Through the fall of 1941, Fieseler concentrated on a design study of the Interceptor, while the Army rocket center looked into the guidance problem. In spite of Lucht’s pronouncements, the Luftwaffe considered the idea of an anti-aircraft missile as well, perhaps because Lucht in the meantime had been fired for incompetence. At the end of November Fieseler produced its study of the Interceptor or Fi 166, as it was dubbed. The company outlined six possible configurations, some using rocket propulsion only, others with an enlarged A-5-type rocket booster and a turbojet engine for cruising at high altitudes. Notwithstanding the excessive complexity and doubtful safety of the proposed designs, an early December meeting between Army Ordnance and the Air Ministry again reached the conclusion that efforts should concentrate on the Interceptor, since the resources needed to develop and produce an anti-aircraft missile were too great. Dornberger had become reluctant to make any commitment to Luftwaffe projects, but he and von Braun agreed with that decision. By January 1942, however, the air force came to its senses and shelved the Interceptor proposal.38
There the matter rested for some months. But inside the Luftwaffe, the advocates of the anti-aircraft missile were plotting another comeback. The two individuals who appear to be most involved were the new Inspector-General of Flak as of January 1942, General Walther von Axthelm, and a junior officer in the Luftwaffe General Staff, Major Friedrich Halder. Probably at von Axthelm’s request, Halder wrote a blistering memorandum in May 1942 attacking the Flak development division, which had been transferred from Army Ordnance to Air Ministry control in 1940. Halder called the division a collection of out-of-touch Army traditionalists who failed to see the potential of radical new technologies like the rocket—hardly a fair charge in view of the events of the preceding summer. Looking ahead to the future, Halder foresaw the day when aircraft speeds and altitudes would be such that anti-aircraft artillery would no longer be able to keep up. As it was, in firing against Allied bombers, gunners already had to allow for lead times of twenty-five seconds or more for the shell to reach altitude. Only missiles or unusual gun designs promised a solution to the problem in the long run.39
After Halder’s superiors vetted his document to make it more politic, it became the basis for General von Axthelm’s new program for anti-aircraft artillery in June 1942. Along with accelerated rocket development, this program proposed various improvements to conventional guns and radar, plus cooperation with the Navy on a new superheavy 24-centimeter Flak gun. After an unexplained delay, von Axthelm was able to get Göring to agree reluctantly to this document, and it was issued as an order from the Reich Marshal on September 1. Hitler dismissed the document as “utopian” but did nothing to stop its implementation. Neither did the inheritor of most of Udet’s powers, Milch, although the Field Marshal was equally unconvinced that defensive missiles were a sound idea. Only later would his opinion change.40
In view of all that skepticism and the Luftwaffe’s own 1941 decision, why did the air force reverse its position in 1942? Göring, like Hitler, had always overestimated the importance of Flak over fighters for defense. But what was new was the rise of an effective RAF bomber threat, symbolized by the first thousand-plane raid on Cologne in May 1942. Attacks of this type provoked harangues from Hitler against Göring and damaged the Luftwaffe’s prestige even further. Adding to such worries, the Germans knew of the American B-29 Superfortress then under development, although it was ultimately used only against Japan, and they saw their own jet programs producing aircraft of potentially revolutionary performance. In those circumstances, the anti-aircraft experts were right to say that the effectiveness of conventional artillery against high-altitude, high-speed aircraft would be nil in the not too distant future.41
Yet there is little doubt that the anti-aircraft missile decision was another major blunder in German weapons development. In his memoirs, Speer asserts that if Hitler had not delayed the Me 262 jet fighter, and if the Army had concentrated on Wasserfall instead of the A-4, the Allied bomber fleets could have been defeated in 1944. Leaving aside the persistent mythology about the jets, even if the Germans had not lost a year changing their minds about the missile, it would not have made any difference. The 1941 warnings about the burden on the war economy were correct—and those estimates were made without any clear idea of the overwhelming technical problems that would be faced in the guidance sector. The fact that the air force had slowed down radar development in the first two years of the war only made matters worse. Germany now found itself in a dilemma that only an earlier and more energetic program of conventional fighter defense could have prevented. Instead, Göring and the Luftwaffe leadership waited too long and then gave in to the missile enthusiasts, who promised a magic answer to their problems.42
In the aftermath of this decision, the Air Ministry followed its usual philosophy of competition by initiating programs at Henschel, Rheinmetall, and Army Ordnance, which fragmented its overstretched research and development capability even further. As for the Army, Peenemünde-East was promised Luftwaffe personnel to develop both a smaller solid-fuel rocket and a large nitric acid-fueled one (the later Wasserfall). It was a significant new commitment to Army-Luftwaffe collaboration and one that would overshadow the rocket-aircraft program of the 1930s in scale. Thus, while the two services would compete in long-range missiles between 1942 and 1945, they would simultaneously cooperate in anti-aircraft missiles. For Dornberger’s rocket engineers, however, the amount of time spent on formal interservice projects was still minor in 1941–42. During that period, and to a large extent thereafter, one problem dominated all others: getting the A-4 to work and getting it into production.
THE A-4 REACHES THE LAUNCH PAD
Until the fall of 1941, the schedule for launching the world’s first ballistic missile remained hypothetical, with the result that it was highly politicized and highly optimistic. During the struggle to win Hitler’s favor that summer, Dornberger was still promising to complete the development of the A-4 by the end of 1941 and to begin firing on Britain in the second half of 1942. By October he was telling the Army General Staff that the first launch would come “at the latest in January,” the completion of development no sooner than the autumn of 1942, and military deployment “is not to be expected before the end of 1942”—in other words, 1943. At the beginning of November his technical people in Peenemünde were estimating the first launch no sooner than mid-February; by January it had slipped to March.43
At least three things were going on here. First, Dornberger was confident of greater political support and may have felt less need to exaggerate, although his behavior from beginning to end fits a classical pattern of the military-industrial complex: schedule and performance predictions that were overly optimistic, if not actually dishonest. The second factor in the lengthening schedules was the increased emphasis on mass production, with the accompanying A-4 “test series” of six hundred. The purpose of that series was above all to determine statistically, in good artilleryman’s fashion, a “firing table” that would allow launch crews to set the guidance system for a specified target. Firing hundreds of rockets would naturally take some time, even if the project coincided with some of the preparations for deployment. Most important was the third factor: coming to terms with the enormous difficulty of making a radically new technology work reliably. Even the relatively routine A-5 launch operations on the Greifswalder Oie did not adequately prepare the rocket group for the quantum leap in performance the A-4 promised and demanded.