JF Ptak Science Books Post 2742
What does one do about Wernher von Braun? For a long time it was difficult to find his name at the National Air and Space Museum, though I don't know what that status is, nowadays. In 1958 I know what was up with him, at least according to the dust jacket of this book he co-authored, one of the first books on satellite communication, Project Satellite. (I can almost here the echo of the title repeating, a la 1958...)
It is there that we are told that Dr. von Braun "has been working in the United States since 1945". Indeed he was, thanks to having been swept up by U.S. forces at the end of the war just 40 days or so after the last V-2 was launched. There were many others taken by the U.S. in this way, though von Braun was hardly alone as a Nazi working as a rocketeer for Adolf Hitler, but he may have been one of the few members of the Nazi Party who were collected and worked at the Army Ballistic Missile Agency in Huntsville, Alabama, there in 1958.
"...(H)e engaged in pioneering experiments which produced the forerunners of today's gigantic missiles". So true--and just when I thought that the blurb writer would skip mentioning the V-2, they do:
"As Technical Director at Peenemude he was responsible for the V-2 and other famous rockets of World War II."
And there it is.
Let's remember that von Braun was a Nazi, worked hard for Hitler's ear to keep his projects rolling, and used slave labor (12,000+ of whom were worked to death at Peenemunde and related sites) to build his "famous rocket", the great forerunner of "today's gigantic missiles". The V-2 began its life ending lives soon after D-Day, with more than 5,000 of them launched primarily against British and Belgian targets, killing 2,754 and wounding 6,523 in London, alone, and terrifying everyone. His pioneering spirit can be seen in the following extraordinary map, which begins to show the V-2 action on London:
map via The Londonist https://londonist.com/2013/06/v2
The map makes quite an impression, no?
And he helped create the U.S. space program.
Back to the book jacket--what else could they say, I wonder, back in the thick and near-disastrous days of the Cold War?
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