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What Is Peenemünde?
Nevertheless, in 1944, Dornberger decided to consolidate in Peenemünde the
projects for the development of automatically guided anti-aircraft missiles that
were scattered among different agencies and companies. The combat use of air
defense missiles had been scheduled to begin in 1942–43. The existing types of
radar at that time—Burund, Hansa, Brabant, Percival, and Lohengrin—were used
to support launches, guidance, and monitoring.The launch area design was codenamed
Vesuvius.
Each Wasserfall anti-aircraft guided missile battery consisted of one radar and
four launchers. The utopian plan for the protection of Germany called for 870
Wasserfall batteries and 1,300 Schmetterling batteries. It is astounding that this pipe
dream was considered possible!
By mid-1945, the unfeasible production plans also called for no fewer than
2 million Taifuns to be produced per month.The Taifun was developed during the
last year of the war to battle large Allied bomber formations. It was the smallest
liquid-propellant rocket the Germans developed, with a length of just 1.9 meters
and a diameter of 10 centimeters.The engine generated 500 kilograms of thrust,
imparting to the projectile—which weighed just 9 kilograms—a speed four times
greater than the speed of sound! The Taifuns were supposed to be launched in
salvos from a launcher with forty-six launching rails. Here the influence of our
Katyusha was clearly evident. But the Taifun engine had not been optimized, and
the Germans had not yet mastered the technology of solid-propellant rockets.
In contrast to the Allies and us, the Germans understood that a guided missile
capable of generating supersonic speed is the most effective means of combating
aircraft. The Wasserfall could have been produced earlier, but little attention had
been devoted to it—the doctrine of vengeance had dominated. The Wasserfall
required very large expenditures. They believed that a battery of eight launchers
using thirty-five rockets could repel an entire bomber squadron.
The Schmetterling was an air defense missile produced by the company
Henschel, with tests conducted in Peenemünde.The Rheintochter was still in development.
It was a two-stage, solid-propellant rocket produced by the company
Rheinmetall Borsig, but it possessed only subsonic speed.The anti-aircraft guided
missile Enzian was developed on the basis of the Me 163 rocket-propelled fighter
at the research center in Oberammergau.Thirty-eight of these missiles were fired.
It used a Walter engine with a thrust of 1.5 metric tons and Rheinmetall Borsig
solid-propellant launch boosters.The Enzian is one more example of the transfer
of scientific-technical ideas through super-secret barriers, even during wartime.
While we were developing the ideas of radio guidance for the BI-1 aircraft in
early 1944, Roman Popov, Abo Kadyshevich and I arrived at the idea of making
this aircraft automatically guided. Popov and Kadyshevich worked on using the
newest American radar for this purpose, and I attempted to create a small work
force to develop an autopilot. The work proved to be considerably more laborintensive
than we had imagined at that beginning stage when an interesting idea
entices inventors into the meat grinder of problems.The discontinuation of work
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