Regarding Peenemünde, the Führer’s wishes in the spring of 1942 still seemed to be favorable, despite his lack of interest in the priority problems that beset the production facility. On March 5 or 6, Hitler asked Speer to investigate the raw materials requirements of producing 3,000 A-4s per month, although Speer’s record of this meeting may reflect his own advocacy of the project. Two weeks later the Führer did, however, reject the Luftwaffe’s transparently political request that it be allowed to do a “theoretical investigation” of the value of the A-4. Although Hitler’s enthusiasm for the rocket seems to have waned in the spring and summer of 1942, claims that he was hostile to the project (Army adjutant Gerhard Engel), or at least “exceedingly skeptical” (Speer), must themselves be regarded with skepticism. Those stories reflect Speer’s disappointment at the Führer’s unwillingness to commit to mass production before the missile had proved itself.24
Thus, while the August Führer order may not have been the final breakthrough that the Peenemünders had thought it was, the rocket program had seen many of its manpower and material difficulties lessen after mid-1941. Even more than in the first phase of the priority battle, it is therefore difficult to find much evidence that Hitler significantly delayed the A-4’s development. It was the Production Plant that absorbed the bulk of the priority setbacks in the winter of 1941–42. But those delays would ultimately prove irrelevant, because technological problems had began to mount that would push the operational readiness of the missile back by as much as two years. That winter also saw increased competition from the Luftwaffe, which complicated the lives of the program’s leaders and made them feel that they were struggling against endless political obstacles, even when the competition had little effect on the A-4 schedule. Ironically, the new interservice struggles came on the heels of renewed attempts at cooperation that only demonstrated how contradictory was the Army-Luftwaffe relationship in rocketry.
FLYING BOMBS, ROCKET PLANES, AND ANTI-AIRCRAFT MISSILES
The air force’s March 1942 attempt to secure permission to do a “theoretical investigation” of the A-4 was only one sign of its growing insecurity regarding the Army rocket program. The Luftwaffe’s loss of prestige and its failure as a strategic bombing force over Britain were bad enough without the senior service presenting its ballistic missile as “relief” for the bomber, a claim Dornberger repeated in late March to General Thomas. In the same letter, the chief of Wa Prüf 11 made an argument for effectiveness of the A-4 as a terror weapon that was even more blunt than his assertions of mid-1941. A months-long, day-and-night missile campaign against British cities, he contended, would, “by creating panic and disorganization, make an important contribution to ending the war.” Furthermore, the unit cost of the missile would be cheaper than the cost of a bomber and its well-trained crew, which would be lost in just a few missions. That sort of argument did not sit well with Luftwaffe officers, who began to grumble that “the Army is beginning to fly.”25
The first manifestation of the air service’s new opposition to the program had come somewhat earlier, in December 1941, when the Air Ministry obstructed Ordnance’s request to dismantle and move Zeppelin’s largest airship hangar in Friedrichshafen. The Ministry had wanted to blow it up, because it blocked a planned runway extension at Dornier Aircraft, another company in the Zeppelin group. Suddenly, the Ministry found that it needed the hangar when the Army requested it for use as an A-4 assembly plant. After three months of wrangling, Erhard Milch finally decided in favor of Ordnance, if it would bear all costs and provide the labor for the move. Notwithstanding this decision, Milch then went on to do more than anyone else to sustain competition with the Army by backing the creation of the “flying bomb” project, later dubbed “Vengeance Weapon 1” or V-1 by the Propaganda Ministry. That cheap alternative to the A-4 (V-2) was, according to Speer, “more than anything else a prestige object” for his friend Milch. In other words, it was a way to get back at the Army.26
The origins of the V-1 go back to the Paul Schmidt pulsejet experiments, which the Air Ministry and Army Ordnance had co-sponsored since 1935. By 1938, Dornberger was convinced that Schmidt was making too little progress toward a usable air-breathing propulsion system based on rapid, intermittent explosions. The work seemed of little interest to the Army anyway. In spite of those doubts, Ordnance did not actually withdraw its financial contribution until 1940. Meanwhile, the Luftwaffe had become convinced by 1939 that Schmidt was moving too slowly and asked an aircraft engine firm, Argus, to develop a pulsejet based on principles it outlined. Only later did Argus hear of Schmidt’s experiments, and its final engine incorporated only one element from the original inventor’s system. The Argus engine was tried out on aircraft in 1941–42, including a small fighter prototype, but its incredible noise and vibration made it virtually worthless for manned airplanes. (The characteristic sound of the engine later inspired the well-known Allied nickname, “the buzz bomb.”)27
How that engine came to be linked to the flying bomb idea is not entirely clear. The concept of an unmanned, explosives-laden airplane that could automatically dive on its target was by no means new; experimental propeller-driven flying bombs had been tried but never deployed by the United States and Britain in World War I and later. A jet-propelled “aerial torpedo” had also been proposed independently by Hellmuth Walter and Paul Schmidt in 1934. Argus outlined a similar concept in 1939. At any rate, in a few months between March and June 1942, undoubtedly in response to the Army’s A-4, the Air Ministry pulled together a team to design what today would be called a cruise missile, based on the already available Argus pulse jet. Another factor was Hitler’s demand for vengeance following the Royal Air Force’s first effective night raids against civilian populations, beginning with the historic city of Lübeck at the end of March. Milch picked the small aircraft firm of Fieseler to design the missile, which received the official designation Fi 103 and the code-name “Cherry Stone.” On June 19, 1942, immediately after Milch had witnessed the first A-4 launch attempt, a conference in the Air Ministry formally gave the go-ahead to build “Cherry Stone” on a crash basis.28
Given the ensuing interservice battle, most writers have pictured the Army-Luftwaffe relationship after 1942 as one of rivalry. But the story is actually much more complex and mirrors the larger relationship between the two services. From the day of its creation, the Luftwaffe had striven for independence from the Army, but as a primarily tactical air force it was closely tied to its parent service nonetheless. Thus we need to look at the other side of the story: the ongoing collaboration in rocketry. That is particularly important because 1941–42 was a transitional period that set the pattern for the rest of the war.
Despite the end of the formal interservice rocket-aircraft program in 1939–40, informal collaboration had continued and perhaps even increased, especially in guidance and control. Ernst Steinhoff, with his close relationship with the Luftwaffe, had cultivated his contacts in the Air Ministry out of both necessity and inclination. In the areas of guide beams, radio equipment, servomotors, and gyroscopes, the benefits of cooperative development and exchange of data were considerable. For the A-4’s guidance system, it was also a matter of life and death that the Luftwaffe collaborate if large numbers of gyros and vane motors were to be manufactured in firms like Siemens’s aircraft instruments division, now spun off as a subsidiary. Because those components were to be taken from regular aircraft manufacturing lines, and because Peenemünde needed Siemens’s mass production capability, Steinhoff had to and did secure the Air Ministry’s acquiescence in the fall of 1940 to ordering thousands of gyros and hydraulic servomotors.29