Summary: In the first two parts of this series we reviewed the chain of events leading up the first Nazi V-weapons attacks against Moscow and Leningrad in 1941 and Allied reactions to those attacks. In this chapter we’ll look at the first Soviet ballistic rocket tests and the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor's impact on U.S. and British ballistic missile development plans.

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The onset of the Russian winter in late 1941 was a bad blow not only to the Wehrmacht’s attempts to capture Moscow but also to the German V-weapons offensive. Snowstorms played havoc with visibility; sub-zero temperatures kept vital components of the V-weapons’ launch mechanisms from functioning properly. Dozens of V-1s were literally frozen in place, prompting desperate German troops to attempt to thaw them out so they could be fired against Soviet targets. Their efforts more often than not came to nothing-- in fact, during one especially catastrophic incident a V-1 actually blew up on its pad, killing the entire launch crew. Such incidents did not sit well with Hitler, who was counting on the V-1 and its larger cousin the V-2 to subdue the tenacious Soviets and win the war in the East for the Third Reich. A Wehrmacht staff officer posted to Berlin in those days would recall twenty years later: “The Führer grew steadily agitated with each V-1 that failed to launch....he would call (Wernher)Von Braun six, seven times a day demanding to know why the rockets weren’t functioning the way he wanted them to”.

    And Hitler was just as impatient with his generals at the Russian front. Every day for weeks he’d been calling the headquarters of Army Group Center, the primary German battle force driving toward Moscow, and asked the same question: “Brennt Moskau?(Is Moscow burning?) When the inevitable answer “Nein(No)” came, the Führer would often as not erupt into one of the frothing rages for which he was later to become all too famous. His very purpose in sanctioning the creation of the V- weapons program had been to bring about the destruction of what he and his comrades in the Nazi movement viewed as the heart of the mythical Judeo-Bolshevist world conspiracy, and to their dismay the city still stood in spite of the tremendous damage that had been inflicted on it since the first V-1s were fired. And now, to add insult to injury, the notoriously brutal Russian winter had intervened to throw a wrench into Hitler’s military plans on the Eastern Front.

     Luftwaffe commander-in-chief Hermann Goering might have taken the opportunity to gloat about the superiority of his tried and true bomber forces over the still-largely experimental V-weapons, but the selfsame conditions that kept the V-1s from being launched into Moscow as winter set in were also forcing his bomber squadrons to seriously curtail their operations on the Eastern Front. Even the famously hardy Junkers Ju-88s were having a devil of a time simply getting off the ground, never mind mounting any sort of attack against the Soviets. It was a source of sheer collective frustration for Hitler's inner circle. For that matter Wernher von Braun and his research team at Peenemunde were becoming increasingly upset with the involuntary lull in their efforts to refine the V-1 and V- 2; the longer the arduous Russian winter lasted, the tougher it would be for the V-weapon to serve its designated purpose.

     Meanwhile in the Soviet Central Asian province of Kazakhstan, out of range of the prying eyes of Abwehr spies or Luftwaffe reconnaissance planes, the Red Army was preparing to conduct the maiden test firing of its own ballistic missile. Sergei Korolev, an aircraft designer who in 1938 had been exiled to a Siberian gulag on trumped-up charges that he had mismanaged funds allocated to him by the Soviet government for his aviation research, now found himself entrusted with what nearly all the participants involved would agree was the most significant military R & D project Moscow had undertaken since the end of the October Revolution. Nobody needed to tell Korolev that the stakes of the project were high; he understood all too well that the price for failing to accomplish the goals of the Red Army rocket project would be a steep one. If the NKVD didn't have him shot, he'd likely end up as a Nazi POW. Neither of those fates particularly appealed to Korolev.

    On November 20th, 1941 Korolev and his top technicians assembled at what is today the Baikonur Cosmodrome to conduct their first test firing of the prototype for the Red Star ballistic missile. Because of wartime security concerns and Stalin's notorious paranoia the full story of what happened at that test firing wouldn't emerge for nearly two decades, but when it finally did come to light it would amaze aerospace experts around the world. Despite having only a fraction of the advanced technology and facilities which were available to Wernher von Braun’s Peenemunde team-- and for that matter ballistic missile developers in America and Britain-- the Red Star prototype launch team were able to hit their target perfectly on their first try, taking out a simulated German bunker. Impressed with these results, Stalin gave Korolev the green light to proceed with further tests on the Red Star and begin design work on the Red Star's anticipated larger cousin, the Vostok(“sunrise”)

    Most of Hitler's military commanders were unaware of the Red Star's existence, and those who did know of it generally minimized the threat it could pose to the Reich. But Wernher von Braun knew all too well that the Soviets, when they put their minds to it, were capable of creating simple yet devastatingly effective weapons. Stalin himself delighted in quoting the famous adage about artillery being the queen of battle; the factories hidden behind the Ural Mountains cranked out weapons and ammunition at an impressive rate, and the Red Army's soldiers were able and willing to use those weapons at every opportunity.

   Bearing that in mind, von Braun strived harder than ever to get the V-2 operational; he rightly suspected the German army would have urgent need of the larger rocket before too long. Oddly enough, however, the next major development regarding ballistic missles would happen not at Peenemunde or Baikonur but at an American naval base thousands of miles from either region...

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     At 1:00 PM on the afternoon of December 7th, 1941 President Roosevelt and his cabinet were in the midst of a closed-door briefing about German rocket research when a War Department messenger abruptly dashed into the conference room with a cable dispatch from Hawaii bearing the horrendous news that Japanese carrier planes had attack the U.S. Pacific Fleet base at Pearl Harbor. That dispatch cast a chilling new light on the arms race between Allied and German ballistic missile developers; Roosevelt and his chief military advisors knew the Japanese were greatly interested in von Braun's V-weapons research, and they suspected it wouldn't be long before Japan decided to take a stab at creating its own V-1 or V-2 type weapon. Bearing this in mind, one of Roosevelt's first major military decisions following Congress' declaration of war on Japan was to sign an executive order authorizing a substantial increase in funding for the Mjolnir rocket program.

    Hermann Goering has once said American factories were only good for building ice boxes and razor blades; he would be proven dramatically and fatally wrong on that score as American industry hastily retooled itself to produce the weapons and materiel the U.S. armed forces would need for fighting the Axis. One of the most significant examples of such retooling happened in February of 1942, when the first American industrial plant to be specifically designed for manufacturing rockets opened in an abandoned mining complex in Colorado. At Mjolnir’s original testing facilities out in New Mexico activity was ratcheting up towards a fever pitch; fears of an all-out Axis invasion of North America, already intense to begin with, had heightened significantly since the Pearl Harbor attack and there was a sense among Roosevelt’s military advisors that the experimental rocket might be the only thing standing between the United States and SS panzers rolling down Fifth Avenue or Japanese soldiers marching across the Golden Gate Bridge.

    By the time the U.S. Army Air Corps launched their famous “Doolittle raids” on Tokyo in April of 1942, the Colorado rocket factory was already employing more than a thousand workers and plans were on the drawing board to establish a second such facility in Michigan with the assistance of an engineering team from the Ford automotive factories in and around Detroit. Henry Ford himself helped choose the site for the Michigan facility, and a third of the workers who would be employed at the plant were or had been Ford Motor Company employees; a popular joke circulating among the Project Mjolnir team at the time alleged that it actually had been a Ford mechanic and not a cow that jumped over the moon in the famous nursery rhyme.

    But for all the wisecracks about the Ford company's newly established role in Mjolnir, the purpose of its involvement was deadly serious. Even at that early juncture it was clear to all parties concerned that whoever won the arms race between Allied and Axis rocket developers would win the Second World War, and the Project Mjolnir team understood that the cost of failing to overtake Peenemunde would be a grim one indeed...

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     ...and their anxieties on this score were shared by their colleagues in Britain's ballistic missile development program, officially designated Operation Lancelot and based on the Isle of Man. British rocket scientists had hoped to use the Malayan Peninsula as an auxiliary base for their work on perfecting their own ballistic missile, but that hope had crumbled with the Japanese invasion of Malaya and the subsequent fall of Singapore. When Rommel's Afrika Korps started pushing the British 8th Army back towards the gates of Cairo, the notion of establishing a rocket development complex in Egypt was on the back burner too-- possibly forever.

    It was at this dire juncture that the War Ministry fell back on what could be dubbed its Plan C and decided to base Lancelot's secondary launch facility in the Australian Outback near Woomera...

To Be Continued