V2: A novel of WW2 by Robert Harris 2020 307pg

4/12/20

At the end of November 1944 Germans fired missiles from Scheveningen on the Dutch Coast. From the RAF base at Medmenham they  were working on photographic reconnaissance  Werner von Braun and SS General Hans Kammler were involved in these rockets. Von Braun had once stated that the rocket would not save Germany and that the aim had been to build a spaceship. 1934 Werner von Braun said there are people alive today that will get to the moon. To develop space ships he convinced the military that rockets could be used as  weapons and they set up an Army Research Centre at Peenemunde. 

V1 and V2 stand for Vergeltungswaffe or Vengeance Weapon. 1942  Oct first space travel type rocket succeeded.

1943 Aug Operation Hydra was launched to destroy Peenemunde which had 20, thousand engineers , scientists, teachers , construction workers and slaves mostly from France and Russia.1944 V2s attacked both London and Antwerp.  The fuel was methyl alcohol, liquid oxygen and hydrogen peroxide.  They launched the rockets during periods of heavy cloud so that the RAF could not find them. The V2 weighed 4 ton empty but 8 and a half to when fueled. It reached the speed of 3500mph in the atmosphere. It detonated a ton of amatol high explosives. V2 landed without warning of time to shelter. The bulk of Germany's potato crop was commandeered to distill alcohol fuel for this. the failure rate of the rocket was about 1in 10.  At Peenemunde, a power station , airfield and liquid oxygen plant were set up, the Luftwaffe paid for the construction of this. After this had been destroyed the SS took over the project and took a gypsum mine in Thuringia to be the V2 factory. Dr. Hans Kammler SS was a civil engineer, the mine was opened so that trains could enter it and cross the tunnel. Capacity would be 900 missiles a month. The supply of slave labour was inexhaustible. Himmler was formally given control of the rocket project "you could be shot by the SS  imprisoned by them or work for them. The RAF recruited Women, well educated middle class with different professions like archaeology were recruited to study reconnaissance photos. 8 were sent to Mechelen, Belgium which had been under Germany 3 months previously. With slide rules and log books and Euler formula of the theorem of the parabolic curve.  Raidar would measure the point of the ballistic curve and get the report of where it landed in London, this way the location of the launch pad could be worked out in 6 minutes and the RAF informed to bomb it before it moved away. There was no Luftwaffe left to speak of at the time. Von Braun and his closest colleagues Walter Dombergerand, Bernard Tessman had all their plans on microfilm and as soon as the war ended they would be in great demand by the Americans in White Sands , New Mexico. When they were later driven through London, remarked "We fired more than a thousand rockets at London. "All they places that propaganda had said were destroyed like Buckingham Palace , Parliament , Piccalilli Circus were all intact. 20000 people had died making the V2  2700 people were killed in London with 6500 wounded. This program had cost Germany more dollars that the whole Manhattan Project The last V2 was fired 6 weeks before the end of the war and killed 140 people in Whitechapel