Transcript for Supersonic Nazi Vengeance: V2 Rocket (Part 1)

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Dealing with pests can be a pain. But relax, terminix can help because when pests show up, so does terminix. With over 95 years of experience, they have what it takes to take on any pest problem fast. If your home or business has pests, don't stress it, terminix it. Visit terminix.com to book your appointment online today. That's T-E-R-M-I-N-I-X.com. If you are a loyal Pushkin Plus subscriber, thank you so much. We're really grateful for your support for the show, which helps us give you the storytelling, the acting, the research, and the sound design. We strive for on cautionary tales. And we hope you're gripped by the two part story of the Tenorif Air Disaster. We recently released on the Pushkin Plus feed. Now, if you are not a pushkin plus subscriber, not to worry, we know it's not for everyone and we still love you. And as a token of that affection, we're releasing our epic trilogy about the V2 rocket previously only available on pushkin plus. I first started working on this story back in the spring of 2022. It was a real labour of love, initially sparked by curiosity about a strange statistic my producer Ryan Dilly had told me and then just going deeper and deeper and eventually darker and darker too. There is tragedy. There is moral complexity, brilliance, courage, pure evil. And of course, there's rocket ships and the dream of traveling into space. Enjoy! By late November 1944, there was no doubt that the Allies were winning the Second World War, and London was far from the front line. Still, London has had to make sacrifices. To pick a trivial example, it was awfully difficult to get hold of a new sourcepan So when a young woman called Betty heard rumours that a branch of woolworths in southeast London had a new consignment of kitchenware, she didn't hesitate.

Betty had to travel across the city to reach the store. It was Saturday the 29th of November and she arrived in South East London just before half past 12.

She was not senseless and sideways.

She had no idea what had happened. She looked at her baby.

Betty's clothes were a mess, buttons and ribbons everywhere. But she wasn't hurt, and neither was her daughter. A horse and cart coercing down the street, the driver's legs waving in the air.

She picked up her daughter, got her feet, and continued her journey. Around the corner, a man stopped her.

He gently touched her shoulder and turned her around.

And so, Betty, forplexed, went home with her baby. And she never had to see the sight of the explosion. The jagged skeletal bricks and timber that used to be the wall worth storm. The scraps of clothing and wedding rings that were all the remained of the women who had been queuing up the saucepan's just a few minutes ahead of her. She didn't have to gaze at the number 53 bus that had stopped outside the store, filled with motionless passengers, covered in dust, apparently unharmed, but all killed instantly. All killed instantly by a weapon that couldn't be seen and could not be stopped. A weapon called the V2. I'm Tim Hartford, and you're listening to caution retails. 168 people were killed by the V2 strike on Woolworths. Many more were seriously injured. 11 people were simply recorded as missing. We presume that they were inside the Woolworth store when the V2 hit and that they were vaporised leaving no trace at all. They will never know. This is the story of the V2. The dreaded rocket-powered bomb that the Nazis began to use in the last few months of the Second World War. It travelled faster than the speed of sound. You couldn't hear it coming. One moment, it's queuing up to by a sourcepan, the next moment. Well, there is no next moment. Onto explore how this terrible weapon came into existence, why so many of the people had heard weren't the people you might expect, and the lessons we can learn even today. Later we'll try to understand the weapon from the perspective of the Germans and the Americans, but let's start with the British and wind back a little further in time. Britain had been at war with Nazi Germany since 1939. London and many other British towns and cities had been relentlessly bombed in late 1940 and early 1941. But by 1942, the focus of the war had moved elsewhere. Around about Christmas in 1942, a British intelligence officer named RV Jones received a worrying message Jones had risen to a lofty position in the British Intelligence Service at the age of just 31, and he didn't like what he read. The message was from an informant in Germany who had managed to overhear a conversation between two senior Nazi engineers about a new German weapon.

Two weeks later, another message

Other similar reports dribbled in over the following three months. Sitting in London, RV Jones was intrigued, but the reports were little more than rumours, and the weapons seemed fantastical. Jones asked for details on the movements of the German units with the most expert radar operators. He was sure that if a rocket was being tested at Pena Munder, which is on the north coast of Germany between Denmark and Poland, then those radar units would be deployed to the area. Sure enough, that's where they were. He commissioned high-level aerial photographs of Peter Munder and after exhaustive study found what looked like it might be a rocket about 35 feet long. These clues convinced RV Jones that the reports of a rocket weapon had to be taken seriously. But he was making a lonely argument, most of the rest of the British establishment was skeptical In June 1943, RV Jones was summoned to a meeting of Prime Minister Winston Churchill's war cabinet, along with several other experts. Churchill wanted to resolve once and for all the argument about the existence or non-existence of a secret German rocket program. On one side, there was RV Jones, convinced that the rocket existed based on the clues from the telegrams and the aerial photographs and the movements of German radar teams. On the other, the skeptics. led by Churchill's senior advisor, Frederick Linderman. The debate was spirited. Frederick Linderman pointed out that Britain had rocket scientists too, and those scientists believed that the rocket-shaped object in the aerial photograph wasn't big enough to deliver anything like the range being rumored. The Germans would have had to have delivered a technological miracle to make a rocket that small fly that far, and that was surely out of the question. Even if the rocket did exist and could fly, Linderman continued, it wouldn't be able to hit targets with any accuracy. And even if the Germans could build some kind of barmono rocket ship, why on earth would they do that? Linderman reminded the group that Germany had to marshal its scarce resources carefully. It desperately needed material for tanks and planes. It seemed quite absurd that they would waste time and money on a costly and impractical program to put bombs on rockets. Pouring vast amounts of resources into making rocket bombs made no strategic sense, it defied all economic logic. Linderman was hugely influential. He was also the person who'd originally recommended RV Jones to Churchill. But now he vigorously disagreed with his young protege. He thought that Jones must have been mistaken when examining the aerial photographs that Jones had seen a plywood decoy, not a real rocket. Linderman had heard different rumours he told Churchill and the others. He'd heard that the Germans were working on some kind of pilotless plain instead. That sounded more believable, although it still didn't make much sense. The most sensible thing that the Germans could focus on was making more of their proven weapons of war, fighter planes, bombers and tanks. The idea of a vast secret program to develop a rocket bomb that surely couldn't work, the whole thing was clearly a hoax, said Linderman. But young RV Jones was well able to defend his view that the rocket was real. His aerial photographs proved that Pena Mundo was a huge sight, full of complex equipment and facilities, whatever was happening there was plainly important. If the Germans were attempting to pull off a hoax, it was a hoax calculated to prompt an attack on Pena Munder. What would they gain from that? Churchill was delighted with a young man standing up for himself. He tees Linderman.

After vigorous argument, RV Jones convinced the Prime Minister that the Germans had no reason to create a self-destructive hoax. The rocket must be real. The meeting concluded with Churchill's order, bomb, pain and wonder, into rubble. Corsion details will return after the break.

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Terminix may not be able to rewrite history or take on societies problems, but they can help you solve one of the peskyest problems at home. Pests. You know, the answer in your kitchen, the roaches under your sink even the termites in the walls, because when pests show up, so this terminix, no matter what type of pest it is, they can terminix it fast with personalized pest care to put you in control. Their expertly trained technicians know your local pests the best. So even though they don't know in depth world history, you can bet they know how to make your past problem history. And with customized plans tailored to your specific situation, you get everything you need to not just get pasts out, but keep them out for good. Between their speedy service, care and technicians are over 95 years of experience. It's no mystery why they're trusted by homes and businesses everywhere. So if you have a pest problem, don't stress it, terminix it. Visit terminix.com to book your appointment online today. That's T-E-R-M-I-N-I-X.com to book online today. Here's what the British didn't know, as Church Hill listened to the experts debate in 1943. They didn't know that a senior member of the German army had been obsessed with the idea of a rocket bomb for a quarter of a century. His name was Captain Dr. Valter Dawnberger, later to be Major General, Dr. Valter Dawnberger. In the first World War, Dawnberger had been an officer with the Paris gun, a huge piece of German artillery. Paris gun could fire 230 pounds shells a range of 80 miles. They took three minutes to sail through the air in a vast parabolic arc until eventually arriving at their destination, which was, of course, Paris. That was a glorious memory for an artillery officer, shelling the enemy from 80 miles away, the joy of waging war from well out of range, but the first World War ended in German defeat and humiliation. Among other things, the Treaty of Versailles banned the German army from using artillery like the Paris gun. The Treaty didn't ban rockets, though. I would it. Rocket chips were the staff of hobbyists, daydreams and science fiction. In the 1920s, Germans were positively giddy about rocket chip stories. They flocked to the movie theatres to see a new film by Fritz Lang and Théavon Harbo, the husband and wife creators of Metropolis. The film was called Frau Immond, the woman in the moon. Meanwhile, pioneers such as Herman Obert and Max Valié were beginning to experiment with small-scale rocket engines and publishing books about the far-off promise of space travel. To captain Donberger, these rockets meant more than stories about space. They presented an opportunity. If the German army couldn't build long-range artillery anymore, why not try to put a bomb on a rocket? With hindsight, the attraction of rockets as a military technology is obvious. Today, we call them ballistic missiles. They fly high and far and fast. Even with 21st century technology, it's hard to intercept them and you get very little warning that they're coming. with 1930's technology, defense would be hopeless. A rocket could fly at several times the speed of sound almost a mile per second. You wouldn't see it, you wouldn't hear it, and you certainly couldn't stop it. But the question was, could they build it? Rockets were complex, temperamental, dangerous things. Rocket pioneer Herman Obert lost an eye in 1929, and he was merely trying to produce special effects for the frow in modern movie. His little model rocket exploded. Max Valier, realizing that space was still beyond his grasp, was building and driving rocket-powered cars, reaching a record-breaking speed of 155 miles per hour. But he was killed in 1930, when one of the rocket engines blew up on the test bench, sending Shrapnoff through his chest. If you can lose an eye making a model rocket for a moving or die in your own workshop. What were the risks of building reliable missile weapons at scale and volume so great that they could replace artillery? Nevertheless, in 1932, Valdadornberger secured some funding from his military superiors, recruited his first rocket scientists, and began the long quest to build the deadly rocket weapon that would eventually be called the V2. The top British scientists in 1943 thought that rocket weapons were a pipe dream, but here's something else they didn't know. For more than a decade, the German government had been throwing money at Walter Donberg's team of scientists to try to crack the rocket problem. The British would not have been surprised to learn that Dawnberg's team had produced failed launch after failed launch year after year. They would have been astonished to learn that despite all the failures. The Nazis were still giving Dawnberg a more and more resources to keep on trying. The young British intelligence officer, RV Jones, had been right to conclude that something important was happening at Pena Monday, but even he couldn't have guessed how important. Dawnberger had built a vast facility, costing 550 million Reichsmarks. The equivalent of billions of dollars today, there were research facilities and a testing site, a large, oval embankment big enough to contain four football pitches, with 40 yard thick earthworks designed to corral missiles that they toppled over and blasted off horizontally, and there were facilities to build ballistic missiles in large quantities once they had won the work. The site housed the largest industrial factory building Europe had yet seen. And beyond that, German is most modern housing estate, providing stylish accommodation for 3,000 people, the families of the scientists and engineers. There were schools, shops, sports and leisure facilities, a beach resort, and well-tended paths meandering through the nearby forest. Since there wasn't room on the site for everyone who would work at Painemunder, there were purpose-built railway lines to bring in workers. The docks were enlarged to allow for the flow of raw materials and food. There was a liquid oxygen plant, and a 30-megawatt coal-fired power station, that's enough to power a small city. All intended to mass-produce a technology that the British experts thought was impossible. At least, that was what Valter Dawnberger had intended. But not everyone in Nazi Germany was convinced that Dawnberger would be able to deliver on his rocket bomb ambitions. So, another part of the German war machine began to advance a parallel plan. Like Dawnberger's rockets, it promised a far greater range, payload and accuracy than even the largest artillery. Like the rockets, it was intended to bring German firepower to bear far behind enemy lines. But unlike the rockets, it was to be cheap, simple, and ruthlessly practical. This parallel weapon became known as the V1. The V's stood for Vegelton or vengeance. Valdadornberger managed to get this rival technology moved to Pena Mundo, where the cutting edge facilities would be devoted to producing both the V1 and the V2. Remember when Churchill's senior advisor Frederick Lindemann said he'd heard another rumor that the Germans were working on a pilotless plane, that rumor was right too. The pilotless plane was the V1. The idea was straight forward, make a bomb in the shape of a plane, give it a primitive jet engine so that it flies quickly, point it in the right direction and use a gyroscope to keep it on course. The V1 looks oddly modern, like a contemporary predator drone or a torpedo with wings. It became known as the buzz bomb, or the doodle bug, because of the loud vibrating sound it produced. These vibrations were a side effect of the jet engines cheap design. It was so violent that the V1 would sometimes shake itself into scrap by the end of the flight. That didn't matter. The whole point of the V1 was that it was a flying bomb designed to drop out of the sky over London. If it was falling apart by the time it reached its target, who cared? The contrast between the two weapons was striking. While the V2 was fueled with a volatile mix of alcohol and liquid oxygen, the V1 ran on simple gasoline. The V2 could reach nearly 3,600 miles per hour and climb and astonishing 55 miles high, which is most of the way to space. The V1 flew at just 400 miles per hour at a height of about half a mile. In principle, the V2 seemed like the superior weapon. It was untrackable and unstoppable. You could fire it from mobile sites and change them every day. The V1 in contrast would be trackable on radar. The British could shoot it down with anti-aircraft guns. It would have to be catapulted from a fixed ramp. The British could find those ramps and destroy them. But when Frederick Lindemann told Churchill that the pilotless plane was a more logical aim for the Germans than the rocket. He was right. Because the V-1 was so much easier to design and build. By 1943, Dawnberger's V-2 rocket bomb had been more than a decade in the making and still wasn't working. the V1 went from a vague concept to a successful test flight in just 18 months. And for the price of a single V2 rocket, Nazi Germany could build and launch maybe 25 V1's. And since they carried a similar payload, a similar distance with similar accuracy, why wouldn't they? Why indeed? But the experts in Churchill's war room didn't yet know all these details, of course. All they knew were rumours of pilotless planes and rocket bombs, for Frederick Linderman, the conclusion was obvious. The rocket bomb made no sense, so it must be a hoax. No, said RV Jones, it might make no sense, but they really are doing it. In August 1943, Britain's Royal Air Force put Churchill's order into action. 600 planes took off and headed to Pena Monday. Corsion details were returned after the break.

As a loyal listener to cautionary tales, you probably consider yourself pretty smart and you are. But how smart is your wallet? When you're looking to upgrade your wallet, it's time to turn. To nerd wallet. Their expert team of nerds has the financial smarts to help you find the right financial products for you. Before nerd wallet, you might have paid for vacations with whatever was in your wallet. But you could have been missing out on miles you didn't even know you were leaving on the table. Now you can get a new card with more miles and more upgrades. What could future you do with more travel rewards? A hotel upgrade, lounge access? Where if you go next, make it happen with a smarter travel credit card. Don't wait to make smart financial decisions, compare and find smarter credit cards, savings accounts and more today at nerdwollet.com. Nerdwollet finance smarter. Has with all cards credit is subject to lender approval and terms apply. This episode is brought to you by Terminix. Terminix may not be able to rewrite history or take on societies problems, but they can help you solve one of the peskyest problems at home. Pests. You know, the answer you're catching, the roaches under your sink even the termites in the walls, because when pests show up, so this terminix. No matter what type of pest it is, they can terminix it fast with personalized pest care to put you in control. They're expertly trained technicians know your local pests the best. So even though they don't know in depth world history, you can bet they know how to make your past problem history. And with customized plans tailored to your specific situation, you get everything you need to not just get pasts out, but keep them out for good. Between their speedy service, care and technicians are over 95 years of experience. It's no mystery why they're trusted by homes and businesses everywhere. So if you have a pest problem, don't stress it, terminix it. Visit terminix.com to book your appointment online today. That's T-E-R-M-I-N-I-X.com to book online today. Late in the evening, on the 17th of August 1943, the air-raid sirens at Pena Munder began to sound. Felted Dawnberger was not overly concerned. British bombers often assembled over the scene near Pena Munder before flying directly south to strike at Berlin. Pena Munder itself maintained a strict blackout, but General Dawnberger noticed with unease how clearly the full moon picked out the dark houses against the silver lawns. He prepared for bed and soon fell asleep. He was jolted awake, not long after midnight, by the thunderous sound of anti-aircraft guns, and then of exploding bombs. Dornberger leaped out of bed to pull on his trousers and boots to discover that only his bedroom slippers were close at hand. His house was shaking, broken glass everywhere, the heavy oak door flowed out and angled on the steps leading to his garden. He stood for a moment, snarged in his slippers, as he gazed out over the smoke and the fiery glow of 600 British planes embarking on a full-scale attempt to obliterate Penamundar's rocket factories, and to wipe out its scientific staff. Dawnberger hurried to the bombshelter. The British thought they had succeeded. From the air, the damage seemed so devastating that they even called off a planned follow-up strike. But they hadn't realised how huge a complex pain and wonder was. They had missed many of its key facilities entirely, or damaged them only superficially, including the launch pad, a supersonic wind tunnel, and the rocket factory itself. Their destroyed most of the homes of the top engineers and their families, but like Valdadornberger, most of these senior people, had made it safely to the bombshellters in time. The bombing raid did kill hundreds of people, but those people weren't the top scientists the British had been hoping to target. Instead, there were construction workers from Eastern Europe, penned behind Barbed wire in a camp two miles away from the main facilities. To the Nazi regime, these workers were disposable and replaceable. The Nazis now recognized though that Pena Mundo was vulnerable. They moved the manufacturing operation to a different site underground. The British thought they'd destroyed the missile program. In fact, they'd just delayed its progress and by only a few months at most. In June 1944, ten months after the bombing of Panama under, and just days after the day landings in Normandy, the first V-1 bombs started to rain down on London. The crude, vibrating, gasoline-powered doodle bugs had beaten the crazily complex V-2 to the punch. But then on the 8th of September, the first V-2 rocket hit London. The British experts had thought it would take a technological miracle to make a rocket bomb that could launch from Germany and hit targets in England. The Germans, it seemed, had made that miracle happen. Although, the target surely wasn't what they'd aimed at. The rocket landed in the suburb of Chizic in West London. It did kill a soldier, but only because he happened to be in Chizic on leave. The other victims were a 63-year-old woman, Aida Harrison, and a three-year-old girl, Rosemary Clark. The V2 was an unstoppable weapon. It was launched from mobile platforms flew faster than sound and was there for silent, although some survivors reported their ears popping a moment before impact as the pressure wave hit. Surely an unstoppable weapon must win any war. Perhaps if you can aim it accurately. The V2 was wildly unpredictable. The Nazis wanted to hit the port in Antwerp, Northern Belgium, which the Allies were using to reinforce and resupply their advance on the western front. They launched over 1600 V2 rockets at Antwerp's docks. More than 90% landed somewhere else. On the 16th of December 1944, nearly 600 moviegoers in Antwerp were killed when a V2 hit a local cinema. That strike came just a couple of weeks after a V2 hit the Woolworth's department store in Southeast London. 10 days later, the day after Christmas, London suffered another blow when a rocket struck a pub in Islington called the Prince of Wales. It was packed with people celebrating the engagement of local girl Emily Neber. And the explosion was strong enough to knock down 15 houses. Seven children from the house across the street died, killed by the shock of the blast alone. They had no outward sign of injury. In total, at least 73 people died. All this was typical of the V2 program. The missiles were too wayward to have much military value, but every now and then a missile would strike a crowded place and dozens or even hundreds of people would die without ever knowing what had hit them. Remember that the V stood for vengeance. That's about right. The rocket bombs have been intended to terrify Germany's enemies, but they achieved nothing but petty revenge for Germany's mounting wartime losses. But civilians were more unnerved than terrified, faced with the V2 that was nothing to do but shrug and hope. And the allied strategists weren't terrified either. They were baffled. They couldn't understand why the Germans had squandered so much effort and expense, developing a missile that achieved so little. Freeman Dyson, the great physicist, worked for British bomber command during the war.

German's rocket program had started in 1932. When Valter Dawnberger had first started to recruit rocket scientists. It ran for 12 years before the rockets achieved their first fatal attack. The one that killed three-year-old Rosemary Clark. And just seven months later, it was all over. As the last V2 strike killed 34-year-old Ivy Miller-Champ. of Orpington Kent. She was the last civilian casualty of the war on British soil. The V2 terror had lasted less than a year. Neither Rosemary Clark nor Ivy Miller-Champ would know it. But the V2 program was a disaster for Germany. It's generally reckoned to have placed a similar burden on Germany's economy to that placed by the atomic weapon program, the Manhattan Project, on America's. And for what? In the end, the V2s killed about 5,000 innocent people, mostly in Antwerp and London. It was terrifying. But those attacks had almost no military effect, and both sides demonstrated over and over again that dropping conventional bombs from planes was a much simpler and cheaper way to kill civilians. Add up the total explosive power of all the V2's ever fired, and you get to about the same scale as one single large bombing raid from Britain's Royal Air Force. As the allies pushed back the German front line, the V2s could no longer reach big cities. The Nazis fired them at whatever targets remained in range, such as the English market town of Ipswich. But Ipswich is a small town in fertile farming country. The expensive, sophisticated V2s each one costing as much as a fighter plane range down randomly on fields of turnips and sugarbeats. By 1945, that was the legacy of the German rocket program, an astonishing technological triumph, but a baffling strategic mistake, a vast budget squandered. If you spend billions, but end up mostly killing housewives, shopping for saucepins in Woolworths, you're not only committing a war crime, you're also going to lose the war, The British intelligence chief, RV Jones, had struggled to convince his colleagues that the Nazis were trying to build a rocket-powered bomb. He struggled because his colleagues rightly pointed out that the idea made no sense. In the middle of a war, the Nazi regime would have been far better served by manufacturing more of the things they knew were effective, tanks and airplanes. All that leaves us with a question. If it was obvious to the British that the idea of a rocket bomb made no sense, why wasn't it obvious to Nazi Germany? Writing decades later, RV Jones mused.

That's part of the answer. But there's more to it than that. Corsionary tales will be back next time with part two of the story, in which we'll meet the brilliant charismatic man who Valter Dawnberger recruited as his chief scientist. And we'll ask why so many governments are so fond of projects that are grand, expensive, and finished far too late. An excellent guide to the V2 program is Murray Barber's book, V2, the A4 rocket from Pain and Wonder to Redstone. For a full list of our sources, see the show notes at TimHarford.com. cautionary tales is written by me, Tim Hartford, with Andrew Wright. It's produced by Alice Fines, with support from Edith Whoslow. The sound design and original music is the work of Pascal Wise. Julia Barton edited the scripts. It features the voice talents of Ben Crow, Melanie Guthridge, Gemma Saunders, and Rufus Wright. The show wouldn't have been possible without the work of Jacob Weisberg, Brian Dilly, Greta Cone, Leetel Malard, John Shnars, Carly Migliori, and Eric Sandler. Horses retails as a production of Pushkin Industries. It was recorded in Wardle Studios in London by Tom Barry. If you like the show, please remember to share, rate and review. Go on, you know it helps us. And if you want to hear the show add free, sign up for Pushkin Plus on the show page in Apple Podcasts or at pushkin.fm slash plus. Dealing with pests can be a pain. But relax, terminix can help because when pests show up, so does terminix. With over 95 years of experience, they have what it takes to take on any pest problem fast. If your home or business has pests, don't stress it, terminix it. Visit terminix.com to book your appointment online today. That's T-E-R-M-I-N-I-X.com.