How Not to Make a Weapon

V-2 (281 pp.)--General Walter Dorn-berger--Translated by James Cleugh and Geoffrey Halllday--Viking ($5).

In the early 1930s, a group of young Germans led by Wernher von Braun were playing with rockets on the outskirts of Berlin. Their object: to fly to the moon.

Their enthusiasm was great, but their funds were low, and their rockets behaved as might be expected of basement-built contraptions. In 1932, the German army gathered up rockets and experimenters and bore them away to secret laboratories Twelve years later, the great V-2 rockets slanted down on London at 3,600 m.p.h.

The story of the V-2s has usually been told by the young enthusiasts. Now it is told by a German general who put them to work for the German army. Under his direction the rocketeers' dreams of space fligts. turned into a hardheaded weapons project, then into a nightmare, as the Nazi government fell into corruption and Hitler's Reich turned to rubble under Allied attack.

Brilliant Engineering. General Dornberger's book is rather confused but highly instructive. It tells in detail how the V-2s were developed. There is no doubt about the brilliance of the rocket engineers who worked at the great Pennemuende base. They started from scratch, feeling their way in an area where virtually nothing was known. Many rockets failed, or exploded disastrously. The engineers had to develop instruments to find out why; they had to develop test stands and guiding devices and elaborate firing routines. Many of the rocket techniques still used today were worked out by the men of Pennemuende nearly 20 years ago.

In spite of all this brilliance, it took twelve years to make the first V-2 fly operationally. This is three times as long as it took the U.S.'s Manhattan Project to produce the bomb that was dropped on Hiroshima. The reasons for the slow progress can be found in Dornberger's book, which is an unintentional treatise on how a novel weapon should not be developed.

Money was not the problem; by 1936, says Dornberger, "high authority virtually suffered from an attack of acute generosity." But even while money, men and equipment poured into Pennemuende, the project had no secure status. Hitler saw a rocket motor fired on a test stand, but was not impressed. Shortly after the start of World War II, the project's priority was reduced so low that Dornberger had to persuade Field Marshal von Brauchitsch to list his staff as fighting troops, out of reach of civilian authorities.

Hitler's Dream. Then terrible news came into headquarters: "The Fuehrer has dreamed that no V-2 will ever reach England." The project's priority dropped another notch.

At last Hitler was persuaded to watch a film of a V-2's flight. He was wildly enthusiastic but demanded that the one-ton warhead be increased to ten tons. When told that this was technically impossible, he cried: "But what I want is annihilation --annihilating effect!" Dornberger had to explain that the V-2s, in effect, were long range artillery. Even if they worked perfectly, they could not annihilate England.

He recalls regretfully that Germany had given up trying to make an atomic bomb.

If the V-2 had been armed with an atomic bomb, it might very well have won the war. Why no one realized this is probably explained by the amazing lack of coordination among Nazi bigwigs. Dornberger discovered in 1943 that practically no one at Hitler's headquarters had ever heard of the enormous Peenemuende base.

He attributed this ignorance to excessive secrecy, but the British knew about Peenemuende and bombed it heavily only a month later.

Too Little & Late. Hitler at last gave the V-2s the highest priority, but Dornberger's troubles were not over. Heinrich Himmler, head of the Gestapo, kept sniffing around Peenemuende. His men arrested Von Braun and two colleagues because they had been heard to remark that they were still interested in space flight. Spies were everywhere; Nazi favorites were plotting. The V-2s were forced into production while they were no more than delicate laboratory models. Many of them failed disastrously. When the first V-2s reached England in September 1944, they were too late to have any appreciable effect on the outcome of the war.

General Dornberger's book is an implied tribute to U.S. scientists and industrialists cooperating with their government. The brilliant engineers at Peenemuende did brilliant work, but the Nazi system achieved nothing like the harmony, purpose, coordination and effectiveness of the U.S. atom-bomb project.

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