On the damp and dreary evening of September 8, 1944, Sapper Bernard Browning hurried through western London toward the Chiswick train station. The young soldier, on military leave, was eager to see his girlfriend. The city hummed with cautious optimism—Allied forces had nearly driven the Germans from France, Soviet armies were advancing from the east, and the Americans and British had just liberated Brussels. The war seemed to be winding down. Checking his watch, Browning quickened his pace.
At 6:40 p.m., without warning—no air raid siren, no engine noise—an explosion tore through Staveley Road in Chiswick. The blast carved a 20-foot-wide crater, completely destroying 11 houses and damaging 27 more, shattering windows all around. Three-year-old Rosemary Clarke suffocated in her cot. Ada Harrison managed to crawl out of the rubble. Robert Stubbs, who had been blown 20 feet by the blast, was now staggering toward the ruins to help her; the 60-something-year-old woman died in his arms. Twenty-two other people were injured.
Browning never reached the train.
Bombing raids were a constant threat for locals, but this made no sense—there were no bombers in the air. In fact, with Luftwaffe planes no longer threatening Britain, Londoners had been sharing rumors that the blackout restrictions, which had darkened the city to prevent bomber targeting for years, might soon be lifted.
Arriving shortly after the incident, government officials declared it was likely a gas main explosion. Yet Londoners who had survived the Blitz, the fierce German bombing campaign of 1940–’41, exchanged skeptical glances; they knew the difference between utility accidents and weapons of war. This was something else entirely, something new.
As the search for survivors continued into the dark, officials maintained their story. But in secure government rooms across London, grim-faced intelligence staff knew the truth. The thing that struck Chiswick without warning was something they’d long feared.
In the spring of 1942, Flight Officer Constance Babington Smith was working as a photo analyst with the Royal Air Force Central Interpretation Unit. Trim and tidy in her uniform, with neatly pinned hair, she peered closely at the latest batch of aerial reconnaissance photos in a corner of a vast aristocratic country house taken over by unit. A reconnaissance Spitfire pilot had recently returned from a mission collecting photographic intelligence, overflying the Baltic coast to have a look at a German naval base. All routine, but something else had caught his attention. Babington Smith was now scrutinizing the pilot’s images. The photos revealed three circular concrete structures and clearings cut into a thick forest near the German village of Peenemünde. Though a peculiar-looking construction site, there was no obvious military significance. With mountains of other data to pore over, she added the images to the unit’s vast archive.
A year later, Babington Smith’s team received vague orders from Royal Air Force leadership. They were to search reconnaissance photos for something unspecified—“some form of long-range projectors capable of firing on this country from the French coast.” The directive came with little explanation, only that intelligence had received credible rumors of a Nazi superweapon program.
Higher authorities wouldn’t share the source of this intelligence, but the parameters were clear: Whatever they were hunting could strike London only from the coast of France, the Low Countries, or northwest Germany. With this geographic boundary established, photo interpreters began methodically reviewing thousands of images, searching for anything that might betray the weapon’s location.
That’s when Babington Smith recalled the images of Peenemünde.
She retrieved the file, took out her magnifying glass, and examined the photos closely. This was no ordinary site. She brought her concerns to her superiors. Prime Minister Winston Churchill appointed his son-in-law Duncan Sandys to investigate the mystery weapon, allowing him to cut through military bureaucracy and conventional chains of command. Sandys, who walked with a limp from a wartime car accident, had both the technical knowledge from his artillery service and the family connection to ensure his urgent findings reached Churchill directly.
In June 1943, he ordered immediate reconnaissance flights over Peenemünde to gather additional photographic evidence of Babington Smith’s suspicions. And as soon as she leaned over the new set of photos with her stereo magnifier, she discovered not only a growing installation but also scorch marks on the ground, evidence of rocket fire at the site. She passed her report up the chain of command, but Churchill’s top science advisors dismissed her findings. “Decoys,” one of the men said.
But Babington Smith and Sandys weren’t convinced. She returned to the collection of Peenemünde photos to look for any missed details. That’s when she saw them: four small tailless airplanes unlike any she’d ever seen. Meanwhile, a colleague discovered two torpedo-like objects, perhaps 40 feet long, lying horizontally on trailers. This time, no one had any doubts.
The race to understand and neutralize Hitler’s vengeance weapons began.
On the afternoon of October 3, 1942, at the Luftwaffe testing site in Peenemünde, Wernher von Braun, the center’s chief of technology, took his position atop the facility’s assembly building. About a mile away, a tall rocket stood ready to launch. Von Braun’s boyish face belied his 30 years, his blue eyes fixed on the rocket, athletic frame tense with anticipation. Surrounding him were air force officials, who were there to see whether he would finally deliver on the promised superweapon after two previous test flights had failed within a minute of launch.
The distant rocket stood 46 feet tall with a diameter of over 5 feet, its fins spreading to an 11-foot span. Constructed from aluminum-magnesium alloy and sheet steel around a wooden frame, the weapon had five main sections: the warhead, guidance compartment, fuel tanks, propulsion unit, and tail unit.
During powered flight, the motor would burn ethanol and liquid oxygen for about 63 seconds, consuming nearly 25 tons of propellant to generate 56,000 pounds of thrust. Guidance would be on two gyroscopes, which would sense deviations from the planned trajectory and send electrical signals to adjust the rocket’s path in flight. That was done by four aerodynamic fins on the four vanes that controlled the rocket’s pitch, yaw, and roll.
After reaching a height of between 50 and 60 miles, the engine would shut down, and the rocket would have a purely ballistic trajectory, descending at about 1,800 miles per hour. This test model was unarmed, but the warhead could contain 1,650 pounds of explosives. The high velocity and steep angle should drive the warhead several feet into the ground before detonation. This would direct much of the explosive force upward and outward.
All of this should happen if von Braun’s experiment finally succeeded.
Von Braun had been fascinated with rockets since adolescence after reading Hermann Oberth’s The Rocket into Planetary Space. The book gave the boy his life’s mission. He pursued this passion by studying mechanical engineering at the Technical University of Berlin while conducting amateur rocket experiments with the German Society for Space Travel. In 1932, at just 20, the brilliant physicist caught the German military’s attention with his tests and dissertation on liquid-fueled rockets.
Rockets had been military tools for centuries, from Chinese fire arrows to the British Congreve rockets that inspired America’s national anthem. After World War I, the Treaty of Versailles banned Germany from developing aircraft, tanks, submarines, and heavy artillery—but made no mention of rockets. In the early 1930s, the German army began supporting civilian rocket enthusiasts like von Braun and, with their help, transformed these modest weapons into something revolutionary. As Allied bombers devastated German cities by 1943, Hitler—now openly regretting his earlier dismissal of rocket technology—demanded weapons that could strike from hundreds of miles away.
Though a young von Braun dreamed of space exploration, the Nazi regime offered him something irresistible: unlimited funding. The devil’s bargain was clear—the Third Reich would enable his work, but his genius would serve the Reich. In 1937, he joined the Nazi party, accepting a junior SS officer commission in 1940.
And now von Braun was eager to learn whether he was advancing on his dreams. At 4:17 p.m., General Walter Dornberger, Chief of Army Ordnance rocket development, gave the signal. A siren wailed, and the rocket thundered to life. Painted in a black-and-white pattern so observers on the ground could track its roll maneuver, it reached an unprecedented 56-mile altitude before arcing over the Baltic and crashing into the sea precisely where predicted. The V2 was baptized.
As the first ballistic missile vanished into the sky, the army and SS officers around von Braun grew elated. That night, half drunk, they toasted their accomplishment. “This afternoon, the spaceship was born!” said Dornberger. The superweapon, he said, must be hurried into mass production—a gift to the Führer that would bring Germany’s enemies to their knees.
Was There Also a V1?
The Nazis were developing V1 and V2 at the same time. While the V2 was a liquid-fueled, long-range ballistic missile, the V1 was a pulsejet-powered cruise missile with limited range, which was easier and cheaper overall to produce. The V1 was about 25 feet long, with a wingspan of roughly 20 feet. About three months after the initial successful V2 launch, the first V1 tests followed: The rocket would launch from catapult ramps or occasionally from aircraft. Carrying a 1,870-pound explosive warhead at about 360 mph, it had an average range of 150 miles. After launch, the pilotless V1 flew until it ran out of fuel and inevitably crashed. It produced a distinctive buzzing noise that earned it the nickname “buzz bomb.”
In the gloomy War Cabinet Rooms beneath London’s Whitehall, the center of government offices, Churchill and his military chiefs knew Britain had precious little time before German rockets would rain down on London. Churchill, who had weathered the Blitz with the people of the United Kingdom, now faced a weapon against which there was no defense. With no means of intercepting a bullet-fast rocket, the only way of preventing attacks was to stop it from launching.
The decision was swift: Peenemünde must be destroyed. Air Marshal Sir Arthur Harris, head of Bomber Command, received an order to prepare one of the largest, most precise bombing raids yet attempted. The target: not just the facilities, but the German scientists themselves. At the Royal Air Force (RAF) briefing, there were murmurs of surprise among the pilots when officers described the scale and extreme focus of the raid. “What are we doing,” bomber pilot George Dunn asked himself, “having a maximum effort on a little tiny place like that?”
On August 17, 1943, a night chosen for its bright full moon, 596 aircraft took off from airfields across Britain, led by an elite “Pathfinder” squadron that would mark the target with flares, aiding the main bomber force’s accuracy. Operation Hydra was underway.
About the same time the RAF took to the skies, von Braun was having drinks—cooling off after a hot summer day—with Hanna Reitsch, a famous female test pilot, in the Peenemünde officers’ club.
Shortly after midnight, Dornberger awoke in his quarters to the sound of incessant anti-aircraft gunfire. He was irate. He’d given an officer permission to fire a few rounds that night as part of an exercise, but this late? And this many? Someone, he resolved, would answer for this. That’s when his window blew out.
The first bombs fell at 12:13 a.m., precisely on the scientists’ housing. As waves of bombers released their payloads over the research facility, fires erupted all over; houses burst open. Soldiers and scientists worked frantically to put out flames while periodically leaping into trenches and bomb craters anytime the whistling explosions got close. Belgian, Dutch, French, and Polish prisoners, whom the Germans used as slave labor at Peenemünde to craft their weapons, scattered to find shelter as the bombs hit their barracks. Polish slave laborer Czesław Bloch felt a rush of mixed feelings while hiding in a ditch: “On the one hand, I really wanted it to be a raid, but on the other hand, I was afraid of the great unknown.”
Six thousand feet above, British pilot Johnny Morris looked down on the “searchlights, explosions on the ground and in the air, the vast fires and chemicals burning below, all combined together to create the greatest firework display one was ever likely to see. Terrifying but beautiful.”
Dornberger, clad in his officer’s coat and pajama bottoms, reached a sturdy air-raid shelter just in time. Von Braun came running in just before bombs fell on his own quarters. The raid went on for a little over 45 minutes.
For the RAF and their Canadian allies, the return trip was a runaway battle against enemy fighters that appeared on the scene to hunt in the bright moonlight. The Allies lost 40 bombers—and with them 243 Allied airmen.
In the morning light, the damage was evident. Hundreds of craters pockmarked Peenemünde, buildings lay in ruins, and smoke drifted over the Baltic. An estimated 500 forced laborers died in the raid as compared to 170 German staff. Walter Thiel, chief designer of the V2 rocket engine, died in his bed when a bomb struck his stately house. So did Erich Walther, a chief engineer of the rocket factory.
At a heavy price, Operation Hydra marked a turning point. Although most German production facilities remained intact, and most scientists had survived, the raid demonstrated that Britain had identified the threat.
The race was far from over.
Though Operation Hydra caused delays, the V2 program eventually recovered. The Germans moved the operations underground into Mittelbau-Dora, a huge facility situated in tunnels underneath the Harz Mountains in central Germany. There, thousands of prisoners—Jews, leftists, prisoners of war—produced V2 rockets under brutal conditions.
By September 1944, missiles were raining on England, killing an average of 13 people per day. Meanwhile, in a final and desperate attempt to disrupt Allied supply lines, Germany launched hundreds of rockets at targets from Belgium and other Low Countries from late 1944, causing thousands of civilian casualties.
V2 rockets struck unpredictably, often seven miles off course. In London’s worst V2 disaster, a rocket hit a Woolworth’s store in New Cross, killing 168. In an instant, the explosion transformed a scene of holiday shopping into one of carnage. They found survivors covered in dust, and prams with small children inside, bleeding from the flying glass. A nearby bus folded like an accordion, with all passengers killed instantly.
British airborne troops were working hard at destroying V2 launch sites. But the fixed sites were only the beginning of the problem.
There were also mobile crews that would set up in forests to disguise the launch of V2s. After a unit of 39 men propped up the rocket on a converted Meillerwagen platform—a large trailer—V2 teams calculated the correct flight settings using slide rules and tables. Technicians then loaded the volatile liquid oxygen and alcohol fuel, a dangerous process taking approximately 90 minutes. Crews evacuated to a safe distance before sending the electrical signal to initiate launch, then hurried to their vehicles and drove away.
The Allies needed different tactics.
While Allied forces worked to cut rocket supply lines—capturing rail lines to keep the rockets from reaching firing range in the first place—a different approach was unfolding behind the scenes. In November 1944, Women’s Auxiliary Air Force Officer Eileen Younghusband joined 11 other women in Belgium hunting mobile V2s. Selected for her mathematical ability and quick reactions, she worked four-hour shifts with pencils and slide rules. After radar detected a launch, Younghusband received the coordinates of the impact site in London, then had five minutes to calculate the trajectory backward to its origin. It was a mental duel against German crews who could dismantle launchers and vanish in less than 30 minutes of firing. “Speed was of the essence,” she recalled as her calculations guided aircraft to bomb mobile launch units in Holland. The WAAF’s persistence paid off.
On March 27, 1945, a V2 rocket crashed in Kent, England. After that, it was quiet. Within days, Canadian forces took over the remaining launch areas. By April 1945, Soviet forces captured Peenemünde. The Third Reich was bleeding out. The Germans were finished.
In the span of eight months, the Nazis launched over 3,000 rockets against Allied targets, killing 5,000 civilians. But far more people died creating Hitler’s wonder weapons.
A few weeks after the last rocket explosion, infantryman John Rison Jones Jr. recorded the horror inside the Mittelbau-Dora underground factory. In his shaking hands, his personal camera bore witness to barbarity: emaciated bodies, men who had been worked to death for the sake of von Braun’s rockets. Of the 60,000 prisoners who had passed through Mittelbau-Dora, approximately 20,000 to 25,000 were killed building V2s and rocket facilities.
As Allied armies squeezed the last breath from Nazi Germany, they cast wary glances at one another. The Americans, British, Canadians, and Soviets had fought on the same side, but with victory assured, they now began positioning for peace. In the ruins of the Third Reich lay valuable assets: scientific minds whose genius might serve a new master.
The Americans made the first move, launching Operation Paperclip. Major Robert Staver led the hunt for German rocket specialists, the urgency of his mission evident when he hitched a ride in a single-seat P-47 Thunderbolt fighter, crammed behind the pilot in a space never designed for passengers. Wernher von Braun topped his list, not only for his technical brilliance, but because he could identify which scientists were essential to rebuild his rocket program.
Von Braun had prepared carefully. As Allied forces approached, he orchestrated his surrender with calculation, hiding key technical documents in a mine shaft in the Harz Mountains—a treasure concealed from both British and Soviet forces. Then he and his team retreated to a Bavarian Alps ski resort to await the Americans. “My country had lost two wars in my young lifetime,” von Braun later explained. “The next time, I wanted to be on the winning side.”
On May 2, 1945, von Braun’s brother Magnus rode a bicycle toward American lines, hands in the air, waving a white handkerchief. “My name is Magnus von Braun. My brother invented the V2. We want to surrender.” Staver personally retrieved the hidden technical documents before British intelligence could locate them. Six months later, the von Braun brothers and a team of rocketeers were aboard a steamer, bound for the United States and a warm reception.
American intelligence quickly scrubbed the scientists’ Nazi connections from official records. Documents showing von Braun’s SS rank of major disappeared, references to his firsthand knowledge of the slave labor at subterranean V2 construction sites purged. Less than a year after VE Day, American engineers were improving von Braun’s V2, preparing the rocket to take the first video of Earth from space. By 1950, von Braun and many German rocket engineers were working at the U.S. Army’s Redstone Arsenal near Huntsville, Alabama, developing the Redstone rocket that would carry the first American satellite and astronaut into space.
Twenty-seven years after General Dornberger had toasted “the birth of the spaceship” at Peenemünde, von Braun monitored Apollo 11’s systems from the Kennedy Space Center, scrutinizing every technical detail of his creation. His face was a bit less boyish, topped with silver hair, his frame tense as he watched the Saturn V—born from V2’s technology—thunder skyward, carrying three astronauts toward the moon.
Von Braun died in 1977. His Nazi past would only become public during the next decade after declassification efforts and Justice Department investigations.
The women who had spent years helping defeat the V2 technology paid a personal price—Constance Babington Smith haunted by pilots who never returned, Eileen Younghusband by concentration camp horrors she witnessed in 1945 as an interpreter. After the war, Babington Smith and Younghusband were appointed Members of the Most Excellent Order of the British Empire in recognition of their mathematical and analytical skills, which had stopped V2 rockets from reaching their full destructive potential during the war, helped defend democracy, and saved countless lives.
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