Wasserfall’s propulsion and tankage system displayed a number of other serious design problems. The injector plate was inefficient, and the bursting membranes in the lines failed to function as planned, causing explosions at ignition. When the engine did operate in flight, thrust was poor, and shutdown came after about thirty seconds (instead of forty-five) because maneuvering threw the propellants around, uncovering the tank drains. The result was that the engine ingested nitrogen pressurization gas along with the oxidizer and fuel, leading to substandard performance and early cutoffs. Obviously, the range and effectiveness of Wasserfall would be severely curtailed if that problem could not be fixed. The original solution of Roth’s group did not work. According to the Luftwaffe officer appointed to oversee the Wasserfall schedule in November, the project leadership had been far too slow to react to the problem. A contest was eventually held to gather suggestions. It was won by Werner Dahm, but his idea apparently did not definitively solve the gas-ingestion problem either, so the situation was little improved at the end of January 1945.30
The guidance problems remained equally perplexing. Just as in the case of the A-4b, acquiring adequately powerful vane servomotors remained a severe difficulty. In other areas of Wasserfall guidance and control, most of the serious difficulties of early 1944 had not been overcome either. The situation in homing devices remained extraordinarily confused because of the proliferation of competing projects, while the final form of Wasserfalle gyro systems remained unclear. To make matters worse, Siemens’s aircraft instruments company was late on all its contracts in the second half of 1944, in part because of air raids. There were only one or two bright spots: The joy-stick, which was merely a modification of an existing system, proved itself in launch testing; a proximity fuse had been chosen, and its design was approaching completion. In the long run, Wasserfall was still a promising project, but its deployment as an effective weapon was still at least a couple of years away—years the Third Reich obviously did not have.31
In light of its dismal outlook, the project came under little further pressure for quick results. Instead, its political support threatened to collapse altogether. Speer and Saur continued to refuse to order Wasserfall into quantity production, causing the directors of Linke-Hoffmann to slow production even of test missiles. Nor did Hermann Göring’s first visit to Peenemünde go well. Accompanied by Speer, he arrived on October 30, 1944, resplendent in bright red riding boots, opossum-hair overcoat, off-white uniform, and jewel-encrusted finger rings. According to Dornberger, the obese Göring popped pills every few minutes and behaved erratically. Afterward the Reich Marshal and the Armaments Minister decided to reduce Wasserfall to a mere long-term development project. Emphasis was to be placed on Schmetterling, which was most advanced, as well as on Enzian (Gentian), a newer project for a mostly wooden, unmanned, scaled-down version of the Me 163 rocket fighter. It is a sign of Göring’s irrelevance that the decision never took effect. It was eventually overruled by the rump Technical Office of the Air Ministry, probably on the basis of a bizarre order by Hitler for accelerated anti-aircraft development in view of the enemy’s fear of the “hell of German flak fire.” Wasserfall would thus continue to limp along until Peenemünde was evacuated.32
The obvious failure of the program to meet its original objectives nonetheless resulted in some true desperation projects. Among the ideas floated was fitting the Wasserfall with small A-4b-type wings to create a scaled-down glider missile. But the most important desperation project was initiated earlier by the Luftwaffe officer responsible for Wasserfall test stands, Lieutenant Klaus Scheufeien. Taifun (Typhoon), a small unguided anti-aircraft rocket, is first mentioned in the documents in August 1944. The pencil-thin missile had a diameter of about 10 cm (4 inches) and a height of approximately 2 meters (6 feet). In Scheufelen’s first version, it would be powered by the same hypergolic propellants as Wasserfall and would be fired off a launch rail, burning out in only three seconds. Taifun could potentially reach altitude faster than an artillery shell and would save gunpowder production, but its warhead was very small (around a kilogram), and its accuracy would have been poor. Essentially, this project was an admission of defeat; the guided anti-aircraft missile was coming along too slowly to alter the overpowering air superiority of the Allies.33
In September the Luftwaffe gave Taifun a higher priority than Wasserfall, but there are indications that Electromechanical Industries paid only lip service to the project. At the beginning of December von Braun told Rees and the shop managers to treat the new contract for ten thousand Taifuns as filler work, except for the first hundred test vehicles. It is unknown whether Scheufelen and the Flak Experimental Center were informed of that order, but Taifun continued to expand as a project, at least on paper. The first liquid-fueled missiles had already been launched in November, and by January a second, solid-fuel version was proposed. As of New Year’s Day 1945, 135 people were assigned to Taifun, a total dwarfed by the 1,940 staff members of the A-4 project, the 1,220 of Wasserfall, and the 270 working on A-4b (660 other employees were listed as “general” or “administrative”). Although the Taifun project did not entail a substantial diversion of resources, it surely expressed the catastrophic character of the military situation.34
A project that even more clearly embodied the mood of desperation was “Test Stand XII.” That code-name was applied in late November 1944 to the idea for a U-boat-towed launch canister for a V-2. It might generously be described as a forerunner of the ballistic-missile submarine, but in its own context “Test Stand XII” was merely ludicrous. The rationale was that the United States might be given pause by the bombardment of New York, although it is hard to see how a few such shots would have done anything but make Americans more determined to take revenge on German cities. In any case, the practical difficulties were overwhelming. To launch, the U-boat would have to surface, then the crew would have to erect the canister by flooding its ballast, fuel the missile, and send it on its way. Accuracy would have been terrible. Notwithstanding those difficulties, a contract was immediately given to Vulkan Docks of Stettin to build a test version by March or April. Only a handful of people worked on the project before it was stopped by the evacuation. Those who participated, including General Rossmann and Walther Riedel, seem to have taken it seriously, but there was scarcely a clearer expression in Peenemünde of the escape from reality produced by the impending collapse of the Third Reich. In one way or another, desperation had come to overshadow all work in the Army rocket program.35
EVACUATION, MASSACRE, FLIGHT
By January 1945 the situation in Peenemünde had become truly bleak. The sound of Russian guns could be heard in the distance; endless streams of grim and tattered refugees came marching across the island of Usedom on their way to the bridge at Wolgast and points farther west. They brought with them tales of terrible atrocities committed by Soviet troops, although the Germans all too easily forgot that such outrages were revenge for the millions killed in the East by the Nazi regime and its armed forces. In the center itself, military employees had to carry guns, while all able-bodied male civilians were obliged since October or November to spend time exercising with the Volkssturm (Home Guard), preparing for a last-ditch stand. On January 18 rumors of Soviet tanks only a few dozen kilometers away caused panic. Scientists from Erich Regener’s stratospheric research institute in Friedrichshafen were sent away before they could finish preparing their instrument package for an A-4 launch, a project begun in mid-1942 to explore the upper atmosphere for guidance purposes as well as science. The launch never happened, because Kammler ordered the evacuation of Peenemünde to central Germany less than two weeks later.36