February 2, 2024 • 36 mins
At the height of World War Two, British intelligence began receiving reports that the enemy was developing a rocket weapon. The idea seemed fantastical — resources in Nazi Germany were scarce and a rocket-building program defied economic logic.
But one intelligence chief took the reports of a rocket weapon seriously and he managed to convince Winston Churchill to heed the threat too. The British Prime Minister gave the order to bomb Germany’s rocket factory to rubble, and 600 bomber planes embarked on a full-scale attempt to obliterate it.
From the air, the damage appeared devastating. The British thought they had succeeded in crushing the rocket-building program. But they were wrong.
For a full list of sources, see the show notes at timharford.com.
Do you have a question for Tim? Send it to tales@pushkin.fm and we'll do our best to answer it in an upcoming Q&A episode.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:15):
Pushkin. 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
(00:36):
cautionary tales. And we hope you're gripped by the two
part story of the Tenerief 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
(01:00):
about the V two Rocket, previously only available on Pushkin Plus.
I first started working on this story back in the
spring of twenty twenty two. It was a real labor
of love, initially sparked by curiosity about a strange statistic
my producer Ryan Dealey had told me, and then just
going deeper and deeper, and eventually darker and darker too.
(01:24):
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 nineteen forty four,
(01:49):
there was no doubt that the Allies were winning the
Second World War, and London was far from the front line. Still,
Londoners had to make sacrifices. To pick a trivial example,
it was awfully difficult to get hold of a new saucepan.
So when a young woman called Betty heard rumors that
(02:10):
a branch of Woolworth's in Southeast London had a new
consignment of kitchen ware, she didn't hesitate.
Speaker 2 (02:17):
I was a very young bride of a couple of years,
with my first baby of about two months, so I
promptly thanked my informer, dressed my baby daughter in her
outdoor clothing, put on my coat and hat, and set
off for a hopeful purchase.
Speaker 1 (02:30):
Betty had to travel across the city to reach the store.
It was Saturday, the twenty ninth of November, and she
arrived in Southeast London just before half past twelve.
Speaker 2 (02:40):
The road was very steep at this point, and I
walked up the road on the right hand side with
my bag in the right hand and my baby on
the left arm. At that point there came a sudden,
airless quiet which seemed to stop one's breath. Then an
almighty sound so tremendous that it seemed to blot out
my mind completely.
Speaker 1 (03:02):
She was knocked senseless and sideways.
Speaker 2 (03:04):
When I came to seconds later, I found myself over
the road into the wall. After a second or two,
I was released and slid to the ground.
Speaker 1 (03:13):
She had no idea what had happened. She looked at
her baby.
Speaker 2 (03:18):
Her bonnet was twisted grotesquely and hung around her neck.
Her hair was blown back tightly, as if she had none.
She was staring at space, not comprehending.
Speaker 1 (03:29):
Betty's clothes were a mess, buttons and ribbons everywhere, but
she wasn't hurt, and neither was her daughter. A horse
and cart careened down the street, the driver's legs waving
in the air.
Speaker 2 (03:43):
I was laughing hysterically.
Speaker 1 (03:45):
She picked up her daughter, got to her feet, and
continued her journey around the corner. A man stopped her.
Where were you, weddyed love alworths for a saucepan. He
gently touched her shoulder and turned her around. Not today,
my love, go home and try tomorrow. And so Betty, perplexed,
(04:09):
went home with her baby, and she never had to
see the sight of the explosion. The jagged skeleton bricks
and timber that used to be the Woolworth storm, the
scraps of clothing and wedding rings that were all the
remains of the women who had been queuing up for saucepans.
Just a few minutes ahead of her. She didn't have
(04:30):
to gaze at the number fifty three 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 V two. I'm Tim Harford, and
(04:56):
you're listening to cautionary tales. One hundred and sixty eight
(05:24):
people were killed by the V two strike on Woolworth's.
Many more were seriously injured. Eleven people were simply recorded
as missing. We presumed that they were inside the Woolworths
store when the V two hit, and that they were vaporized,
leaving no trace at all, but will never know. This
is the story of the V two, the dreaded rocket
(05:47):
powered bomb that the Nazis began to use in the
last few months of the Second World War. It traveled
faster than the speed of sound. You couldn't hear it coming.
One moment you're queuing up to buy a saucepan. The
next moment, well, there is no next moment. I want
to explore how this terrible weapon came into existence, why
(06:09):
so many of the people it hurt 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 nineteen
(06:32):
thirty nine. London and many other British towns and cities
had been relentlessly bombed in late nineteen forty and early
nineteen forty one, but by nineteen forty two the focus
of the war had moved elsewhere. Round about Christmas in
nineteen forty two, a British intelligence officer named R. V.
(06:53):
Jones received a worrying message. Jones had risen to a
lofty position in the British Intelligence Service at the age
of just thirty one, 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.
Speaker 3 (07:14):
A new German weapon. Weapon is a rocket containing five
tons explosive with a maximum range of two hundred kilometers.
Speaker 1 (07:23):
Two weeks later, another message.
Speaker 3 (07:26):
The Germans have constructed a new factory at Penamunda where
new weapons are manufactured. The new weapon is in the
form of a rocket which has been seen fired from
the testing ground.
Speaker 1 (07:38):
Other similar reports dribbled in over the following three months.
Sitting in London, R V. Jones was intrigued, but the
reports were little more than rumors, 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
(07:59):
that if a rocket was being tested at Pinamunda, which
is on the north coast of Germany between Denmark and Poland,
then those radar units would be delay lloyd to the area.
Sure enough, that's where they were. He commissioned high level
aerial photographs of Painnamunda, and after exhaustive study, found what
(08:21):
looked like it might be a rocket about thirty five
feet long. These clues convinced R. V. 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 nineteen
(08:44):
forty three, R. V. 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 R. V. Jones,
(09:06):
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
(09:29):
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,
(09:52):
it wouldn't be able to hit targets with any accuracy.
And even if the Germans could build some kind of
bomb on a rocket ship, why on earth would they
do that. Lindermann 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
(10:15):
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 R. V. Jones to Churchill,
(10:38):
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 rumors, he told
Churchill and the others. He had heard that the Germans
were working on some kind of pilotless plane instead. That
(11:02):
sounded more believable, although it still didn't make much sense.
The most sensible thing that the Germans could folks, 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
(11:23):
whole thing was clearly a hoax, said Linderman. But young R. V.
Jones was well able to defend his view that the
rocket was real. His aerial photographs proved that Painna Munder
was a huge site full of complex equipment and facilities.
Whatever was happening there was plainly important. If the Germans
(11:45):
were attempting to pull off a hoax, it was a
hoax calculated to prompt an attack on Painamunda. What would
they gain from that? Churchill was delighted with a young
man standing up for himself. He teased Linderman, hear that
that's a weighty point against you. Remember it was you
who introduced him to me. After a vigorous argument, R. V.
(12:09):
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 paya
munda inter rubble. Cautionary tales will return after the break.
(12:46):
Here's what the British didn't know as Churchill listened to
the Experts debate in nineteen forty three. 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 Doornberger,
(13:07):
later to be Major jen Rule Dr Valter Dornberger. In
the First World War, drn Berger had been an officer
with the Paris Gun, a huge piece of German artillery.
The Paris Gun could fire two hundred and thirty pound
shells a range of eighty miles. They took three minutes
(13:28):
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 eighty miles away, the joy of waging
war from well out of range. But the First World
(13:51):
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 why would it. Rocket Ships were the stuff of hobbyists,
day dreams, and science fiction. In the nineteen twenties, Germans
(14:14):
were positively giddy about rocket ship stories. They flocked to
the movie theaters to see a new film by Fritz
Lang and Theovon Harbu, the husband and wife creators of Metropolis.
The film was called frau Immonde The Woman in the Moon. Meanwhile,
pioneers such as Hermann Obett and Max Vallier were beginning
(14:37):
to experiment with small scale rocket engines and publishing books
about the far off promise of space travel. To Captain Drnberger,
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
(14:59):
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 twenty
first century technology, it's hard to intercept them, and you
get very little warning that they're coming. With nineteen thirties technology,
(15:22):
defence 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
(15:42):
Herman Obet lost an eye in nineteen twenty nine, and
he was merely trying to produce special effects for the
Frau Immonde 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
(16:03):
of one hundred and fifty five miles per hour. But
he was killed in nineteen thirty when one of the
rocket engines blew up on the test bench, sending shrapnel
through his chest. If you can lose an eye making
a model rocket for a movie, or die in your
own workshop, what were the risks of building reliable missile
(16:25):
weapons at scale and volume so great that they could
replace artillery. Nevertheless, in nineteen thirty two, Valter Dornberger secured
some funding from his military superiors, recruited his first rocket scientists,
and began the long quest to build the deadly rocket
(16:45):
weapon that would eventually be called the V two. The
top British scientists in nineteen forty three 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 Valter Dornberger's team of scientists
(17:06):
to try to crack the rocket problem. The British would
not have been surprised to learn that Dornberger'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 Dornberger more and more resources
(17:28):
to keep on trying. The young British intelligence officer R. V.
Jones had been right to conclude that something important was
happening at Payinamunda, but even he couldn't have guessed how important.
Dornberger had built a vast facility, costing five hundred and
fifty million Reichsmarks the equivalent of billions of dollars today.
(17:53):
There were research facilities and a testing site, a large
oval embankment big enough to contain four football pitches, with
forty yard thick earthworks designed to corral missiles. They toppled
over and blasted off horizontally. There were facilities to build
ballistic missiles in large quantities once they had one that worked.
(18:15):
The site housed the largest industrial factory building Europe had
yet seen, and beyond that, Germany's most modern housing estate,
providing stylish accommodation for three thousand people, the families of
the scientists and engineers. There were schools, shops, sports and
leisure facilities, a beach resort, and well tended paths meandering
(18:39):
through the nearby forest. Since there wasn't room on the
site for everyone who would work at Pain and Mundo,
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 thirty megawatt coal fired power station that's enough
(18:59):
to power a small city, all intended to mass produce
a technology that the British experts thought was impossible. At
least that was what Walter Dornberger had intended, but not
everyone in Nazi Germany was convinced that Dornberger would be
able to deliver on his rocket bomb ambitions. So another
(19:22):
part of the German War machine began to advance a
parallel plan. Like Dornberger'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
(19:46):
be cheap, simple, and ruthlessly practical. This parallel weapon became
known as the V one. The V stood for Vegeltung
or vengeance Valtera. Dornberger managed to get this rival technology
moved to Painamunda, where the cutting edge facilities would be
(20:07):
devoted to producing both the v V one and the
V two. Remember when Churchill's senior advisor, Frederick Linderman said
he'd heard another rumor that the Germans were working on
a pilotless plane. That rumor was right two. The pilotless
plane was the V one. The idea was straightforward. Make
(20:28):
a bomb in the shape of a plane, give it
a primitive jet engine so that it flies quickly pointed
in the right direction, and use a gyroscope to keep
it on course. The V one looks oddly modern, like
a contemporary predator drone or a torpedo with wings. It
became known as the buzz bomb or the doodlebug because
(20:50):
of the loud, vibrating sound it produced. These vibrations were
a side effect to the jet engine's cheap design, and
were so violent that the V one would sometimes shake
itself into scrap by the end of the flight. That
didn't matter. The whole point of the V one was
that it was a flying bomb designed to drop out
(21:10):
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 V
two was fueled with a volatile mix of alcohol and
liquid oxygen, the V one ran on simple gasoline. The
V two could reach nearly three thousand, six hundred miles
(21:32):
per hour and climb an astonishing fifty five miles high,
which is most of the way of space. The V
one flew at just four hundred miles per hour at
a height of about half a mile. In principle, the
V two seemed like the superior weapon. It was untrackable
and unstoppable. You could fire it from mobile sites and
(21:55):
change them every day. The V one, in contrast, would
be trackable on radar. If 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 Linderman told Churchill
that the pilotless plane was a more logical aim for
(22:16):
the Germans than the rocket, he was right because the
V one was so much easier to design and build.
By nineteen forty three, Drnberger's V two rocket bomb had
been more than a decade in the making and still
wasn't working. The V one went from a vague concept
to a successful test flight in just eighteen months, and
(22:39):
for the price of a single V two rocket, Nazi
Germany could build and launch maybe twenty five V one's,
And since they carried a similar payload a similar distance
with similar accuracy, why wouldn't they Why Indeed, the experts
in Churchill's war room didn't yet know all these details.
(23:02):
Of course, all they knew were rumors of pilotless planes
and rocket bombs. For Frederick Line, the conclusion was obvious.
The rocket bomb made no sense, so it must be
a hoax. No, said R. V. Jones. It might make
no sense, but they really are doing it. In August
(23:25):
nineteen forty three, Britain's Royal Air Force put Churchill's order
into action. Six hundred planes took off and headed to
Paina Munda. Cautionary tales will return after the break. Late
(23:55):
in the evening on the seventeenth of August nineteen forty three,
the air raid sirens at Pina Munda began to sound.
Felt Drnberger was not overly concerned. British bombers often assembled
the sea near Painamunda before flying directly south to strike
at Berlin. Painamunder itself maintained a strict blackout, but General
(24:18):
Dornberger 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
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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 blown out and angled on the steps leading to
his garden. He stood for a moment snug in his
slippers as he gazed out over the smoke and the
(25:04):
fiery glow of six hundred British planes embarking on a
full a scale attempt to obliterate Paya Munda's rocket factories
and to wipe out its scientific staff. Dawn Berger hurried
to the bomb shelter. The British thought they had succeeded
(25:25):
from the air. The damage seemed so devastating that they
even called off a planned follow up strike, But they
hadn't realized how huge a complex Painnamunda was. They'd missed
many of its key facilities entirely, or damaged them only superficially,
including the launchpad, a supersonic wind tunnel, and the rocket
(25:47):
factory itself. They'd destroyed most of the homes of the
top engineers and their families, but like Valda Dornberger, most
of these senior people had made it safely to the
bomb shelters in time. The bombing ray did kill hundreds
of people, but those people weren't the top scientists the
British had been hoping to target. Instead, they were construction
(26:10):
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 Painamunda was vulnerable. They moved the
manufacturing operation to a different site underground. The British thought
(26:36):
they'd destroyed the missile program. In fact, they'd just delayed
its progress, and by only a few months at most.
In June nineteen forty four, ten months after the bombing
of Pinamunda and just days after the D Day landings
in Normandy, the first V one bombs started to rain
(26:59):
down on London. The crude, vibrating gasoline powered doodlebugs had
beaten the crazily complex V two to the punch. But then,
on the eighth of September, the first V two rocket
hit London. The British experts had thought it would take
(27:19):
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 Chiswick in West London. It did kill
(27:39):
a soldier, but only because he happened to be in
Chiswick on leave. The other victims were a sixty three
year old woman, Ada Harrison and a three year old girl,
Rosemary Clark. The V two was an unstoppable weapon. It
was launched from mobile platforms, flew faster than sound, and
(28:00):
was therefore 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 V two was wildly unpredictable.
(28:20):
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 sixteen hundred
V two rockets at Antwerp's docks. More than ninety percent
landed somewhere else. On the sixteenth of December nineteen forty four,
(28:43):
nearly six hundred moviegoers in Antwerp were killed when a
V two hit a local cinema. That strike came just
a couple of weeks after a V two hit the
Woolworths department store in southeast London. Ten days Later the
day after Christmas, London suffered another blow when a rocket
struck a pub in Islington called the Prince of Wales.
(29:06):
It was packed with people celebrating the U S engagement
of local girl Emily Neighbor, and the explosion was strong
enough to knock down fifteen 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 seventy three people died all This
(29:32):
was typical of the V two 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 had been
(29:55):
intended to terrify Germany's enemies, but they achieved nothing but
petty revenge for Germany's mounting wartime losses. Civilians were more
unnerved than terrified. Faced with the V two, there was
nothing to do but shrug and hope, and the Allied
strategists weren't terrified either. They were baffled. They couldn't understand
(30:19):
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.
He later mused, those of.
Speaker 3 (30:34):
US who were seriously engaged in the war were very
grateful for the V two program. We knew that each
V two cost as much to produce as a high
performance fighter airplane. We knew that German forces on the
fighting fronts were in desperate need of airplanes, and that
the V two rockets were doing US no military damage.
From our point of view, the V two program was
(30:55):
almost as good as if Hitler had adopted a policy
of unilateral disarmament.
Speaker 1 (31:01):
Germany's rocket program had started in nineteen thirty two, when
Valter Dornberger had first started to recruit rock scientists. It
ran for twelve 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
(31:23):
the last V two strike killed thirty four year old
Ivy Miller Champ of Orpington, Kent. She was the last
civilian casualty of the war on British soil. The V
two terror had lasted less than a year. Neither Rosemary
Clark nor Ivy Miller Champ would know it, but the
(31:44):
V two 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 Americas. And for what. In the end, the
V twos killed about five thousand innocent people, mostly in
(32:04):
Antwerp and London. It was terrifying, but those are tax
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 V twos
(32:26):
ever fired, and you'd 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
V twos could no longer reach big cities. The Nazis
fired them at whatever targets remained in range, such as
(32:47):
the English market town of Ipswich. But Ipswich is a
small town in fertile farming country. The expensive sophisticated V twos,
each one costing as much as a fighter plane, ranged
down randomly on fields of turnips and sugar Beete forty five.
(33:10):
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 saucepans in Woolworth's, you're not only
(33:31):
committing a war crime, you're also going to lose the war.
The British intelligence chief R. V. 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
(33:53):
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, R. V.
(34:18):
Jones mused, when we try to understand the policy behind
the rocket, we are forced to abandon rationality and instead
to enter a fantasy where romance has replaced economy.
Speaker 3 (34:28):
Why then, have they made the rocket? The answer is simple,
no weapon yet produced has comparable romantic appeal.
Speaker 1 (34:36):
That's part of the answer, but there's more to it
than that. Cautionary Tales will be back next time with
part two of the story, in which we'll meet the
brilliant charismatic man who Valter Dornberger recruited as his chief scientist,
and we'll ask why so many governments are so fond
(34:59):
of projects that are grand, expensive and finished far too late.
An excellent guide to the V two program is Murray
Barber's book V two The A four Rocket From Paynamunda
to Redstone. For a full list of our sources, see
(35:21):
the show notes at Timharford dot com. Cautionary Tales is
written by me Tim Harford with Andrew Wright. It's produced
by Alice Fines with support from Edith Uslow. The sound
design and original music is the work of Pascal Wise.
Julia Barton edited the scripts. It features the voice talents
(35:43):
of Ben Crowe, Melanie Gushridge, Jemma Saunders and rufus Wright.
The show wouldn't have been possible without the work of
Jacob Weisberg, Ryan Dilly, Greta Cohne, let Al Millard, John Schnarz,
Carlie mcgliori and Eric Sandler. Cautionary Tales is a production
of Pushkin Industries. It was recorded in Wardall Studios in
(36:05):
London by Tom Berry. If you like the show, please
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the research and the sound design we strive for on
(00:36):
cautionary tales. And we hope you're gripped by the two
part story of the Tenerief 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
(01:00):
about the V two Rocket, previously only available on Pushkin Plus.
I first started working on this story back in the
spring of twenty twenty two. It was a real labor
of love, initially sparked by curiosity about a strange statistic
my producer Ryan Dealey had told me, and then just
going deeper and deeper, and eventually darker and darker too.
(01:24):
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 nineteen forty four,
(01:49):
there was no doubt that the Allies were winning the
Second World War, and London was far from the front line. Still,
Londoners had to make sacrifices. To pick a trivial example,
it was awfully difficult to get hold of a new saucepan.
So when a young woman called Betty heard rumors that
(02:10):
a branch of Woolworth's in Southeast London had a new
consignment of kitchen ware, she didn't hesitate.
Speaker 2 (02:17):
I was a very young bride of a couple of years,
with my first baby of about two months, so I
promptly thanked my informer, dressed my baby daughter in her
outdoor clothing, put on my coat and hat, and set
off for a hopeful purchase.
Speaker 1 (02:30):
Betty had to travel across the city to reach the store.
It was Saturday, the twenty ninth of November, and she
arrived in Southeast London just before half past twelve.
Speaker 2 (02:40):
The road was very steep at this point, and I
walked up the road on the right hand side with
my bag in the right hand and my baby on
the left arm. At that point there came a sudden,
airless quiet which seemed to stop one's breath. Then an
almighty sound so tremendous that it seemed to blot out
my mind completely.
Speaker 1 (03:02):
She was knocked senseless and sideways.
Speaker 2 (03:04):
When I came to seconds later, I found myself over
the road into the wall. After a second or two,
I was released and slid to the ground.
Speaker 1 (03:13):
She had no idea what had happened. She looked at
her baby.
Speaker 2 (03:18):
Her bonnet was twisted grotesquely and hung around her neck.
Her hair was blown back tightly, as if she had none.
She was staring at space, not comprehending.
Speaker 1 (03:29):
Betty's clothes were a mess, buttons and ribbons everywhere, but
she wasn't hurt, and neither was her daughter. A horse
and cart careened down the street, the driver's legs waving
in the air.
Speaker 2 (03:43):
I was laughing hysterically.
Speaker 1 (03:45):
She picked up her daughter, got to her feet, and
continued her journey around the corner. A man stopped her.
Where were you, weddyed love alworths for a saucepan. He
gently touched her shoulder and turned her around. Not today,
my love, go home and try tomorrow. And so Betty, perplexed,
(04:09):
went home with her baby, and she never had to
see the sight of the explosion. The jagged skeleton bricks
and timber that used to be the Woolworth storm, the
scraps of clothing and wedding rings that were all the
remains of the women who had been queuing up for saucepans.
Just a few minutes ahead of her. She didn't have
(04:30):
to gaze at the number fifty three 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 V two. I'm Tim Harford, and
(04:56):
you're listening to cautionary tales. One hundred and sixty eight
(05:24):
people were killed by the V two strike on Woolworth's.
Many more were seriously injured. Eleven people were simply recorded
as missing. We presumed that they were inside the Woolworths
store when the V two hit, and that they were vaporized,
leaving no trace at all, but will never know. This
is the story of the V two, the dreaded rocket
(05:47):
powered bomb that the Nazis began to use in the
last few months of the Second World War. It traveled
faster than the speed of sound. You couldn't hear it coming.
One moment you're queuing up to buy a saucepan. The
next moment, well, there is no next moment. I want
to explore how this terrible weapon came into existence, why
(06:09):
so many of the people it hurt 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 nineteen
(06:32):
thirty nine. London and many other British towns and cities
had been relentlessly bombed in late nineteen forty and early
nineteen forty one, but by nineteen forty two the focus
of the war had moved elsewhere. Round about Christmas in
nineteen forty two, a British intelligence officer named R. V.
(06:53):
Jones received a worrying message. Jones had risen to a
lofty position in the British Intelligence Service at the age
of just thirty one, 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.
Speaker 3 (07:14):
A new German weapon. Weapon is a rocket containing five
tons explosive with a maximum range of two hundred kilometers.
Speaker 1 (07:23):
Two weeks later, another message.
Speaker 3 (07:26):
The Germans have constructed a new factory at Penamunda where
new weapons are manufactured. The new weapon is in the
form of a rocket which has been seen fired from
the testing ground.
Speaker 1 (07:38):
Other similar reports dribbled in over the following three months.
Sitting in London, R V. Jones was intrigued, but the
reports were little more than rumors, 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
(07:59):
that if a rocket was being tested at Pinamunda, which
is on the north coast of Germany between Denmark and Poland,
then those radar units would be delay lloyd to the area.
Sure enough, that's where they were. He commissioned high level
aerial photographs of Painnamunda, and after exhaustive study, found what
(08:21):
looked like it might be a rocket about thirty five
feet long. These clues convinced R. V. 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 nineteen
(08:44):
forty three, R. V. 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 R. V. Jones,
(09:06):
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
(09:29):
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,
(09:52):
it wouldn't be able to hit targets with any accuracy.
And even if the Germans could build some kind of
bomb on a rocket ship, why on earth would they
do that. Lindermann 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
(10:15):
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 R. V. Jones to Churchill,
(10:38):
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 rumors, he told
Churchill and the others. He had heard that the Germans
were working on some kind of pilotless plane instead. That
(11:02):
sounded more believable, although it still didn't make much sense.
The most sensible thing that the Germans could folks, 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
(11:23):
whole thing was clearly a hoax, said Linderman. But young R. V.
Jones was well able to defend his view that the
rocket was real. His aerial photographs proved that Painna Munder
was a huge site full of complex equipment and facilities.
Whatever was happening there was plainly important. If the Germans
(11:45):
were attempting to pull off a hoax, it was a
hoax calculated to prompt an attack on Painamunda. What would
they gain from that? Churchill was delighted with a young
man standing up for himself. He teased Linderman, hear that
that's a weighty point against you. Remember it was you
who introduced him to me. After a vigorous argument, R. V.
(12:09):
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 paya
munda inter rubble. Cautionary tales will return after the break.
(12:46):
Here's what the British didn't know as Churchill listened to
the Experts debate in nineteen forty three. 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 Doornberger,
(13:07):
later to be Major jen Rule Dr Valter Dornberger. In
the First World War, drn Berger had been an officer
with the Paris Gun, a huge piece of German artillery.
The Paris Gun could fire two hundred and thirty pound
shells a range of eighty miles. They took three minutes
(13:28):
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 eighty miles away, the joy of waging
war from well out of range. But the First World
(13:51):
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 why would it. Rocket Ships were the stuff of hobbyists,
day dreams, and science fiction. In the nineteen twenties, Germans
(14:14):
were positively giddy about rocket ship stories. They flocked to
the movie theaters to see a new film by Fritz
Lang and Theovon Harbu, the husband and wife creators of Metropolis.
The film was called frau Immonde The Woman in the Moon. Meanwhile,
pioneers such as Hermann Obett and Max Vallier were beginning
(14:37):
to experiment with small scale rocket engines and publishing books
about the far off promise of space travel. To Captain Drnberger,
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
(14:59):
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 twenty
first century technology, it's hard to intercept them, and you
get very little warning that they're coming. With nineteen thirties technology,
(15:22):
defence 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
(15:42):
Herman Obet lost an eye in nineteen twenty nine, and
he was merely trying to produce special effects for the
Frau Immonde 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
(16:03):
of one hundred and fifty five miles per hour. But
he was killed in nineteen thirty when one of the
rocket engines blew up on the test bench, sending shrapnel
through his chest. If you can lose an eye making
a model rocket for a movie, or die in your
own workshop, what were the risks of building reliable missile
(16:25):
weapons at scale and volume so great that they could
replace artillery. Nevertheless, in nineteen thirty two, Valter Dornberger secured
some funding from his military superiors, recruited his first rocket scientists,
and began the long quest to build the deadly rocket
(16:45):
weapon that would eventually be called the V two. The
top British scientists in nineteen forty three 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 Valter Dornberger's team of scientists
(17:06):
to try to crack the rocket problem. The British would
not have been surprised to learn that Dornberger'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 Dornberger more and more resources
(17:28):
to keep on trying. The young British intelligence officer R. V.
Jones had been right to conclude that something important was
happening at Payinamunda, but even he couldn't have guessed how important.
Dornberger had built a vast facility, costing five hundred and
fifty million Reichsmarks the equivalent of billions of dollars today.
(17:53):
There were research facilities and a testing site, a large
oval embankment big enough to contain four football pitches, with
forty yard thick earthworks designed to corral missiles. They toppled
over and blasted off horizontally. There were facilities to build
ballistic missiles in large quantities once they had one that worked.
(18:15):
The site housed the largest industrial factory building Europe had
yet seen, and beyond that, Germany's most modern housing estate,
providing stylish accommodation for three thousand people, the families of
the scientists and engineers. There were schools, shops, sports and
leisure facilities, a beach resort, and well tended paths meandering
(18:39):
through the nearby forest. Since there wasn't room on the
site for everyone who would work at Pain and Mundo,
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 thirty megawatt coal fired power station that's enough
(18:59):
to power a small city, all intended to mass produce
a technology that the British experts thought was impossible. At
least that was what Walter Dornberger had intended, but not
everyone in Nazi Germany was convinced that Dornberger would be
able to deliver on his rocket bomb ambitions. So another
(19:22):
part of the German War machine began to advance a
parallel plan. Like Dornberger'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
(19:46):
be cheap, simple, and ruthlessly practical. This parallel weapon became
known as the V one. The V stood for Vegeltung
or vengeance Valtera. Dornberger managed to get this rival technology
moved to Painamunda, where the cutting edge facilities would be
(20:07):
devoted to producing both the v V one and the
V two. Remember when Churchill's senior advisor, Frederick Linderman said
he'd heard another rumor that the Germans were working on
a pilotless plane. That rumor was right two. The pilotless
plane was the V one. The idea was straightforward. Make
(20:28):
a bomb in the shape of a plane, give it
a primitive jet engine so that it flies quickly pointed
in the right direction, and use a gyroscope to keep
it on course. The V one looks oddly modern, like
a contemporary predator drone or a torpedo with wings. It
became known as the buzz bomb or the doodlebug because
(20:50):
of the loud, vibrating sound it produced. These vibrations were
a side effect to the jet engine's cheap design, and
were so violent that the V one would sometimes shake
itself into scrap by the end of the flight. That
didn't matter. The whole point of the V one was
that it was a flying bomb designed to drop out
(21:10):
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 V
two was fueled with a volatile mix of alcohol and
liquid oxygen, the V one ran on simple gasoline. The
V two could reach nearly three thousand, six hundred miles
(21:32):
per hour and climb an astonishing fifty five miles high,
which is most of the way of space. The V
one flew at just four hundred miles per hour at
a height of about half a mile. In principle, the
V two seemed like the superior weapon. It was untrackable
and unstoppable. You could fire it from mobile sites and
(21:55):
change them every day. The V one, in contrast, would
be trackable on radar. If 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 Linderman told Churchill
that the pilotless plane was a more logical aim for
(22:16):
the Germans than the rocket, he was right because the
V one was so much easier to design and build.
By nineteen forty three, Drnberger's V two rocket bomb had
been more than a decade in the making and still
wasn't working. The V one went from a vague concept
to a successful test flight in just eighteen months, and
(22:39):
for the price of a single V two rocket, Nazi
Germany could build and launch maybe twenty five V one's,
And since they carried a similar payload a similar distance
with similar accuracy, why wouldn't they Why Indeed, the experts
in Churchill's war room didn't yet know all these details.
(23:02):
Of course, all they knew were rumors of pilotless planes
and rocket bombs. For Frederick Line, the conclusion was obvious.
The rocket bomb made no sense, so it must be
a hoax. No, said R. V. Jones. It might make
no sense, but they really are doing it. In August
(23:25):
nineteen forty three, Britain's Royal Air Force put Churchill's order
into action. Six hundred planes took off and headed to
Paina Munda. Cautionary tales will return after the break. Late
(23:55):
in the evening on the seventeenth of August nineteen forty three,
the air raid sirens at Pina Munda began to sound.
Felt Drnberger was not overly concerned. British bombers often assembled
the sea near Painamunda before flying directly south to strike
at Berlin. Painamunder itself maintained a strict blackout, but General
(24:18):
Dornberger 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
(24:42):
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 blown out and angled on the steps leading to
his garden. He stood for a moment snug in his
slippers as he gazed out over the smoke and the
(25:04):
fiery glow of six hundred British planes embarking on a
full a scale attempt to obliterate Paya Munda's rocket factories
and to wipe out its scientific staff. Dawn Berger hurried
to the bomb shelter. The British thought they had succeeded
(25:25):
from the air. The damage seemed so devastating that they
even called off a planned follow up strike, But they
hadn't realized how huge a complex Painnamunda was. They'd missed
many of its key facilities entirely, or damaged them only superficially,
including the launchpad, a supersonic wind tunnel, and the rocket
(25:47):
factory itself. They'd destroyed most of the homes of the
top engineers and their families, but like Valda Dornberger, most
of these senior people had made it safely to the
bomb shelters in time. The bombing ray did kill hundreds
of people, but those people weren't the top scientists the
British had been hoping to target. Instead, they were construction
(26:10):
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 Painamunda was vulnerable. They moved the
manufacturing operation to a different site underground. The British thought
(26:36):
they'd destroyed the missile program. In fact, they'd just delayed
its progress, and by only a few months at most.
In June nineteen forty four, ten months after the bombing
of Pinamunda and just days after the D Day landings
in Normandy, the first V one bombs started to rain
(26:59):
down on London. The crude, vibrating gasoline powered doodlebugs had
beaten the crazily complex V two to the punch. But then,
on the eighth of September, the first V two rocket
hit London. The British experts had thought it would take
(27:19):
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 Chiswick in West London. It did kill
(27:39):
a soldier, but only because he happened to be in
Chiswick on leave. The other victims were a sixty three
year old woman, Ada Harrison and a three year old girl,
Rosemary Clark. The V two was an unstoppable weapon. It
was launched from mobile platforms, flew faster than sound, and
(28:00):
was therefore 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 V two was wildly unpredictable.
(28:20):
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 sixteen hundred
V two rockets at Antwerp's docks. More than ninety percent
landed somewhere else. On the sixteenth of December nineteen forty four,
(28:43):
nearly six hundred moviegoers in Antwerp were killed when a
V two hit a local cinema. That strike came just
a couple of weeks after a V two hit the
Woolworths department store in southeast London. Ten days Later the
day after Christmas, London suffered another blow when a rocket
struck a pub in Islington called the Prince of Wales.
(29:06):
It was packed with people celebrating the U S engagement
of local girl Emily Neighbor, and the explosion was strong
enough to knock down fifteen 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 seventy three people died all This
(29:32):
was typical of the V two 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 had been
(29:55):
intended to terrify Germany's enemies, but they achieved nothing but
petty revenge for Germany's mounting wartime losses. Civilians were more
unnerved than terrified. Faced with the V two, there was
nothing to do but shrug and hope, and the Allied
strategists weren't terrified either. They were baffled. They couldn't understand
(30:19):
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.
He later mused, those of.
Speaker 3 (30:34):
US who were seriously engaged in the war were very
grateful for the V two program. We knew that each
V two cost as much to produce as a high
performance fighter airplane. We knew that German forces on the
fighting fronts were in desperate need of airplanes, and that
the V two rockets were doing US no military damage.
From our point of view, the V two program was
(30:55):
almost as good as if Hitler had adopted a policy
of unilateral disarmament.
Speaker 1 (31:01):
Germany's rocket program had started in nineteen thirty two, when
Valter Dornberger had first started to recruit rock scientists. It
ran for twelve 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
(31:23):
the last V two strike killed thirty four year old
Ivy Miller Champ of Orpington, Kent. She was the last
civilian casualty of the war on British soil. The V
two terror had lasted less than a year. Neither Rosemary
Clark nor Ivy Miller Champ would know it, but the
(31:44):
V two 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 Americas. And for what. In the end, the
V twos killed about five thousand innocent people, mostly in
(32:04):
Antwerp and London. It was terrifying, but those are tax
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 V twos
(32:26):
ever fired, and you'd 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
V twos could no longer reach big cities. The Nazis
fired them at whatever targets remained in range, such as
(32:47):
the English market town of Ipswich. But Ipswich is a
small town in fertile farming country. The expensive sophisticated V twos,
each one costing as much as a fighter plane, ranged
down randomly on fields of turnips and sugar Beete forty five.
(33:10):
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 saucepans in Woolworth's, you're not only
(33:31):
committing a war crime, you're also going to lose the war.
The British intelligence chief R. V. 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
(33:53):
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, R. V.
(34:18):
Jones mused, when we try to understand the policy behind
the rocket, we are forced to abandon rationality and instead
to enter a fantasy where romance has replaced economy.
Speaker 3 (34:28):
Why then, have they made the rocket? The answer is simple,
no weapon yet produced has comparable romantic appeal.
Speaker 1 (34:36):
That's part of the answer, but there's more to it
than that. Cautionary Tales will be back next time with
part two of the story, in which we'll meet the
brilliant charismatic man who Valter Dornberger recruited as his chief scientist,
and we'll ask why so many governments are so fond
(34:59):
of projects that are grand, expensive and finished far too late.
An excellent guide to the V two program is Murray
Barber's book V two The A four Rocket From Paynamunda
to Redstone. For a full list of our sources, see
(35:21):
the show notes at Timharford dot com. Cautionary Tales is
written by me Tim Harford with Andrew Wright. It's produced
by Alice Fines with support from Edith Uslow. The sound
design and original music is the work of Pascal Wise.
Julia Barton edited the scripts. It features the voice talents
(35:43):
of Ben Crowe, Melanie Gushridge, Jemma Saunders and rufus Wright.
The show wouldn't have been possible without the work of
Jacob Weisberg, Ryan Dilly, Greta Cohne, let Al Millard, John Schnarz,
Carlie mcgliori and Eric Sandler. Cautionary Tales is a production
of Pushkin Industries. It was recorded in Wardall Studios in
(36:05):
London by Tom Berry. 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 ad free, sign up for Pushkin Plus on the
show page in Apple Podcasts or at pushkin dot fm,
slash plus
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If you've ever wanted to know about champagne, satanism, the Stonewall Uprising, chaos theory, LSD, El Nino, true crime and Rosa Parks, then look no further. Josh and Chuck have you covered.