Germany was dislocated. Nine days later, Arthur Harris took over as Commander in Chief. He began to plan a raid on a German city by a thousand bombers. In the meantime, the Billancourt Renault factory, which it was estimated produced 18,000 lorries per annum for the German army, was bombed on March 2nd/3rd by 235 aircraft; some 300 bombs hit the factory, causing an estimated loss of production of nearly 2300 lorries. In a series of attacks on industrial areas, Kiel (5 times), Wilhelmshaven, Essen (8 times), Cologne (4 times), Lubeck, Hanau, Lohr, Hamburg (twice), Dortmund (twice), Emden, Augsberg and Rostock (4 times) were attacked by the end of April. Lubeck and Rostock were both utterly devastated by fire, Goebbels reporting that community life in Rostock had ended. The word ‘Terrorangriff’ was used for the first time.42 Altogether, between February 14th and the end of April, RAF Bomber Command conducted some 86 operations in seventy-five nights, including mine-laying, shipping attacks and major industrial raids, losing over 230 aircraft – considerably less than production. An Empire air training scheme meant that trained aircrew would be available to man the bombers which the factories were beginning to pour out; by the end of the war, Britain would have trained nearly 300,000 aircrew, of which some 120,000 were pilots, after commencing the war with an output of only some 5800 pilots per year.43 Although, of course, the British training and production figures were unknown to the Germans, they knew the rate of British losses over Germany, and they knew that the attacks were on an increasing scale of weight and accuracy. And they knew that the United States was making preparations to enter the war in the air over the Reich. Clearly, they needed to do something.
But it was the German army that was most obviously in need of the iron fruits of production. Despite the armoured force that had terrorised the west, the vast majority of the army consisted of infantry, marching on foot with horse drawn guns. The losses in Russia had ‘demodernised’ the army further, and it would fight the rest of the war in the east with insufficient tanks and guns. Tank production was 5290 in 1941, but none were as good as the soviet T34 or heavy KV tanks, of which 6243 were made in 1941.44 Hitler would not be aware of this until the great clash at Stalingrad later in the year.
Thus by April 1942 Germany had entered into a war of grinding attrition; of submarines, aircraft, tanks, guns, lorries, bombs, shells, explosives, cartridges, bullets and boots; of picks, shovels, gauges, instruments, radio and radar equipment, and optical lenses; of maintenance fitters, skilled and unskilled factory workers, of gunners, sailors, pilots, tank crew and infantrymen; and of housing, bedding, cooking utensils and even crockery. All were being consumed on a huge scale. Her war production was flat out, but inefficient; there were many faults in organisation and leadership, with the armed services competing with each other for capacity. By April 1942 prioritised, efficient production had become a life and death problem for Nazi Germany.
In that April of 1942, and amid these stringencies, came a proposal by Oberst Walter Dornberger, chief of weapons testing unit 11 (Wa Pruef 11), and in charge of German rocket development, which he hoped would gain his project top priority in production and development. Dornberger’s booklet, entitled ‘Proposals for the Operational Employment of the A4 Rocket’, was distributed to ‘the highest authorities civilian and military’.1 It called for 5000 rockets a year to be launched from northern France against industrial and supply areas and communications in ‘southern England’. Dornberger provided details of the firing organisation, the basic unit of which was to be the ‘abteilung’. Each abteilung was to be divided into 3 batteries, each of which was to possess a mobile firing platform. One abteilung could sustain a fire of 27 rockets per day; three abteilungen, grouped as a regiment, could fire 100 rockets in an eight hour period, although problems of supply would limit this barrage to only once in every twenty-four hours.
An abteilung would consist of some 750 men. These troops were to be fully motorised, which meant an establishment of 560 vehicles per abteilung. They would require 70,000 tons of liquid oxygen per annum – at the time only some 26,000 tons were available. The alcohol to be used was ethanol, which was manufactured by the fermentation of potatoes. Thus the stratospheric rocket would be dependent upon the potato crop, a curious mixture of the new age with the old. Here the requirement was 30,000 tons of alcohol per annum.2
It may be wondered how the rocket project had survived the first three years of a war which was so demanding of national resources. In February 1940 Goering had closed down all projects that would not be finished in 1940/1, which had stopped work on the Jumo 004 jet engine, the Messerschmitt Me262 jet fighter and ground to air missiles.3 Yet the rocket survived the battles of France and Britain, the carnage of men and equipment in Russia, and the night bombing offensive, due mainly to the protection afforded by the politically powerful army and the artful zeal of Dornberger.
On September 5th, 1939, von Brauchitsch, the commander in chief of the army, decreed that the rocket project at Peenemunde was to be expedited as being ‘particularly urgent for national defence’. But its projected completion had now to be brought forward by Dornberger from September 1943 to September 1941.4 By October 9th 1939 General Becker was asking for a completion date of May 31st 1941, which would demand some 9000 construction workers (it already had 5000); by the 11th October, it gained first priority from General Georg Thomas (head of the Defence Economics and Armaments Directorate), together with the U boat and Ju88 programmes; but on 20th November, to Dornberger’s horror, Hitler cut back the steel quota from 6000 to 2000 tons.5
Hitler had visited Kummersdorf in March 1939, and to Dornberger’s amazement, the Fuehrer had not been moved.
‘In all the years I had been working on rocket development this was the first time that anyone had witnessed the massive output of gas at enormous speed, in luminous colours, from a rocket exhaust, and heard the thunderous rumble of power thus released, without being either enraptured, thrilled, or carried away by the spectacle’, he wrote.6 That irascible dictator can seldom have been criticised for an over calm and objective appraisal of a situation; but four years of ruinous war would later dull the German dictator’s critical faculties, and a dim hope of salvation and a thirst for vengeance would by then aid the wiles of the crafty military salesman.
Neither the tense uncertainties of war nor the brimming euphoria of victory were able to unseat the army’s pet project at Peenemunde. When Hitler had withdrawn the rocket from the priority list in the spring of 1940, the army commander in chief, and Dornberger’s old battalion commander, von Brauchitsch had, displaying ‘wise foresight’ and ‘a high sense of responsibility and imagination’, and without Hitler’s knowledge, withdrawn 4000 technically qualified men from the fighting troops for work at Peenemunde7.
In April 1940 General Becker, hounded over a munitions crisis by Georg Thomas, Goering and Hitler, committed suicide. “I only hope”, he had said to Dornberger two days before the melancholy event, “that I have not been mistaken in my estimate of you and your work.”8 Perhaps, when Becker’s great leader followed him into voluntary extinction almost exactly five years later, his mind may also have dwelt for a time on wonder weapons and Dornberger’s promises.
Before
