In February 1936 the Research Division of the Technical Office hired Sänger anyway for a projected massive aeronautical research establishment near Braunschweig in north-central Germany. Shortly thereafter, the Air Ministry gave him the funds to create a rocket research institute at Trauen, some distance from the main establishment. That institute received a cover name, the Aircraft Test Center, with the apparent intent of obscuring its existence as much from the Army as from foreign intelligence services. The Air Ministry allegedly even asked Sänger to change his name. He refused but signed documents with only the initial “S.” His group began to test a 1,000-kg-thrust liquid oxygen/diesel oil rocket motor in 1939 and drew up a design for a 100-ton-thrust engine, but in 1942 the Air Ministry ended its duplicitous attempt to set up a large rocket-engine program parallel to the Army. There was skepticism about its value to the Luftwaffe. Besides, intense disagreements had arisen between Sänger and the director of the Braunschweig establishment. In any case, the Austrian engineer had never received funds adequate to challenge Peenemünde-East in the high-stakes rocket business.46
The decision to hire Sänger and pursue an independent course may have come about because of the decline of von Richthofen’s influence. He left the Development Division in early 1937, six months after Göring had appointed Ernst Udet, a renowned World War I fighter ace, to head the Technical Office. In the long run Udet was a disastrous choice, being such a poor administrator, but had the virtue of subservience to Göring’s wishes. The expenditure on Sänger’s facility at Trauen could not have been made without the approval of Göring or Udet, and it would have been consistent with their desire to assert independence from the Army.
A final indication of the decline of the Luftwaffe–Army alliance is the breakup of the joint facility at Peenemünde less than a year after it was opened. The cause primarily lay elsewhere than in Luftwaffe policy. A certain Brigadier General Schneider (no relation to the former rocket group member Erich Schneider) was appointed as Commandant of the Peenemünde Experimental Center. As an old-fashioned officer of the combat engineers (Pioneers), he proved to be a poor choice. He was very bureaucratic and even threatened Rudolph with legal action for ordering large quantities of materials in advance. Rudolph’s policy ensured fast progress in development work at the cost of some wastage, but it ran against the tradition of ordering what was needed according to the lowest bid and waiting months for it to show up. Schneider had another run-in with Peenemünde-East over who was to control the receipt of shipments, and he wanted to meddle in technical correspondence between von Braun and Dornberger’s office in Berlin.47
The Peenemünde organization simply did not work. The two facilities were under the authority of the Commandant for some functions and under their respective service administrations for others. The demise of that unwieldy arrangement was hastened by Schneider’s obstructiveness. By the fall of 1937 he was on bad terms with Dornberger and everyone else. According to an October 28 memorandum from Dornberger to Schneider: “The constant small conflicts with the Construction Office and the RLM [Reich Air Ministry] have led to RLM’s desire to separate itself from the Commandant’s Office. The basis for maintaining a general as Commandant has therefore been eliminated.” The Air Ministry officially separated Peenemünde-West from the joint command on April 1, 1938, after notifying the Army that the 1937–38 payment of 1 million marks into the development and test budget of Peenemünde-East would not be continued. In the future the air force would return to paying the actual costs of any work done. As a result of the separation, what remained of the facility became the Peenemünde Army Experimental Center, and Schneider was retired. In the summer of 1938 Leo Zanssen returned to the program as Commandant after serving more than two years as a battery commander and administrator in the solid rocket/chemical warfare units (the Nebeltruppen).48
The joint character of Peenemünde had thus collapsed in less than a year, although daily cooperation and coordination were still a necessity. While the separation was neither a direct product of interservice rivalry nor of a Luftwaffe policy to assert its independence, the net effect was to loosen the rocket alliance further. It is symbolically appropriate that Peenemünde-West eventually put up a fence around its perimeter.
SUCCESSFUL FAILURE: THE A-3
The momentous events of the years after 1935—the rise and decline of the Luftwaffe alliance, the experiments with rocket aircraft, the founding of Peenemünde, and the birth of the A-4—tend to overshadow the primary job of the engineers at Kummersdorf and Peenemünde, which was to carry forward the development of the Ordnance rocket series and its associated technologies. Following the A-2 success in December 1934, the Army planned an ambitious new step. Not only would the A-3 be much bigger, necessitating greatly increased thrust, but above all it would require an active guidance system to replace the crude stopgap measure of a single massive gyroscope.
Developing the new “3B” series of 1,500-kg-thrust engines was the most straightforward part of the job. The basic concept of the A-2 engine was just scaled up: Welded inside the alcohol tank was a long cylindrical combustion chamber. The length of the chamber was intended to give the propellants more time to burn completely. A double wall allowed regenerative cooling by the circulation of the watered alcohol before injection. The injection system was, however, changed under Walter Riedel’s influence to one similar to the Heylandt systems. Whereas the “2B” engines, derived from Raketenflugplatz designs, had only fuel and oxidizer jets pointed at each other, the “3B” engines had a mushroom-shaped injector sticking down from the top of the engine. From the underside of the cap, alchohol jets sprayed upward against liquid oxygen jets coming down from a number of small injectors at the top of the combustion chamber. This innovation increased exhaust velocity from 1,600 m/sec to more than 1,700 because of more efficient combustion, with a resulting increase in performance. But this necessarily worsened the cooling problem because of the increase in the temperature of the burning gases.49
The solution was an endless series of experiments with different aluminum alloys and variations on the basic engine concept. After successfully testing a steel configuration of the 1,500-kg engine in the summer and fall of 1935, the Kummersdorf group went on to test aluminum alloy engines and tankage built by Zarges in Stuttgart and a few other firms that had been let in on the secret. Secrecy was such an obsession that in early 1935 manufacturers were asked to send shipments to a shadow firm under Rudolph’s name in a town next to Kummersdorf, rather than use a military address. The inconvenience of shipping the highly secret components across the country to Kummersdorf and, not infrequently, back to the firms for repairs was a factor in the decision to concentrate manufacturing capability in Rudolph’s workshops when Peenemünde was planned and built. Another factor was growing dissatisfaction with the work of the primary contractor, Zarges, whose small company was based in Stuttgart. Zarges lacked the highly skilled welders necessary to carry out precision work on difficult alloys, and it was not easy to find manufacturing capacity elsewhere. Those experiences reinforced the Ordnance group’s preference for an Army-run facility with “everything under one roof.”50
By contrast, designing and building a three-axis, gyroscopic guidance and control system for a flying rocket was beyond the capability of Army Ordnance. In this case, contracting the whole problem to a company was unavoidable. In 1933 or early 1934 the Navy recommended that the rocket group contact Aerogeodetic, a firm primarily based in Berlin. The Navy had surreptitously bought the Dutch company in 1926 and had used it as a cover for secret work, mostly in heavy ship-based gyroscopic navigation and fire-control systems. A year or two after the Nazi seizure of power the company changed its name to Kreiselgeräte GmbH (Gyro Devices, Ltd.) and gave up the headquarters in the Netherlands that served as a front.51