Ready for Battle by Lorber Azriel

Author:Lorber, Azriel
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: undefined
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group, Inc.
Published: 2012-03-09T16:00:00+00:00

The Big Debate

June 1943 brought a crisis in the debate over the meaning of what was found in Peenemünde. There were no doubts about the size of the objects. From the growing stock of aerial photos and reports of agents on the ground, it was clear that the length of these rockets (if indeed they were rockets) was about ten to eleven meters with a diameter of about two meters. The first difference of opinions was about its mode of propulsion. All concerned assumed a priori that if these were really rockets then they used solid fuels. Everybody knew about solid fuels, and the internal ballistics of solid-fuel rockets was reasonably well understood.

Solid fuels of that period were based on cordite, which is used also as the propellant in standard ammunition.[48] In ammunition, the breech pressure reaches several thousand bars, but in a rocket motor the usual working pressure is thirty to eighty bars. In a solid-fuel rocket, the casing holding the fuel thus has to withstand these pressures. Assuming a reasonable working pressure, and considering the size of the rockets observed, a casing made of steel (with a reasonable safety factor) would have had a thickness of about two inches and weighed about twenty tons. Adding to this the weight of the fuel (in the observed volume) and the warhead, this rocket would have weighted at its launch about forty tons. This meant that just to start moving, let alone accelerate, the rocket motor had to deliver more than forty tons of thrust. Those twenty tons of fuel would not have sufficed to send the rocket to any meaningful distance.

Professor Lindemann, Churchill’s science advisor, objected vehemently to any interpretation of these findings as rockets, basing his objections on the above considerations of weight and thrust.

Because of his role in many of the controversies about German achievements in technology, a brief description of Frederick Alexander Lindemann is in order. Lindemann was a world-renowned physicist who taught at Oxford. During World War I, he volunteered to join the Flying Corps but was rejected for flying duty because of one bad eye. Instead, he was posted to the aeronautical research center at Farnborough. There he developed the method for recovering from a spin. At that time, spin was almost always fatal, and few pilots ever recovered from it while really understanding how they did it. Lindemann worked out the theory and then learned to fly at his own expense. When he felt confident enough he took an airplane up, he entered a spin and recovered from it. Every flying student today practices this technique.

At the end of the twenties, Lindemann became one of Churchill’s (who at that time did not hold any office) closest friends. When the Nazis came to power, he supported Churchill, who was against them and urged the government to strengthen the air force. Although Lindemann descended from a family that emigrated from Germany in the nineteenth century, he too hated the Nazis and helped Jewish physicists who escaped from Germany.

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