Hitler's Scientists by John Cornwell

Author:John Cornwell [Cornwell, John]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
ISBN: 9781101640159
Publisher: Penguin Group US
Published: 2004-09-27T16:00:00+00:00

Academic Science and the German Missile

The collaboration between the army rocket programme and academia had begun in the mid-1930s with the contributions of Dr Rudolf Hermann, an assistant at the Technische Hochschule at Aachen, where Hermann was working on sub-scale rocket models at the university wind tunnel. Hermann, a Nazi, was eventually enticed to Peenemünde with the sort of prospect scientists and engineers tend to find irresistible: he was invited to construct and manage the largest and most powerful wind tunnel in the world. It was completed in the autumn of 1939 as Germany went to war. By that time other Technische Hochschulen, especially those of Dresden and Darmstadt, had begun work on sophisticated guidance technology.

The wind tunnel project formed a highly significant feature of Big Science pioneered at Peenemünde, as its directors attempted to bring every aspect of research, development and production of missiles under one roof. Dornberger later admitted that the budget of the wind tunnel project at 300,000 Marks frightened him. In time this budget would be exceeded again and again. Eventually two large supersonic wind tunnels were built at Peenemünde, and a third smaller one, employing a staff of sixty by the beginning of the war in 1939, rising to 200 by 1943.

The point of these machines was to test the air drag, lift, stability and controllability of airplanes and missiles by subjecting scaled-down models to high wind speeds replicating real conditions in supersonic flight. The tunnels required compressors of great power to move air continuously at supersonic speeds through a circular test duct.

The result of Hermann’s work was the refining of the fin and fuselage shape of the proposed A4 so as to create the first fin-stabilized supersonic projectile. Dr Walter Thiel succeeded in increasing the power of the alcohol/liquid oxygen engine used in the A3 to the 25-ton thrust required for the A4.

Before the outbreak of war Peenemünde, with its advanced technologies and no deployment in the foreseeable future, had been awarded the same top-priority status as U-boat and aircraft production, and braced itself to expand the workforce from 5,000 to 9,000. In the meantime the rocket-aircraft project was shelved, and the much vaunted collaboration between the army and the Luftwaffe dwindled to collaboration on guidance systems and a proposed rocket-assisted take-off system for bomber aircraft.

The priority was to complete the technical developments of the A4 and push through the construction of a factory in order to commence production two years ahead of the original schedule. The latter required large quantities of steel at a time of severe ammunition shortages due to the invasion of Poland. In consequence, Hitler intervened in the autumn of 1939 to overcome the ‘munitions crisis’, relegating the rocket project to its original timetable and scaling down its steel supply to 2,000 tons a month from an earlier increase to 4,000 tons a month. Dornberger nevertheless struggled to keep the start date for production of the A4 to 1941, rather than 1943, with a completion figure of just eighteen rockets a month, rising to ninety a month by July 1942.

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