Hitler's Rockets: The Story of the V-2s (13 page)

On 5 November 1943, with the temperture nearly 10°C below zero, the first launching test took place. . . . The experimental battery had so far fired only a few test shots and was still inexperienced. At the first practice at Blizna it had been assumed that loose sand, the surface frozen over to a depth of only half an inch, would be adequate as a base. Owing to some unfortunate carelessness, the blast deflector plate of the firing table was not set firmly on the ground at ignition time. The gas jet thawed out the ground and burrowed down into the sand. One leg of the firing table sank slowly into the soil during the preliminary burning time. The rocket rose diagonally, lost control and crashed into the woods two miles away.

Even worse than Dornberger’s absence was the unlucky presence of the senior artillery officer recently selected to command the rocket and flying-bomb launching batteries in action.

That would not have been so bad if General Heinemann . . . had not been watching a rocket launched for the first time. From this false start, due entirely to the inexperience of the man in charge, the conclusion was drawn that only firm concrete platforms would serve for frontline operations. For over six months manpower and material were wasted on the erection of these concrete emplacements in the battle area. . . . The first impression stuck.

Dornberger’s own preference had always been for ‘a bit of planking on a forest track, or the overgrown track itself’, but here he was up against Hitler’s passion, as an architect
manqué,
for huge and grandiose constructions, preferably made of concrete. Hitler had always favoured large bunkers combining storage facilities with firing platforms for both the A-4 and the flying bomb. The first ‘large site’ (as the Allies called them), intended specifically for the rocket, had been selected as long ago as December 1942 in woodland near Calais, one and a half miles from the nearest railway station at Watten, by which name it became known. The site was also conveniently close to main roads, a canal and electric grid lines, and Dornberger, bowing to the inevitable, thought it could also be used to accommodate a liquid oxygen plant, as well as 108 A-4 rockets and the troops to fire them. The prodigious amount of concrete needed for ‘North-West Power Station’ (as it was codenamed), 120,000 cubic metres, made the scheme irresistibly attractive to Hitler, when Speer presented it to him on 25 March 1943. It was then anticipated that the structure, though not its wiring and plant, would be ready by the end of July 1943 and on 4 May the army asked for it to be complete and fit for operations by 1 November.

Unknown to the Germans the photographic interpreters at Medmenham had, as already mentioned,
⁸
been keeping a sharp eye on what was going on at Watten and various other points in the Pas-de-Calais, though most of the activity they detected was related to flying-bomb launching and storage sites. As early as 17 May Medmenham drew attention to ‘a large rail – and canal-served clearing in the woods, possibly a gravel pit’, and as the work progressed a scale model of the site was prepared. On 3 July Lord Cherwell candidly admitted in a note to the Prime Minister that he was as much in the dark as anyone about ‘these very large structures similar to gun emplacements’ but repeated the view he had expressed three weeks before that ‘if is worth the enemy’s while to go to all the trouble of building them it would seem worth ours to destroy them’. On 6 July an agent’s report described the area as a centre of ‘German long-range rocket activity’, and Watten’s fate was sealed. The head of one of the country’s most famous construction firms, Sir Malcolm MacAlpine, advised that the best moment to attack would be before the concrete had set and was still surrounded by planking, and on 27 August the job was duly undertaken by 185 Flying Fortresses of the US 8th Air Force, all of whom ‘made it’ home. They left behind a scene of ruin. The ‘launching shelter’, Dornberger lamented, was now ‘a desolate heap of concrete, steel, props and planking. The concrete hardened. After a few days the shelter was beyond saving. All we could do was roof in a part and use it for other work’.

Watten was in fact converted, with remarkable ingenuity, into a virtually impregnable factory for producing liquid oxygen, by building a roof 10 feet thick on top of the surviving 12 foot walls and then hoisting it up hydraulically and building up the walls beneath it. The Germans were left, after the roof had been strengthened, with a vast concrete cavern 300 feet long by 150 feet wide, beneath 23 feet of concrete, and the Todt organization engineer responsible, Xavier Dorsch, now produced an even more imaginative plan for a second ‘bunker’ at Wizernes near Boulogne, originally intended merely as a storage dump. Dorsch’s plan, as he told Dornberger, involved ‘placing a bell of concrete 20 feet thick on the top of the quarry’ already there, beneath which a huge network of tunnels were to be hollowed out, including workshops, storerooms, barrack rooms and even a hospital. At the heart of this vast complex, which would require a million tons of concrete, would be a huge chamber where the rockets were prepared for firing, before being trundled into the open air along two passageways, whimsically named ‘Gretchen’ and ‘Gustav’, protected by 5-foot-thick steel doors.

Dorsch decided that a scheme of this magnitude required Hitler’s approval, and he and Dornberger were duly invited to Rastenburg on 30 September 1943 to meet the same galaxy of generals as had watched the A-4 film back in July. Dornberger was ‘shocked’ at the deterioration in the Führer’s appearance even in those few weeks. ‘He seemed to me to have aged. . . . I particularly noticed the unhealthy, yellowish . . . greenishyellow colour of his complexion and . . . the ghastly pallor of his face.’ As he signed the necessary orders, which also empowered Field Marshal von Rundstedt, C-in-C, West, to make preparations for action throughout France’, Hitler’s ‘hand trembled slightly’ but when ‘Dorsch began to speak Hitler at once brightened up . . . immediately captivated by the grandiose plans Dorch described and . . . enthusiastically consented’. Hitler also listened to Dornberger’s counter-plan for ‘putting the A-4 into action from motorized batteries’, though he ruled against it, but was perhaps more impressed than he admitted, for a few days later he told Albert Speer that he was doubtful if the Wizernes battery would ever be finished. It was a perceptive comment. Although the workforce on the site was built up from 1100 in April 1944 to nearly 1300 in May and 1400 in mid-June, most of them German, progress was slow because of the constant air-raid warnings, which stopped work no fewer than 229 times during May alone.

In addition to Watten and Wizernes, the Germans also built a large though somewhat less impressive bunker at Sottevast, eight miles due south of Cherbourg, and another at Equeurdreville on its outskirts, misleadingly known to the Allies as Martinvast, a town four miles away, though Équeurdreville was later allocated to the flying bomb. A number of other, much simpler, small sites were also built, consisting of two sunken parallel roads on either side of an existing tree-lined road, so that camouflage nets could be strung from the branches, with three small platforms built across it. The launching crews would emerge from the side roads to set up their missiles on the platforms, then go back into hiding. The only known site of this type actually built was near the Chateau du Molay, west of Bayeux, but other places were earmarked for similar use.

By 8 November 1943 all these preparations were sufficiently far advanced for Hitler, broadcasting fcom the Munich beercellar which was one of the shrines of the Nazi movement, to proclaim to his wildly applauding audience, ‘Our hour of revenge is nigh!’ At the beginning of December the elderly Lieutenant-General Erich Heinemann, who had watched the disastrous test at Blizna the previous month, was appointed commander of Army Corps 65 (LXV in German army numbering), which was to launch both secret weapons, with, in charge of the A-4 component, a hitherto obscure artillery officer, Major-General Richard Metz, henceforward known as HARKO (from the German abbreviation for Senior Artillery Commander) 91. Control of Peenemünde was soon afterwards taken away from Dornberger, against his wishes, nominally so that he could concentrate on ‘the formation and training of field units’.

The new year brought fresh problems. On 15 March 1944, in response to a telephone call in the small hours, Dornberger reached Berchtesgaden after a nightmare journey ‘delayed by snowstorms, icy roads and the havoc of a heavy air raid on Munich’ to be told that von Braun and two other senior engineers had been arrested by the Gestapo for alleged sabotage. They had, he learned from Field Marshal Keitel himself, been overheard ‘in company at Zinnowitz’, presumably by the spies planted by Himmler, boasting ‘that it had never been their intention to make a weapon of war out of the rocket’ but only ‘to obtain money for their experiments in space travel’. What had happened, he decided, was that remarks to the effect that the A-4 was ‘only the first tentative step’ towards ‘voyages in space’ had been misunderstood, perhaps deliberately, as part of Himmler’s campaign to take over the whole enterprise. Next day Dornberger pleaded his subordinates’ case at the Gestapo head office in Berlin, where he was not much comforted to be asked ‘Do you know what a fat file of evidence we have against you here?’ and to be told that it ‘would have to be gone into eventually’. His incautious criticism of Hitler’s dream that the rocket would never be used was, he now learned, held to have ‘exercised a harmful pessimistic, almost defeatist influence’ on his staff, and he was also held responsible for the general ‘delay in the development of the A-4’. He was, however, allowed to leave, being ‘still regarded as our greatest rocket expert’, and a few days later von Braun and the others were also released, the whole episode having apparently been designed to warn them to watch their step – and, perhaps, to demonstrate their loyalty by getting the rocket into action at last.

On 1 June 1944, much against Dornberger’s wishes, the main part of the development works at Peenemünde was converted into a commercial concern under a managing director from the great electrical engineering firm of Siemens, who was, Dornberger complained, ‘practically a stranger to our work’. Nor were things going well at Nordhausen, where a new man, Alben Sawatzki, who had made his name in speeding up output of the Tiger tank, had been seconded from another firm, Henschel, to take charge of production planning. The inevitable delays were attributed by Degenkolb and his fellow engineers and industrialists from the commercial world to defects in the development work. ‘Major difficulties are cropping up . . . now that mass production is starting,’ he had told a meeting presided over by Speer on 8 November 1943, and it was not till New Year’s Day 1944 that the first three A-4s left Nordhausen. During the whole month, which was to have seen the start of the rocket offensive, only 50 were delivered, and in February only 86, a long way short of the 300 called for under the Degenkolb-Saur programme and even further short of the 1000 that Saur had asserted to be possible. In March the figure was better, 253, and in May better still, 437 – a total that would have been higher if constant demands for major changes, with all the retooling and redrawing of blueprints they involved, were not still arriving from Blizna and Dornberger’s own headquarters at Schwedt, 80 miles from Peenemünde and 250 from Blizna, to which he flew ceaselessly back and forth in his beloved Storch. By now, although the training and equipment of the launching batteries was going smoothly, the earliest possible date for a sustained A-4 bombardment was early September. On 13 June 1944, while General Metz – holding the post Dornberger thought should have been his, as operational commander of the A-4 batteries – waited for his first missiles to arrive, his colleague Colonel Wachtel, in command of Flakregiment 155 (W), armed with flying bombs, opened fire on London. The Luftwaffe, coming on the secret-weapon scene long after the army, had got its missile into action first.

Hitler’s reaction was immediate. Flying-bomb production, he ordered, should be increased at the expense of rocket manufacture, and on 6 July he directed that the second underground A-4 factory, Cement, now being built at Traunsee in Austria, should instead be earmarked for tank production. The rocket-manufacturing programme was already in trouble, however, because of the constant modifications still being made to the production model, which cut the output figure from May’s 437 – not all that far short of the 600 a month that Albert Speer considered reasonable – to 132 in June and only 86 in July. But Goebbels remained enthusiastic. ‘If we could only show this film in every cinema in Germany,’ he told his officials, after Speer had invited him to see an updated version of the now classic documentary which had previously impressed Hitler, ‘I wouldn’t have to make another speech or write another word. The most hardboiled pessimist could doubt in victory no longer.’

The rocket men also had other troubles than the loss of Hitler’s support. Having fled to Blizna to escape the British bombers, they now had to move again to escape the advancing Red Army, deserting Heidelager (Heathcamp) for the equally romantically named Heidekraut (Heather) 10 miles east of Tuchel and about 160 miles north-west of Warsaw. Here they struggled with the rocket’s continuing tendency, in spite of earlier modifications to blow up on re-entering the earth’s atmosphere, a fault finally, or at least largely, cured by fitting the fuel tank with a steel ‘sleeve’ which made it better able to withstand vibration. By now, however, perfecting the missile was becoming an end in itself and, after 65,000 modifications to the original design, both von Braun and Dornberger seem to have felt there was always time for one more. Kammler, anxious to get the rocket into action, had no patience with this approach, but seems himself to have been losing faith in the missile, as Dornberger discovered in a humiliating public confrontation:

On 8 July 1944 I was described by Kammler, in the presence of General Buhle and two other generals, as a public danger. He said I ought to be court-martialled . . . [and that] for years I had been weakening Germany’s armament potential by tying [up] . . . both . . . men and material. . . . It would be a crime to devote another penny to so hopeless a project.