The V-2

It's been a few years since I last posted this, so I think I'm in the clear:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QEJ9HrZq7Ro

"Once the rockets are up, who cares where they come down. That's not my department, says Wernher von Braun."

As a German I have very mixed feelings about von Braun. On the hand he was an impressive engineering leader but he was also a war criminal that used slave labor under terrible conditions without hesitation. I would have prefer him going to jail for a few years after the war.

From the "trivia" section of the article (not sure what their source is).

"Von Braun was heard to say that it would have been preferable to develop rocketry for space travel rather than war. But if it was necessary to develop a war rocket to reach space, he was willing to do so. Dornberger ordered von Braun not to mention space in Hitler's presence"

Terryfying, considering that the V2 led to space and eventually the moon exactly according to his plan.

It's really highly exaggerated, both in that show and in popular culture. Nazis would not have travelled to Mars by the 1960s, and they wouldn't have supersonic civilian airliners. Nazism crippled German science, math, and technology. If you remember your math courses, many things have German names. You'll notice that's mainly pre-1933 works. The mathematical establishment at Gottingten and elsewhere, which included many Jews and people married to them, was eviscerated. Ditto for physics.

The only place they were unambiguously ahead of Allied technology was rocketry. Our bombers were superior, Soviet tanks were superior to what the Germans had, and the fighters were comparable. Even with rocketry, the allies would have caught up even without Operation Paperclip.

Nazism really doesn't have any upsides.

But then the Soviets would've been wiped out, and Korolev and co actually beat the former Nazis to orbit and to the moon (lunar rovers), even with less resources and experience.

The cost vs the Manhattan project as a drain on German resources is one of the major thesis points in "The Rocket and the Reich."

If the V-2 had been used to attack staging areas for the D-Day invasion, etc., it might have been effective. But randomly blowing up a building here and there accomplished nothing for the war effort.

The Allies' bombing attacks on German homes had similarly useless effects. See "Fire and Fury" by Hansen.

For a fascinating book on the development of the V-2, see "V-2" by Dornberger.

It might just be a widely held misunderstanding that the V2's purpose was only meant as a ballistic missile. But if I remember correctly it was also, and probably initially mostly, meant as a psychological and political weapon, the objective being to convince British population of the necessity to reach a separate agreement with Germany, so they could end the war on that front before moving against the Soviet Union. Therefore the best weapon had to be frightening but not necessarily very efficient from a deaths per invested dollars measurement.

The response from the British state is also to be understood as a political move: they responded with the large bombimg raids over German cities (using plain old death-toll effective bombers), thus signifying that there would be no separate peace agreement with the UK.

According to this narrative, it sounds like the German war plan was naive to believe other great powers would agree to let Germany conquer Russia, more than naive regarding the efficiency of the V2 as a weapon.

Anyway, just a reminder that ultimately it's all about politics not technology.

A good source I can remember about the V2 story during the war, from the UK point of view, was this book:

Most secret war, by R.V. Jones

Having similar budgets, the German rocket program consumed a lot of slave labour. No concern for the conditions of the labour, either their salaries of course - replaceable human machines with service length 1-2 years. Add the worth of the eqivalent labour on top of the total cost of the German program.

Works for me in FF on iPhone, but stalls a bit when loading.

For me also, on chrome in Android.