The joy that Dornberger felt after October 3 was not, however, completely unsullied. On the ninth he asked Wernher von Braun to report within a week on the Luftwaffe’s “Cherry Stone” (V-1) project. According to Dornberger’s memorandum:
Lately there have been many remarks from government offices, firms, etc., that the A-4 program no longer possesses the importance ascribed to it by the people who work on it. In that connection, confidential hints have been made that “Cherry Stone”… is far more valuable and has every chance of catching up and passing the A-4 program, if not making it altogether illusory.
The A-4 obviously had its enemies and skeptics in the air force and elsewhere. Von Braun was soon able to reassure Dornberger, however, that the poor accuracy and shorter range of the cruise missile made it less than competitive with the ballistic missile, although it had every chance of being a success. Dornberger reported those conclusions to Leeb but expressed his amazement at the Luftwaffe’s ability to initiate a competing program in apparent secrecy from a sister service.2 In view of the many priority battles the Army rocket program had already endured, this evidence of growing interservice rivalry was certainly a disquieting sign. But just as von Braun surmised, the V-1 would never prove a decisive threat to the survival of the A-4 project, although it did at times worry Dornberger.
Meanwhile, V4’s result and Dornberger’s demands for an acceleration of the launch schedule forced Peenemünde to concentrate even more decisively on getting the A-4 into production. “Special Program S,” issued on October 10 by Development Works chief Stegmaier, suspended all activity on most other research projects, most notably the A-9 glider missile and its subscale version, the A-7. Only two engineless, drop-test versions of the A-7 were to be finished, and only because they were subject to corrosion. (They were soon glide-tested, with mediocre results.) Ten people from Ludwig Roth’s small Projects Office, that embodiment of the rocket group’s “most cherished desires and hopes for the future” (Dornberger), were to be sent to other divisions. In line with the new interservice program approved by Göring in September, Roth’s roughly thirty remaining staff members were to draw up plans for anti-aircraft missiles. It would take time for the Air Ministry to mobilize people and resources for those projects, however, so the application of rocket technology to air defense remained only a minor distraction for von Braun’s group in the winter of 1942–43.3
Although the Wasserfall anti-aircraft missile eventually became Peenemünde’s second major development project, the crash status of the A-4 program was clearly transforming the center into an organization predominantly concerned with missile production. Until December 1942 the transformation occurred with little outside intervention, because of Dornberger’s clout and because of the remnants of the Army’s autonomy within the Nazi system. However, once Albert Speer gained Hitler’s approval for the full-scale manufacture of the A-4, he was no longer satisfied with a limited role. More ominously, Reichsführer-SS Heinrich Himmler began to take an interest in the A-4 as well. As in the war economy as a whole, Army Ordnance’s power over Peenemünde began to decline as first the Armaments Ministry and then the SS began to intrude into its domain. By the summer of 1943 Himmler’s blackshirts had made their presence felt through the supply of concentration camp labor and through the infiltration of agents, but it was Speer and his managers who had come to dominate the organization of A-4 production. As a result, the Army center at Peenemünde reached the apogee of its institutional growth in August 1943, but it had already lost much of its autonomy. The Third Reich’s “muscle men,” to use von Braun’s later term, now set the tone. The first and foremost of these was Speer’s designated commissioner for the missile program, Gerhard Degenkolb.4
THE SPEER MINISTRY INTRUDES
For Albert Speer to extend his power over the A-4, he first had to secure the Führer’s long-sought approval for mass production. Hitler’s attitude toward the ballistic missile in 1942 had been frustrating to its advocates. After having embraced the A-4 so enthusiastically in August 1941, he had again become moody about it. He continued to refuse a production order, although he did nothing to slow down the rate of its development. In June, after hearing Speer’s report on the first launch attempt, he expressed his skepticism about the A-4’s guidance. The Führer’s reaction to October 3 was more positive but still not entirely satisfactory. In Speer’s official minutes, Hitler is described as agreeing that the parallel development of the A-4 and “Cherry Stone” was a “valuable” suggestion, but the ballistic missile “only makes sense if 5,000 projectiles are available simultaneously for an initial mass attack.” That absurd comment again demonstrated Hitler’s failure to understand that the A-4 was not a simple projectile that could be manufactured and fired in huge quantities. When von Braun examined the mass attack in December, he could foresee only a one-time maximum effort of 108 operational launches in twenty-four hours—and a normal rate of twenty-seven a day.5
The next time Speer presented the issue to Hitler, something had changed. According to the meeting minutes of November 22—three days after the Soviets launched their Stalingrad offensive and two weeks after the western Allies landed in north Africa—“the Führer takes a great interest in A-4 production planning and believes that, if the necessary numbers can be produced promptly, one can make a very strong impression on England with this weapon.” Apparently, in his search for ways to reverse the rapidly deteriorating strategic situation and to exact “vengeance” on Britain for the RAF’s “terror raids” against Germany, he had overcome many of his well-founded reservations about the impact of a small number of missiles on British morale.6
The imaginary threat of American missile attacks from the periphery of Europe may also have influenced Hitler’s decision to order the A-4 into production. In early January 1943 he told Speer that it was “absolutely essential, in view of the rocket development going forward in America, that the most urgent experiments be made to find out if the jamming of the guide beams can provide a defense against such rockets.” The repeated warnings from Ordnance about foreign competition, reinforced by faulty German intelligence reports, had had their effect. The Army rocket program had become an ironic mirror image of the Manhattan Project: While the Germans were racing a virtually nonexistent American missile program, the Americans (with British and Canadian help) were racing a virtually nonexistent German atomic bomb effort.7
How large a factor that was in the Führer’s change of heart is difficult to determine, although it was clearly quite secondary to “vengeance.” But, whatever the reason, Speer had finally received Hitler’s approval for A-4 production. That good news was immediately conveyed to Dornberger, along with another order from the Führer: massive air-raid-proof bunkers must be built along the Channel coast for firing the missiles at London.8
That demand sparked a fascinating controversy between the chief of Wa Prüf 11 and his engineers. From his war experience in the heavy artillery and from the unwieldy character of the Paris Gun’s railroad-borne equipment, Dornberger knew that missile batteries needed to be lightly equipped and mobile. In December 1939 he had proposed a train with minimal equipment that could carry and launch eight missiles. By 1942 Dornberger’s group still planned a railroad battery, but the primary deployment mode was to be a motorized regiment, consisting of three batteries of trucks and other road vehicles. Klaus Riedel, the veteran of the Raketenflugplatz, had been given the task of planning the vehicles after he was removed from the leadership of the test stands in 1940. When Hitler demanded bunkers, however, von Braun immediately jumped at the idea. He asserted in a November 27 memo to Dornberger that this launch mode was more suited to a missile still far from being a mass production item. The road-mobile system, he felt, required a more refined rocket and better-trained crews. The heart of the matter was that he and his engineers felt more comfortable with something resembling their test-stand operations. Dornberger disagreed heatedly, but had little choice but to go along with Hitler’s wishes.9