1936 General Baron Wernher Von Fritsch (1880-1939), the Commander in Chief of the German Army, was persuaded to visit Kummersdorf. There he was subjected to a treatment to which many high ranking Germans would succumb. He was introduced to rocketry by lectures illustrated with coloured drawings and diagrams, and then exposed, successively, to test bed demonstrations of 650lbs, 2200lbs and 3500lbs thrust engines. To the 56 year old ex-staff officer, whose early years had not seen powered flight, it was an experience of impressive and seductive grandeur. ‘Hardly had the echo of the motors died away in the pine woods, than the General assured us of his full support’, wrote Dornberger.16 But there was a proviso – the rocket had to become a specific, defined weapon. Fritsch asked them how much they wanted. They asked for, and obtained, a complete armament programme and, in conjunction with the Luftwaffe, a dedicated site.
They found this at Peenemunde, on the Baltic coast. The site was immediately purchased for 750,000 marks. Dornberger met with Riedel and Von Braun to discuss the weapon that they needed in order to justify this princely sum. Becker had already felt, during the war, that rockets – even the crude devices available at the time – would be a better means of delivering poison gas than the projectors then in use. But they should now use long-range, precision rockets, designed in the first place for gas bombardment, and to provide a long-range alternative to bombing with high explosive.17
Both Von Braun and Riedel considered that a really big rocket was required. Dornberger agreed, with a proviso concerning ease of transportation. It was therefore decided that the rocket should be capable of being carried on existing roads and railways, and launched using simple and mobile equipment. Within these limits, a range of 160 miles (twice that of the Paris Gun) and an explosive (or chemical) warhead weight of one ton (100 times greater than the gun) seemed attainable. The thrust required for this would be 25 tons.
The accuracy of the new weapon was to be from 2 to 3 mils, that is, for every 1000 metres travelled it would be only 2 or 3 metres off target, both in range and line. At the extreme range of 160 miles it would fall in a circle of around 650 metres radius.
By first World War standards, therefore, the proposed weapon was formidable indeed – but it was also hugely expensive. In the Great War it would have enabled Germany to reach out to hit enemy Headquarters, ammunition dumps, supply depots, railway yards and junctions with sudden, unstoppable and devastating effect. The firing crews would be too far behind the lines to be hit by counter battery fire, but it could not be used as prodigally as artillery shells; in the last two weeks of August 1918, the much smaller British army expended some 6 million shells. It had rarely used less than a million shells a week since 1917.18
Heavy artillery, however, was always closely connected with air power. The gunners could not see their target – did not even know if a target was there. Aerial photography and spotting were essentials of the ‘deep battle’,19 and the rocket without air power would be useful only to attack immovably fixed targets, i.e. cities, if it were to be used against an enemy who possessed command of the air.
Perhaps another limitation of the artillery rocket was that, if you devastated a rear area in the course and for the purpose of an offensive, you had to reach it fairly quickly during your advance in order to take full advantage of the damage, disorganisation and effect on enemy morale. But rapid advances of 50 to 150 miles were not usual on the western front in the first World War. This meant that its effect would, in those circumstances, be more attritional or strategic than tactical; and although it was always gratifying to kick your enemy without his being able to reply, it would have been an expensive method of achieving it, akin to the ‘breaking windows with guineas’ by which British operations in the early part of the Napoleonic war were characterised.
How many such rockets would be necessary to achieve general ‘devastation’, or to be certain of hitting a target? Bombardment to destroy a whole area is expensive in shells, due to the phenomenon of ‘overhitting’, i.e. from the first shell onwards, you become more and more likely to hit an area already hit; by the time, for example, 50% of the area is damaged, half of all your shells will be ‘wasted’ in this way. In 1944 scientists calculated that to achieve a 50% devastation of an area of one square mile, with a 600 yard aiming error, 250 tons of bombs would be required. But to achieve an increase of 30% to an 80% devastation, would require 600 tons, nearly two and a half times as much.20 It so happens that the planned accuracy of the rocket at 160 miles, and the 1 ton warhead, means that ‘tons’ may be read as rockets. This was thus an expensive way to devastate a target. If the aiming error were to increase to 2000 yards, then to 50% devastate the area would require 1250 rockets, and to 80% devastate, 2900.
A War Office investigation was carried out in order to ascertain how many shells would be needed to be almost certain to destroy a particular target, and a paper21 on the mathematics of bombardment was published some time later. In the paper, six terrorists are presumed to be in a forest of an area of 4 square miles, the question being, how many shells are required to place one shell within 10 yards of one terrorist? The paper concluded that a 1 in 20 chance requires 340 shells, a one in 10 chance needs 690, an even chance requires 5560 and a 95% chance 74,000 shells. Artillery bombardment is an expensive business, and it may be thought that, even with the accuracy specified, a 46 foot, 13 ton rocket, needing 9 tons of fuel to blast it into the stratosphere, was not a very economic alternative to a gun, even presuming that very large, long-range guns were useful or economic weapons themselves.
So would the weapon envisaged by Dornberger, Riedel and Von Braun, and paid for so copiously by the German army and people, have been worth the expense? Formidable though its capabilities would have been, there seems to be no real evidence that the rocketeers had planned definite tactics for the rocket, or had envisaged its precise role in a future battle, although Dornberger and Becker were both artillerymen. Were they themselves as carried away as General Von Fritsch had been by the ear splitting thunder of the rocket motor that they forgot its purpose? In Dornberger’s book there is much made of the superiority of the V2 over both the bomber and conventional artillery, much of the scientific advances and much of space travel, but there is no thoroughly worked out tactical plan for the rocket, such as would be expected from the German army. There is no definite scheme by which the rocket was to be integrated into the existing weaponry. Dornberger, in defence of the rocket, states that ‘the dispersal of the V2 in relation to its range was always less than that of bombs and big guns’.22 But a shell that misses its target is useless, no matter how marvellous the technology that despatched it over so many miles; and to multiply the shots to make up for the inaccuracy of a projectile, whatever the reason for its inaccuracy or the distance it has travelled in order to miss the target, is vastly expensive. Without air power, which meant that you could place an aeroplane safely above the target to observe your fall of shot, and to correct your aim, it was scarcely practicable at all. It was only useful if it was an adjunct to air power, rather than an alternative.
A British analysis of the V2 which resulted from interrogations of the German rocketeers just after the war, concluded that the V2 specification ‘was conceived not for the carrying out of any deeply laid strategic plan for the bombardment of England or any other country, or indeed with any clearly defined application in view. It was merely conceived as a “super gun”, which would impress those in the highest places …’23 Dornberger, when in 1952 he came to write in order to ‘end the confusion and correct mistaken ideas’, perhaps felt a need to explain the apparent folly to his countrymen (the book appeared in German two years before the English edition). But if it also made him appear a high-minded spaceflight enthusiast, then that was also to the good. In 1945, however, the rope was waiting for those whose service to the Fuehrer was suspected of being too morally indiscriminate, and to be certain to survive, the captured artillery Major General had to relate his tale with some caution.
Perhaps it is fair to say that