft, unlike the ballistic missile, did not require a revolutionary leap in the technology of flight.25
Thus, in a fundamental sense the A-4 was another Paris Gun. It was the product of a narrow technological vision that obscured the strategic bankruptcy of the concept. The fact that Dornberger was also a spaceflight enthusiast, like his chief liquid-fuel rocket engineers—von Braun, Riedel, and Rudolph—only reinforced his tendency to substitute technological enthusiasm for careful strategic thought.
Given the flawed military logic of Ordnance’s ballistic missile program, it is curious that the German Army leadership embraced it so readily. The blinkered strategic vision of German generals during the era of the two world wars is one likely explanation. The training and traditions of the Prussian Army officer corps after the Napoleonic era emphasized operational and tactical excellence at the expense of strategy and grand strategy. The political irresponsibility and strategic incompetence that tradition fostered were only furthered by a lack of effective civilian control over the military in the authoritarian systems of Prussia and the German empire. The result was the paradoxical combination of “battlefield brilliance” and strategic blundering that contributed so much to the “German catastrophe” of the twentieth century. In this context, it is easier to understand how Becker, Fritsch, and other generals might overestimate the effects of the A-4, or their predecessors the impact of the Paris Gun.26
The Army also embraced the ballistic missile because it was the pet project of the artillerists, a branch of the service very prominent in the Army leadership after that ultimate artillery war, World War I. Until Hitler himself took over command in December 1941, all the Army Commanders-in-Chief during the Third Reich came out of the artillery, as did Wilhelm Keitel, Hitler’s chief of staff in the Armed Forces High Command (OKW) after 1938. Every Chief of Army Ordnance in this period, including Becker himself from 1938 to 1940, was an artillery man as well.27
Moreover, Becker and Dornberger probably argued that there was an international missile race in which the Germans had to stay ahead. Zanssen’s 1935 letter to the Air Ministry had mentioned Germany’s “considerable development lead” over other countries. In February and August 1936 Ordnance received news of Robert Goddard’s activities in the United States, including, in all likelihood, his new Smithsonian report, which contained the first substantial public information about his rocket development since the early 1920s. Nothing in that report would have shaken the Ordnance group’s confidence in its lead, nor did they glean any significant new technological concepts from Goddard. The report was not that specific, his patents were unavailable to the Germans, and almost everything he had done had been anticipated in the German-language literature or at Kummersdorf. But the American pioneer’s advances sufficiently paralleled their own to provide an argument for a race with the United States. Dornberger would use such an argument during World War II in his battles for top priority.28
The expensive and militarily questionable ballistic missile program profited as well from the highly advantageous political and military context of the mid-1930s. Becker’s great personal influence on armaments development kept growing; in early 1938 he became Chief of Army Ordnance. Although the Army’s autonomy from Hitler and the Nazi leadership decreased rapidly over time, the senior service could still make some decisions independently, at least in technical questions. If the Army, supported by the politically influential Luftwaffe, wished to invest a lot of money in rocketry, no one in the Nazi hierarchy was likely to object, particularly as the Führer took little interest in what was still, for him, a small program. In any case, rearmament became an irresponsible free-for-all after 1935. Like children in a candy store, the services wanted everything they could order, and Hitler’s demands for as rapid a buildup as possible, combined with weak coordination from the top, resulted in the showering of money upon politically favored programs until the system came up against shortages of skilled labor, foreign exchange, and raw materials in the late 1930s. It was a context in which the ballistic missile program and the Peenemünde rocket center could flourish.29
In the spring of 1936, with the basic configuration of the A-4 in hand and with a firm commitment from the Luftwaffe jointly to fund the Army half of the facility, it was necessary only to get final clearances from the top. On April 1 General Albert Kesselring, head of administration in the Luftwaffe, put his seal of approval on the construction plans for the Peenemünde project. The very same day an Air Ministry official was sent “in a high-powered car” to purchase the land. In Dornberger’s words: “Here was action indeed!” Within weeks bulldozers began to cut into the pristine wilderness to build the facility that would further revolutionize the technology of the rocket.30
THE ALLIANCE DECLINES
The huge increases in spending brought the program increased bureaucratic stature within Army Ordnance. In the summer of 1936 the rocket group was elevated to an independent section under Dornberger. After a number of changes of name and the redesignation of Testing Division as Development and Testing Division in 1938, the rocket section was given the acronym Wa Prüf 11 (Ordnance Test 11).
With his promotion to section head, Dornberger came into his own as the chief administrator of the solid-fuel and liquid-fuel programs. He had contributed a great deal to those programs in the early years; in 1935 he received an honorary doctorate, which Becker had arranged as Dean of the new Faculty of Military Technology at the Technical University of Berlin. But before he left for active duty from late 1934 to early 1936, Dornberger had always been under the command of von Horstig and Schneider, who now moved on to other positions outside the rocket program. The smiling, smooth-talking Dornberger proved himself to be both a master at salesmanship and bureaucratic maneuvering and a talented engineer in control of the complexities of his field. He became a respected leader among the core group of engineers at Kummersdorf and Peenemünde, acquiring the stereotypical Bavarian nickname “Seppi” for his tendency to wear Alpine lederhosen (leather shorts) on informal occasions. From his office in Berlin he energetically protected the rocket group from outside interference. Although extremely loyal to Becker and Ordnance, he was not above fudging paperwork or going outside the strict chain of command to get around some obstacle created by Army bureaucracy.31