The first successful A4 rocket launch

On the afternoon of 3 October 1942 a fourteen-metre rocket painted in a black-and-white chequered pattern lifted off from the Army research establishment at Peenemünde, on the northern tip of the island of Usedom. It was the fourth test example of the A4 (Aggregat 4) rocket, designated V4 (from Versuchsmuster, “test model”). The engine burned for 58 seconds and accelerated the missile to about 4,800 km/h, more than four times the speed of sound. According to the establishment’s measurements, the rocket climbed to an altitude of about 84.5 km and then fell into the Baltic roughly 190 km from the launch site. After two failed attempts, it was the first fully successful flight of a large liquid-fuelled ballistic rocket in history. Two years later this design became the V-2, “Vengeance Weapon 2”, with which the Germans bombarded London, Antwerp and other cities.

It is sometimes stated that the rocket flew 147 km. The surviving records of the Peenemünde tests credit the flight of 3 October with a range of about 190 km (192–193 km in some studies). The 147 km distance was reached only by the next example, V5, launched on 21 October 1942. The altitude of 84.5 km is given consistently, although some authors speak of 85–90 km.

From amateurs to the army

German rocketry grew out of a movement of space-flight enthusiasts. In the late 1920s Hermann Oberth wrote about rockets capable of carrying a man beyond the atmosphere, and members of the Berlin Verein für Raumschiffahrt (Society for Space Travel) built and fired the first small liquid-fuelled rockets. Among them was the very young Wernher von Braun, born in 1912 in Wirsitz (today Wyrzysk in Poland).

The Reichswehr took an interest in rockets for a simple reason. The Treaty of Versailles placed detailed limits on German artillery but said nothing about rocket missiles. In 1932 a small research group was set up in the Army Ordnance Office under Captain Walter Dornberger. It took on von Braun, who at the Kummersdorf military proving ground near Berlin built one “Aggregat” after another: the A1, A2 and A3. In 1937 the team moved to a purpose-built establishment at Peenemünde, shared by the Army and the Luftwaffe. There the smaller A5 rocket was developed and used to test the control systems of the future large design.

From the outset Dornberger was thinking of a weapon. The requirements for the A4 were laid down in the late 1930s: the rocket was to carry a tonne of explosive over a distance of some 250–300 km – twice as far as the famous “Paris Gun” of 1918 – and to fit within the loading gauge of the railways. The finished missile was 14 m long and weighed about 12.5 tonnes at launch. Its engine burned ethyl alcohol mixed with water in liquid oxygen, and the fuel pumps were driven by a turbine powered by steam from decomposing hydrogen peroxide. The flight was controlled by gyroscopes and graphite vanes placed in the exhaust stream.

Two failures

The first A4s left the workshops in the spring of 1942 and were taken to Test Stand VII, a huge arena ringed with earth banks, from which rockets were launched north-eastwards along the Pomeranian coast. Prototype V1 never flew: it was damaged during ground tests in March. V2 was launched on 13 June 1942. The launch was watched by visitors from Berlin, among them the Armaments Minister Albert Speer, Field Marshal Erhard Milch and the commander of the Replacement Army, General Friedrich Fromm. Just after lift-off the roll gyroscope failed, the rocket began to spin, after less than a minute the fuel system stopped working and the missile plunged into the sea less than a kilometre from the shore.

V3 was launched on 16 August. This flight was already a partial success: the rocket became the first ever to exceed the speed of sound and flew stably, but after about 45 seconds its nose cone broke away and the missile disintegrated in mid-air a few kilometres from Peenemünde. The engineers therefore knew that the design was close to its goal, but also that time was pressing. The programme was swallowing enormous sums, and in the competition for raw materials and workers the Reich’s armaments industry had other priorities in 1942: tanks and aircraft for the Eastern Front.

The flight of 3 October

The fourth rocket was carefully prepared and, according to surviving accounts, its body was decorated with an emblem from Fritz Lang’s 1929 silent film Woman in the Moon: the figure of a woman sitting on a crescent moon. For many at Peenemünde the film, on which Oberth had been an adviser, was a reminder of their youthful dreams of space flight.

The launch took place at about 4 p.m. The rocket rose vertically, began to tilt towards the sea after a few seconds as programmed, broke the sound barrier and vanished from the observers’ sight, leaving a trail in the upper atmosphere that the winds twisted into a zigzag. The engine was shut down by radio after 58 seconds. It later emerged that an error in the pitch programme had made the trajectory steeper than intended; that was why the rocket climbed so high and also why it did not fly its full range. It fell into the Baltic about 190 km from the launch site, and the whole flight lasted about five minutes. For the first time every system – engine, pumps, guidance and radio cut-off of thrust – had worked as designed.

That evening Dornberger addressed his colleagues in a speech that he quoted after the war in his memoirs. According to his account, he told them that they had proved that day that rocket propulsion was practicable for space travel, and that “this third day of October 1942 is the first of a new era of transportation, that of space travel”. German tradition also attributes to him the sentence: “The spaceship is born!” Dornberger added at once, however, that as long as the war lasted their task was to perfect the rocket as a weapon as quickly as possible. Historians treat these memoirs, written in the 1950s when he was already in the United States, with caution: they served well to build an image of engineers interested only in space.

Did the rocket reach space?

The A4 of 3 October 1942 is often described as the first man-made object to reach space. That claim needs qualifying. The boundary of space is a matter of convention. The most widely accepted is the Kármán line at an altitude of 100 km, recognised by the Fédération Aéronautique Internationale; V4 did not reach it. The first object to cross it was the A4 designated MW 18014, launched vertically from Peenemünde on 20 June 1944 to an altitude of about 175 km. By other, lower definitions – for example the 80 km (50 mile) boundary used by the US Air Force – the flight of 3 October may be regarded as the first flight to “the edge of space”. What is beyond dispute is that no earlier device had climbed anywhere near so high: the record-breaking stratospheric balloons of the 1930s reached about 22 km.

Hitler, production and Dora

Adolf Hitler long had no faith in the rocket. In August 1941 he approved its development, but without top priority, and Dornberger had to argue that after the lost Battle of Britain only a long-range missile would make it possible to strike British cities. The success of 3 October changed the picture. On 22 December 1942 Hitler signed an order to prepare mass production of the A4, although the technology was still far from mature: in the following months many tests ended in explosions and rockets breaking up in the air. The breakthrough came on 7 July 1943, when Dornberger and von Braun showed Hitler a film of successful launches at the Wolf’s Lair. The A4 was then given the Reich’s highest armaments priority.

The Allies knew more about Peenemünde than the Germans supposed. The Oslo Report of 1939 had already mentioned the research there, and in 1943 British intelligence, drawing also on reports from the Polish underground and from forced labourers, identified the rocket on aerial photographs. On the night of 17–18 August 1943 nearly 600 RAF bombers attacked Peenemünde. The raid delayed the programme by several weeks or months and led the Germans to move production underground and some of the testing to an SS training ground near the village of Blizna in the General Government, where soldiers of the Home Army collected rocket debris; in July 1944 key A4 components were flown out to London.

From the autumn of 1943 the A4 was assembled in the underground Mittelwerk factory, in galleries cut into the Kohnstein hill near Nordhausen in Thuringia. The tunnels were dug, and the assembly lines later worked, by prisoners of the Mittelbau-Dora concentration camp, initially a sub-camp of Buchenwald, among them many Poles, Soviet citizens and Frenchmen. In the winter of 1943/1944 the prisoners slept in the damp tunnels, without daylight and without enough water; the death rate was enormous. Some 60,000 people passed through the camp and its sub-camps, and historians estimate that at least 20,000 of them died. Prisoners accused of sabotage were hanged in public, including in the assembly hall itself. The Peenemünde leadership, von Braun included, knew of these conditions. Construction of the galleries was directed on behalf of the SS by Hans Kammler, who in August 1944, at Heinrich Himmler’s wish, also took command of the operational use of the rockets.

Place in the war

The first operational A4s, named V-2 by Goebbels’s propaganda, were fired on 8 September 1944 at Paris and, that same evening, at London. By the end of March 1945 the Germans had launched more than 3,000 of these missiles, mainly at London and at Antwerp, through which the Allied armies were supplied. A rocket arriving at supersonic speed could be neither seen nor shot down; the only defence was to capture or bomb the launch sites. Various estimates put the number killed by the attacks at some 5,000–9,000, about 2,700 of them in Britain alone. Historians, Michael Neufeld among them, point to the paradox of this weapon: more people died producing it than were killed by its explosions. Militarily the V-2, like the earlier V-1 flying bomb, did not affect the course of the war, and it consumed resources that the Reich could have devoted to fighter aircraft, including the Me 262 jet, or to anti-aircraft defence. After the “Amerikabomber” project, it was another example of German hopes for a weapon that would change the fortunes of the war from afar.

Yet the flight of 3 October 1942 opened the age of ballistic missiles and space flight. After the war, under Operation Paperclip, the Americans brought von Braun, Dornberger and more than a hundred Peenemünde specialists to the United States together with a stock of rockets; the Soviet Union employed other engineers and built its first ballistic missile, the R-1, on the model of the A4. Von Braun later led the development of the Saturn V rocket, which carried men to the Moon. His past – membership of the Nazi Party and the SS and his part in a programme built on slave labour – long remained in the shadow of that success.