Wernher
von Braun, the son of a Prussian baron, was born in Wirsitz, Germany
in 1912. He studied engineering at Berlin's Charlottenburg Institute
of Technology and after reading The Rocket
into Interplanetary Space by Hermann
Oberth, he became interested in rocket technology and helped form
the German Society for Space Travel.
In
1932 Braun's achievements attracted the attentions of Walter
Dornberger, who was in charge of the solid-fuel rocket research
and development in the Ordnance Department of the German
Army. Dornberger recruited Braun and in 1934 he successfully built
two rockets that rose vertically for more the than 2.4 kilometres
(1.5 miles).
Dornberger
was appointed military commander of rocket research station at Peenemunde
in 1937. Braun became technical director of the establishment and
he began to develop the long-range ballistic missile, the A4 and the
supersonic anti-aircraft missile Wasserfall.
During
the Second World War Braun began working on
a new secret weapon, the V2 Rocket. This 45
feet long, liquid-fuelled rocket carried a one ton warhead, and was
capable of supersonic speed and could fly at an altitude of over 50
miles. As a result it could not be effectively stopped once launched.
Heinrich
Himmler saw the military potential of Braun's research and took
over control of the research station. Himmler became increasingly
concerned about the motivation of Braun, considering him more interested
in space travel than developing bombs. In March, 1944, Braun was arrested
by the Gestapo and was only released
when they became convinced that Braun was willing to use all his energies
to develop this bomb that Himmler believed had the potential to win
the war.
The V2
Rocket was first used in September, 1944. Over 5,000 V-2s were
fired on Britain. However, only 1,100 reached their target. These
rockets killed 2,724 people and badly injured 6,000. After the D-Day
landings, Allied troops were on mainland Europe and they were able
to capture the launch sites and by March, 1945, the attacks came to
an end.
With the
Red Army advancing on the Peenemunde Research
Station, Braun and his staff fled west and surrendered to the US Army.
Braun and 40 other rocker scientists were taken to the United
States where they worked on the development of nuclear missiles.
In 1952
Braun became
technical director of the US Army's Ballistic Missile Agency at Huntsville,
Alabama and was chiefly responsible for the manufacture and successful
launching of Redstone, Jupiter-C, Juno and Pershing missiles.
After
the Soviet Union successfully launched Sputnik on 4th October, 1957,
Braun concentrated on the development of space rockets and in January,
1958 launched Explorer I.
In 1960 Braun became director of the Marshall Space Flight Center
where he developed the Saturn rocket that helped the United States
to land on the moon in 1969.
When
President Richard Nixon dramatically reduced
the space budget in 1972 Braun resigned and became vice-president
of Fairchild Industries, an aerospace company
Wernher
von Braun, who wrote the books Conquest of
the Moon (1953) and Space Frontier
(1967) died of cancer at Alexandria on 16th June, 1977.
(1)
In an interview he gave to a journalist in October 1950, Wernher von
Braun spoke about the political and moral consequences of going to
work for the German Army
on rocket technology in 1932.
In 1932, the idea of war seemed to us an absurdity. The Nazis weren't
even in power. We felt no moral scruples about the possible future
abuse of our brain child. We were interested solely in exploring outer
space. It was simply a question with us of how the golden cow would
be milked most successfully.
(2)
Albert Speer, Germany's Minister of Armaments
in the Second World War, was a strong supporter
of the rocket programme headed by Wernher von Braun.
Ever since the winter of 1939, I had been closely associated with
the Peenemunde development centre, although at first all I was doing
was meeting its construction needs. I liked mingling with the circle
of non-political young scientists and inventors headed by Werner von
Braun - twenty-seven years old, purposeful, a man realistically at
home in the future. It was extraordinary that so young and untried
a team should be allowed to pursue a project costing hundreds of millions
of marks and whose realization seemed far away.
My sympathy
stood them in good stead when in the late fall of 1939 Hitler crossed
the rocket project off his list of urgent undertakings and thus automatically
cut off its labour and materials. By tacit agreement with the Army
Ordnance Office, I continued to build the Peenemunde installations
without its approval - a liberty that probably no one but myself could
have taken.
(3)
In a letter to R.W. Reid, the author of a book on science and morality,
Wernher von Braun, wrote about the problems of developing new weapons
for Adolf Hitler and his Nazi
government (May, 1968)
With the tight press censorship imposed by Hitler, the abuses of his
regime were not nearly as visible to the average German as they were
to an outsider who had free access to the international news media.
For this reason, I must say, more by way of a statement than as an
apology, that I never realized the depth of the abyss of Hitler's
régime until very late and particularly after the war, when
all these terrible abuses were first published. I guess until about
a year before the war's end I shared the feelings of most Germans
that while Hitler was unquestionably an aggressor and a conqueror,
that this put him more in a class with Napoleon than with the devil
incarnate. While right from the beginning I deeply deplored the war
and the misery and suffering it spread all over the world, I found
myself caught in a maelstrom in which I simply felt that, like it
or not, it was my duty to work for my country at war.
(4)
Albert Speer wrote about the testing of
Wernher von Braun's rocket in his autobiography, Inside the Third
Reich.
On June 13, 1942, the armaments chiefs of the three branches of the
armed forces, Field Marshal Milch, Admiral Witzell and General Fromm,
flew to Peenemunde with me to witness the first firing of a remote-controlled
rocket.
Wisps of
vapour showed that the fuel tanks were being filled. At the predetermined
second, at first with a faltering motion but then with the roar of
an unleashed giant, the rocket rose slowly from its pad, seemed to
stand upon its jet of flame for the fraction of a second, then vanished
with a howl into the low clouds. Wernher von Braun was beaming. For
my part, I was thunderstruck at this technical miracle, at its precision
and at the way it seemed to abolish the laws of gravity, so that thirteen
tons could be hurtled into the air without any mechanical guidance.
Approximately
twenty-five feet long, the Wasserfall rocket was capable of carrying
approximately six hundred and sixty pounds of explosives along a directional
beam up to an altitude of fifty thousand feet.
(5)
Albert Speer told Adolf
Hitler about the A-4 rocket, on 14h October, 1942. Hitler was
excited by the news as he was convinced that he now had a weapon that
would win the war.
The A-4 is a measure that can decide the war. And what encouragement
to the home front when we attack the English with it. This is the
decisive weapon of the war, and what is more it can be produced with
relatively small resources. Speer, you must push the A-4 as hard as
you can! Whatever labour and materials they need must be supplied
instantly. You know I was going to sign the decree for the tank program.
But my conclusion now is: Change it around and phase it so that A-4
is put on a par with tank production. But in this project we can use
only Germans. God help us if the enemy finds out about this business.
(6)
R. V. Jones first became aware of
the German VI Flying Bomb project in August, 1943.
On 22nd August an object had crashed in a turnip field on the island
of Bornholm in the Baltic, roughly half-way between Germany and Sweden.
It was a small pilotless aircraft bearing the number V83, and it was
promptly photographed by the Danish Naval Officer-in-Charge on Bornholm,
Lieutenant Commander Hasager Christiansen. He also made a sketch,
and noted that the warhead was a dummy made of concrete.
At first,
we were not sure what he had found. From his sketch it was about 4
metres long, and it might have been a rather larger version of the
HS 293 glider bomb that KG100 was now using against our warships in
the Mediterranean. Indeed, it turned out that this particular bomb
had been released from a Heinkel III, but it was in fact a research
model (the 'V' probably stood for 'Versuchs' i.e. research) of the
flying bomb about which we were going to hear so much in the next
few months.
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