This presupposes that the V2 is the first use of rocketry in history which...well, it's just not true. You conveniently skipped over the bit about Congreve rockets, which were invented in the late 18th/early 19th century, explicitly for war, or the growing evidence about the use of gunpowder rocketry in Imperial China. Both of these uses were explicitly NOT peaceful. (not hargreve, I misremembered in the OP post).
Also, if you bother to read the article you referenced, it makes it clear that literally nothing came of the experiments apart from that book. It took a war to get the funding and manufacturing resources available to actually _do the work_ of advancing rocketry.
EDIT: to sound less like an asshole and engage with the comment on its face value.