Submarines and their Weapons - Aircraft of World War II

SURFACE-TO-SURFACE MISSILES
Above: An A4 rocket, shrouded in tarpaulin, on the railway
flatcar used to transport it to the vicinity of the launch site.
The Allied advance across northern Europe drove the V2
battalions out of effective range of worthwhile targets.
THE LATER GUIDED BALLISTIC MISSILE PROJECTS
As soon as the A4 was viable, the project was taken
out of von Braun's hands. He and his team, it is suggested,
were never entirely satisfied with it, and
would happily have gone on refining their design, but
Heinrich Himmler, who had previously seized control
of all the secret weapons programmes, would not
accept that. Von Braun turned to working on ways of
increasing its range. The simplest means, he concluded,
was to fit it with wings, so that it would glide in
the final phase of its flight, prolonging its descent and
increasing its range to 435km (270 miles), but he
counted without the effects of re-entering the dense
air at lower atmospheric levels. The one A4b missile
which was launched successfully (the first one
crashed soon after take-off) failed to re-enter cleanly
and was destroyed.
The A6, which never made it past the discussion
stage, was to have been an A4 fueled by SV-StoiT,
made up of 94 per cent nitric acid and 6 per cent
nitrous oxide, and Visol (the generic name given to a
group of isobutyl-vinyl esters); it was to have 20 per
82
cent more thrust. The A7 was a winged version of the
A5, air-launched as a concept vehicle for the A9. The
A8 was virtually identical to the A6 but fuelled with
SV-Stoff and diesel oil, although it is also suggested
that it was to have been fuelled with LOX and
methanol contained in pressurized tanks, rather than
employing the turbine pump to deliver them to the
combustion chamber. The A9 was the A4b with modified
wing planform: essentially, the horizontal fins
were to have been continued forward, right to the
rocket's nose, in a simple ogive, to allow it to survive
re-entry; it had the motor from the A6, with a projected
range of 600km (370 miles).
The final ballistic missile project, the A10, was
much more ambitious in scale and had it ever materialised,
would have been the first ever ICBM. The projected
inter-continental ballistic missile was to have
been a two-stage rocket, the first stage being based on
six A4 motors linked into a common venturi, and
designed to propel its second stage - either an A4 or
an A9 - to an altitude of 24km (14.9 miles) before its
own motor was fired, giving it a range of around
4800km (2800 miles) with a 1000kg (22001b) amatol
warhead and a flight time of around 45 minutes. It is
suggested that this project was first discussed as early
as 1940, long before the United States entered the
war, but there is no evidence that it got beyond the