Ironically, when Roth gave his pessimistic assessment of the state of guidance development in early 1944, he did not even assume that the preliminary version of Wasserfall would have a homing device, proximity fuse, or automatic guide beam, although all of those features would be needed if the missile was to be truly effective. At that time Roth did not even have sufficient information to lay out the interim guidance system, which was based on a joy-stick operated by a controller on the ground. This system was a modification of the transmitter and receiver developed to direct the Henschel Hs 293 glide bomb against ship targets. The bombardier maneuvered the projectile using a joy-stick in the attacking aircraft. The procedure had scored some significant successes against Allied shipping in the Mediterranean, but directing a supersonic missile against an airplane at distances scarcely visible to the naked eye was a somewhat more difficult problem. Various schemes were outlined in 1943–44, using a telescope or telescopes that would be radar-directed to follow the missile as it ascended and approached the target. The controller could maneuver the missile in his cross hairs, although obviously not at night or on a cloudy day. Some proposed variants also had a radar screen displaying the missile’s position vis-à-vis the aircraft, but that scheme was subject to all the limitations of 1940s radar technology. In any case, the joy-stick system was in such an underdeveloped state that in January 1944 Roth did not even have the layout of the missile’s various antennae.84
Wasserfall’s problems did not end there. Earlier in January Milch had once again become infuriated that Luftwaffe personnel in Peenemünde-East were being employed on A-4 work. He demanded that they be returned full-time to Wasserfall within three months. Tension erupted as well over the arrangements for the mass production of the missile. Much to the disappointment of Roth and others at Peenemünde, Henschel always refused to accept the production contract because of its own burdens. The idea of using the Mittelwerk had also been considered, and the A-4 Special Committee had promised in May 1943 to organize the manufacturing process. But Degenkolb did not pay much attention to the project, which is not surprising in view of the A-4’s problems. In the spring of 1944 Peenemünde and the Luftwaffe did succeed in interesting Linke-Hoffmann in the prime contract, but they received little help from the Armaments Ministry. Speer and Saur found no reason to support the production of a missile that was so far from deployment, and they soon had the formal power to obstruct such a decision. In June, on Hitler’s order, Göring gave control of aircraft manufacturing to the Armaments Ministry. Milch found himself circumvented and resigned as a result.85
If the situation for Wasserfall production was bleak in the first half of 1944, the launch schedule was scarcely better. Von Braun had originally wanted to begin launches in late 1944, allowing adequate time for development, but the Air Ministry demanded in early 1943 that the schedule be greatly accelerated in view of the war situation. Before Wasserfall’s wing design was even revised, Peenemünde committed itself to component contracts for two missiles to be launched by the end of 1943. Development problems delayed those attempts into early 1944, then the first vehicle was damaged in an engine test. Just as in the case of the A-4, the second test vehicle became the first to be launched. On February 29, 1944, it rose off its launch pad on the Greifswalder Oie. With no guidance except two gyros for stabilization, it had a simple trajectory, but the system nonetheless failed, and the missile tumbled out of control and fell into the sea. The next attempt, with the repaired first vehicle, was no more successful. Because of the inexperience of the launch crew, which the Flak Experimental Center insisted on staffing with its own people, the filming of the March 8 test was bungled; no conclusions could be drawn about the cause of the failure.86
Siemens’s late delivery of the improved control system for the second Wasserfall configuration, compounded by severe manpower shortages at Peenemünde, postponed the next launch until May 12. The missile went off course after twenty-two seconds, in all probability because of the failure of a vane servomotor. On the fourth attempt, June 8, one of the explosive bolts holding the missile to the mobile launch table did not fire, resulting in a fiasco: the vehicle took off with the stand attached and crashed after nine seconds. During the fifth flight in July, the engine malfunctioned and the vehicle blew up in the air. Meanwhile, because attempts to work with the joy-stick on the May flight had not yielded much useful information, the Army center had launched an A-4 with the relevant equipment on June 13. It was successful for half a minute, then the joy-stick operator lost sight of the missile and it strayed to the left, ultimately ending in an airburst over southern Sweden. That embarrassing failure placed much new information about the A-4 in the hands of the Allies, although the peculiar guidance equipment on board proved to be misleading to intelligence analysts.87
So it went—a checkered launch record that is not surprising in light of Peenemünde’s previous experience, nor that of later missile development elsewhere. But the project’s original schedule and the assumptions behind Wasserfall’s guidance development demonstrate how much wishful thinking, impelled by desperation about the war situation, had permeated the anti-aircraft missile program from the outset. In May 1944 the Flak Experimental Center still wanted to launch hundreds of missiles by the end of the year, notwithstanding the bleak short-run prospects. It was hard to admit the truth: that Wasserfall, like the other anti-aircraft missiles, was a promising long-term development project but was illusory as an answer to Allied air attacks during the war. There was no way it was going to be finished on time. Even if it had been, the joy-stick system would have been ineffective and susceptible to Allied electronic jamming. Nonetheless, the program was bureaucratically entrenched in the Army and the Luftwaffe, and the desperation felt by the German authorities ensured that Wasserfall would continue, whether it made any sense or not.88
Thus, as the summer of 1944 turned into fall, the anti-aircraft missile program struggled onward, while the ballistic missile troops finally began to move into firing positions in the west. In the meantime, the rapid decline of the Army’s power in the Reich had ushered in the final phase in the history of the Ordnance liquid-fuel rocket program: one in which Peenemünde was a civilian corporation and Heinrich Himmler’s SS had finally secured the dominance it had long sought.
Chapter 8
Rockets, Inc.
On July 20, 1944, the anti-Nazi resistance tried valiantly, but failed miserably, to overthrow the Third Reich. After the bomb planted by Colonel Claus Count von Stauffenberg narrowly missed killing Hitler in the briefing barracks at the Wolfsschanze, the attempted military coup in Berlin quickly sputtered and died. A little after midnight, the Chief of Army Armaments and Commander of the Replacement Army, General Fritz Fromm, directed the summary execution by firing squad of his chief of staff, Stauffenberg, and three other prominent subordinates. Although the opposition movement had a base among traditional elites such as the officer corps, the aristocracy, and the civil service, it had been centered in Fromm’s office because his control over Army units inside the Reich provided the basis for a coup. Fromm himself had played an ambiguous and indecisive role before the uprising, neither denouncing the conspirators nor committing himself to their plans. His summary action had been designed to save his own skin. But it did him no good. Hitler had already named Himmler as Fromm’s replacement that afternoon. Not long after the executions, the general was arrested. He languished in jail until March 1945, when the Führer, in a belated act of revenge, had him shot for “cowardice.”1