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On the Times and My Contemporaries
another powerful People’s Commissar (for Ammunitions) or Ustinov (the People’s
Commissar for Armaments).
After the most difficult war in our history, our government needed at the very
least to catch its breath, but the Cold War did not allow it. It was unrealistic to
begin the development and construction of large rocket systems in a country that
was starving and mutilated by war.The decision to reproduce German rocket technology
on German territory—using Russian specialists assisted by German rocket
specialists—was risky, but it turned out to be a very good one. Active work by
Soviet specialists in the field of large rocket technology was transferred to
Germany for two years (from May 1945 through January 1947). Working in
Germany, we reconstructed the history of German rocket technology and correspondingly
the role of the Nazi totalitarian regime in the organization of superlarge-scale
programs for the production of long-range ballistic missiles.
On 4 May 1945, the troops of Marshal Rokossovskiy occupied, virtually without
opposition, the area of the German rocket scientific research center in Peenemünde.
The reconstruction of the Germans’ activity in Peenemünde was handled
not by Aviation General Petr Ivanovich Fedorov, as might be expected, but by
Artillery Major General Andrey Illarionovich Sokolov.
Sokolov was one of the first distinguished figures in the history of our rocketspace
technology. During the most difficult years of the war, he was the person
authorized to represent the State Defense Committee (GKO) during the introduction
of the Katyusha to factories in the Urals and its subsequent production
there. 4 Katyusha was the name the army gave to combat vehicles mounted with
multiple solid fuel rocket launchers.This type of rocket armament was developed
as early as 1937 at RNII. One of the primary authors of this development, RNII
Chief Engineer Langemak, was executed.
Vehicle-mounted rocket launchers were not accepted as weaponry until 1941.
It is very likely that this was the only Soviet weapon that stunned the Germans
during the first months of the war. Serial production had to be set up almost from
scratch, and troop units had to be organized for the effective mass use of the new
multiple rocket launcher systems for salvo fire. At Stalin’s initiative, all Katyushas
designated for the front were combined into a new military branch: the Guards
Mortar Unit of the Supreme Command Headquarters. At the end of 1944,Andrey
Sokolov carried out his mission to organize the production of and military acceptance
of the “Guards mortars” in the Urals and was appointed Chief of Armaments
and Deputy Commander of the Guards Mortar Units.
The Guards Mortar Units had command of the Katyushas, which were purely
a tactical rocket weapon, but the Germans’ example suggested that there was no
time to waste. They had to seize the initiative to produce strategic rocket
4. The GKO—Gosudarstvennyy Komitet Oborony (State Defense Committee)—headed by Stalin, was the
principal state organization that oversaw the Soviet Union’s wartime activities during World War II.
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