Submarines and their Weapons - Aircraft of World War II

THE UNGUIDED 'TAIFUN'
By mid-1944, there were many in Germany who
advocated cancelling the offensive weapons development
programme completely in order to concentrate
on developing more effective defensive measures, but
of course Adolf Hitler was not one of them, and what
he said still went. The 'Aggregat' programme certainly
got priority at Peenemünde, and since the same
team was working on 'Wasserfall', that inevitably
meant that the latter lost out because resources were
not available. The A4 got into production, while
'Wasserfall' did not. Tn fact, there was not even a clear
consensus in favour of 'Wasserfall', or even general
acceptance of its desirability. Some at BMW even
advocated scrapping 'Wasserfall' (on the grounds that
it would never work successfully without an automatic
guidance system) and concentrating on a simpler,
unguided flak rocket.
A design for just such a missile was put forward by
the Range Officer at Peenemünde, an engineer named
Scheufein, and was - perhaps somewhat surprisingly,
considering all the other demands being put on that
establishment - ordered into development in
September 1944 as the Taifun' ('Typhoon'). The first
examples used solid-fuel motors, but it soon became
apparent that they would not reach the desired height
(the 'Rheintochter' development team was having the
same problem, we may recall), and liquid propellants
Salbei and Visol were used instead. They were stored
in concentric cylindrical tanks, which made up the
body of the missile, and forced into the combustion
SURFACE-TO-AIR MISSILES
chamber by nitrogen under pressure, a cunningly
designed valve ensuring that initially there was a fuelrich
mixture in the chamber which allowed pressure
there to build up slowly and evenly (relatively speaking
since the delay between triggering and firing was
one tenth of a second). This was to prove most effective,
and was to make 'Taifun' surprisingly accurate
even at high altitude, which meant that the warhead
could be fitted with a contact or graze fuze, and needed
to be no bigger than a conventional anti-aircraft
artillery shell of 0.5kg (1.lib).
Overall, the missile was 1.93m (6.3ft) long and
100mm (4in) in diameter. Tt weighed 21kg (461b)
before launch, and reached a height of 15,000m
(49,210ft) before falling back to earth, with a maximum
velocity of 3600km/h (2235mph). It went into
limited production at Peenemünde in January 1945,
and an estimated 600 were completed, along with a
small number of launchers (which were based, once
again, on the mounting of the 8.8cm FlaK 37). Unit
cost would have been very low and, at RM25, less
than a third of the price of a rifle. There is no clear
indication whether it was ever used operationally, and
no evidence to suggest that it ever brought down an
aircraft, though that is certainly possible, since to the
target's crew, it would have appeared that the aircraft
had been hit by conventional anti-aircraft fire.
Below: The 'Wasserfall' was essentially a scaled-down
A4 (V2) rocket; it weighed 3.5 tonnes (3.4 tons) and
reached an altitude of 20km (12.5 miles}.
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