In addition to guidance, another area of informal but intense Luftwaffe–Army collaboration was the daily operation of Peenemünde. Luftwaffe aircraft used for drop tests, guide beam experiments, and transportation flew from the airfield at Peenemünde-West. Among the pilots using the runway was Wernher von Braun, who was provided with a fast single-engine plane for business trips. In planning and building the housing settlement, the electrical power plant, and the new commuter train system, the Production Plant also had to coordinate its activities with the smaller Luftwaffe test center. According to Gerhard Reisig, head of the measurement group until 1943, interpersonal relations were cordial as well and were largely untouched by battles at higher levels. In the later war years, when the two competing long-range missiles were being launched, East and West cooperated in tracking them.30
During the interlude from 1940 to 1942, however, the only formal interservice rocket project was the liquid-oxygen/alcohol takeoff-assist system. The Air Ministry had contracted with Army Ordnance in January 1939 to develop two egg-shaped pods, each containing a 1,000-kg-thrust motor, to be strapped under the wings of heavily loaded bombers. After burning for thirty seconds, the pods were to be dropped off and parachuted back to earth sufficiently undamaged for reuse. The Air Ministry imposed stringent requirements for safety and simplicity of function, since explosions or failures of one unit to ignite were clearly to be avoided at all costs. The first aircraft drop test was carried out at the end of August 1940, followed by dozens of experimental takeoffs from Peenemünde-West over the next year and a half.31
But the project ran aground in the latter half of 1941, when the designated manufacturer, Schmidding, failed to produce the preliminary models of the mass production version. Instead, the company’s engineers redesigned the units according to their own ideas, encouraged by the responsible person in the Air Ministry Technical Office. That was precisely the sort of slipshod administration that had flourished in the office under the tenure of General Ernst Udet. The famous ace had been installed by Göring in 1936 in part to undercut Milch, whose administrative competence the “second man in the Reich” found threatening. In the end, Udet’s bungling of aircraft development and production led to his dramatic suicide. On November 17, 1941, Udet shot himself, “scrawling on the wall before he died that Göring had betrayed him to the Jews in the Air Ministry.”32 One week later, Wa Prüf 11 warned the Luftwaffe that Schmidding’s new version of the takeoff-assist system was dangerous and that much time had been lost. The following February the Army rocket group washed its hands of the whole affair and left it to Schmidding and the Air Ministry to decide which version would be produced. In fact, no liquid-oxygen systems ever saw active service with the Luftwaffe, which had more sensible but less powerful solid-propellant and hydrogen peroxide units anyway.33
The failure of the takeoff-assist project was the low point of formal Army-Luftwaffe collaboration in rocketry. In 1942, however, an important new field of cooperation would open up: anti-aircraft missiles. The story of Wasserfall (“Waterfall”), the missile that became the second most important Army rocket project in the latter half of the war, had its origin in the spring of 1941. On May 7 of that year, Dornberger phoned Stegmaier and asked him to study the possibility of a liquid-propellant anti-aircraft missile with a maximum altitude of 15 to 18 kilometers (about 50,000–60,000 feet).34
Using rockets to shoot down airplanes was an old idea and had been considered by the Ordnance group from the outset. But unguided solid-fuel rockets could never match the accuracy of anti-aircraft guns, the responsibility for defense against airplanes became the preserve of the Luftwaffe, and the Army’s liquid-fuel rocket program focused on the creation of an offensive weapon that might justify its exorbitant costs with “war-winning” results. It is therefore certain that Dornberger’s request originated in the Air Ministry. A few advocates inside the Luftwaffe had pushed the anti-aircraft missile repeatedly over the years, and Rheinmetall-Borsig, an artillery and munitions manufacturer with its own line of solid rockets, had made a proposal. In February 1941 the Inspector-General of Flak (anti-aircraft artillery) had called for missile development because of the failure of guns at night against British bombers. Probably in response to that call, Henschel Aircraft, a builder of rocket-assisted glide bombs, presented the Ministry with a missile proposal in June 1941.35
Although Dornberger had asked Peenemünde to study the anti-aircraft missile, Wernher von Braun quickly moved toward the manned rocket interceptor instead. On May 13 he drafted a letter to Ordnance chief Leeb requesting permission to bring Professor Willi Messerschmitt, head of the aircraft firm of the same name, to Peenemünde to discuss such an aircraft. Von Braun’s fascination with rocket planes was intense and longstanding. At the beginning of July 1939, in the wake of the first He 176 flights, he had written a proposal for a rocket fighter would take off vertically. The Luftwaffe ignored the document, being more interested in its own program at Messerschmitt, the hydrogen-peroxide-fueled Me 163 Komet. In late May 1941 the young technical director produced a new version of his proposal. It discussed both missile and rocket-fighter solutions to the specific problem of nighttime air raids, which were becoming an RAF specialty. In the new proposal von Braun came down firmly on the side of the manned aircraft, because the missile’s burden on war production would be justified, he felt, only if the probability of hitting an enemy bomber was 100 percent. He noted the demand on the overloaded radar and aircraft-instruments sector that would be imposed by a throwaway device with very expensive components. As a way around that difficulty, he proposed what was in effect a manned missile: an interceptor launched vertically and guided automatically to the target. The pilot’s responsibility would be only to carry out the actual attack and to land safely. The propulsion system for either the rocket plane or the missile would be based on nitric acid and diesel oil, a combination that BMW’s Berlin aircraft engine plant had first developed at the instigation of the Luftwaffe.36
Those ideas excited immediate interest in the Air Ministry. By the time officers from anti-aircraft artillery development arrived for a tour in mid-June, the Ministry had already decided that Peenemünde-East would be paired with Messerschmitt to build an “Interceptor” (the English term was used) and that anti-aircraft missiles would be studied through tests carried out on modified A-5s. Three weeks later an even higher-level delegation came through, led by the chief engineer in the Technical Office, Roluf Lucht. Although Lucht saw a successful A-5 launch from the Oie, he did not share the enthusiasm of the Flak people for the anti-aircraft missile, nor did he accept their argument that its production demands could be satisfied from the existing Flak radar and instruments industry. He agreed with von Braun and the Peenemünders that the Interceptor was a more feasible concept but announced that Messerschmitt was too burdened to take on another rocket fighter. Fieseler, the same company that would later receive the V-1 airframe contract, was picked in its place. Guide beam tests with A-5s would serve to test the early versions of the Interceptor’s automatic approach system.37