The Father of Space Travel
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In the final months of the Second World War, the Nazis began to use a dreadful rocket-powered bomb. It travelled faster than the speed of sound, which meant that you couldn't hear it coming. One moment you were queuing up at a store or enjoying a pint at the pub, and the next moment, well, there was no next moment. It was a cruel, spiteful weapon. Technologically, it was a miracle.

but economically and militarily, the V2 rocket was a total disaster for Nazi Germany. How did this terrible weapon come into existence? Why were so many of the people it hurt not the people you might expect? And what lessons can we learn from the V2 rocket even today?

I'm very excited to introduce my new three-part series on the V2 rocket, in which I investigate the answers to those questions. All the episodes are available now, ad-free, for Pushkin Plus subscribers. But the miniseries was inspired by former and founding Cautionary Tales producer Ryan Dilley, the OG producer,

Of course, Ryan is also our resident V2 expert, and while I've been able to cover the rocket weapon in depth, I haven't yet had the chance to geek out with Ryan on the topic, and today...

Ryan Dilley joins me. Welcome back to Cautionary Tales, Ryan. It's so lovely to be back on the other side of the glass in the studio part rather than the cubicle directing you. Yeah, it's because you're no longer the boss of Cautionary Tales. We can actually get you in front of the mic while you were in charge. This was never going to happen. We can talk about how you got me into the V2, but how did your interest first start?

There are surviving versions of the V2. There were rockets that were collected after the war. And there's one in the Imperial War Museum. So when I was a kid, I would go there and I'd see this huge black and white rocket, amazing thing. And they cut it out so you can see what's going on inside. I mean, it's tall as a house, isn't it? It's 45 feet tall, about five feet wide. And it takes up the whole atrium of the museum, three floors up.

But I didn't realise this until quite later, that one of the V2 bombs landed very close to where my great-grandmother actually worked. March 8th, 1945, she was a kitchen hand in a cafe next to London's main meat market, Smithfield Market, which is a very kind of grand, beautiful Victorian building, an ancient market which was built on the original land outside the city walls the Romans had built where animals were slaughtered. And still operates as a meat market to this day. It's an amazing place, yeah. On this day, on...

But in the real tail end of the war, this is a month or two before the end of the war, lots of people had heard a rumor that there were going to be rabbits on sale. So they went to the market very early to line up because there was obviously rationing and food shortages. And just as they were doing that, one of these fearsome V2s landed. No warning, as you said, supersonic speed. The speed and the weight of the rocket caused it to break through the building, through the ground. And there's an underground railway which used to serve the market.

And that collapsed, and many people were flung into that hole. And there were 110 deaths, many of them women and children, just regular shoppers waiting. My family never talked about this, and I'm sure my great-grandmother was there, probably about 60, 70 yards beyond the blast zone. So not injured. But it was definitely something that came very, very close to changing my family history. It is absolutely extraordinary. And one of the things that we discussed in the series is the way that this thing would just come from nowhere. Yeah.

and hit almost always civilian targets because it wasn't accurate enough to really be of any military value. And because it was so random, there wasn't anything they could do about it. They couldn't go to a bomb shelter. It wasn't like in the Blitz earlier, which killed many more people.

You knew you had some warning, the bombers were coming, you could go and hide, you could get somewhere safe. But this would just, yeah, you're queuing for rabbits. This is why particularly, it's an interesting weapon. So when it was developed, it was called the A-series weapon. It was the A-rocket. The V comes from German, the Geltungswaffe. So that's kind of retaliation, vengeance. And the idea is it's a weapon to terrorise people. Yeah. Because Germany's losing the war badly by then. Yes. So this is their revenge.

But actually, militarily, it's not a great weapon. In military values, you mentioned the bombers. Bombers would come over, the air raid siren would go, and all the workers have to get out of their beds so that you disrupt their sleep and you disrupt production the next day. Maybe you hit their factory and you maybe knock out the railway line. The other thing that the Germans would do would drop timed bombs. So a whole street would be closed down while they're waiting for this timed bomb to be diffused, and you would kill anyone trying to diffuse it, or it would go off. So that was a way of disrupting huge amounts of the city over days from one raid.

The V2 didn't do any of that. It came along and had huge destructive power. It would burrow itself into the ground and with one ton explosion quite deep down would cause huge damage to foundations, absolute destroy buildings in a way that conventional bombs didn't do. And this is something that we explore in the series. And one of the things we also explore is how Germany came together

to build this thing in the first place. Why did anybody ever think that this was a good investment of resources rather than building more tanks and planes? And one of the reasons is because the senior engineer on the V2 program was this incredibly charismatic man, Fairnough von Braun. Yes. Thinking about him, I find him deeply distasteful and become distasteful

very angry about him, actually. He was born in about 1912 into an aristocratic family. They were Prussian aristocracy, so he was kind of a blonde-haired, blue-eyed, kind of perfect German that people then revered. From the Junkers class, this kind of political and military elite of Germany, the people who really pushed what

what we think of as being classic Germans, the kind of heel-clicking, militaristic Germans. He came from that background. Yeah, and the somewhat sneering at the Nazis is a bit ridiculous, upstarts, but at the same time very interested in the Nazi agenda of military domination, of German nationalism. That kind of thing would sit very well with von Braun's

Yeah, von Braun's father, as I understand it, was a government minister, served in the Weimar Republic. We think of the Weimar Republic as being kind of progressive, lefty, but in many ways there was a real spectrum of people. Yeah. And he was a more conservative figure. It wasn't all cabarets. It wasn't all cabarets. It wasn't all Laismanelli. He was a more kind of conservative figure. The Prussians would have shared many of the views of...

that the Nazis had. Perhaps not the kind of street fighting ways of the SA or the SS, but certainly they would have shared many of the racist views, many of the economic views. They would have shared a fear of Bolshevism, they would have shared a fear of kind of international Jewry, they would have shared a fear of Western decadence. So there were many overlaps between their worldview. Yeah. And the series is, one of the things that we do is follow von Braun along with following the rocket and

and talk about his journey and his decisions and his moral responsibility for what happened. So I don't want to go into too much detail about that, but he does end up in an extraordinary place, which is, among other things, working for Disney. Yes, I mean, I find that that transformation slightly obscene.

It's undoubtedly obscene. Yes, but I was looking through the archives. It's quite rare to find people criticizing that. I found a really interesting article written by a British major newspaper, the Daily Mirror, just after the war, which looked at his situation going to live in America and is very, very critical of it and makes many of the points that I would make today. And these some were swept under the carpet in the 50s. I mean, in a nutshell, this guy is a Nazi war criminal. We can debate to what extent he's a Nazi war criminal, but he was a major part of the German war effort.

And now he's making a TV series for Walt Disney about how we're going to go to space. He's suddenly a kind of popular science commentator. It is astonishing. And via Walt Disney and via those appearances and via the public profile, he hobnobbed with politicians. He became friends with JFK to an extent. I mean, his daughter says that when JFK was killed,

It was the most upset she'd ever seen her father. He went off to his den and just stayed there and she was told not to go anywhere near him. He had a link with him and JFK was instrumental in giving NASA the funds it needed to get to the moon. Yeah, the moonshot was JFK's vision and von Braun was intimately involved in making that happen. He said...

that that wasn't much criticised at the time. There was a debate as to what was going to happen to these people. Who would they go to work for? Or maybe they should all just be shot. There is an argument that they should have been executed for war crimes, but fine. Instead, they go to build rockets. But they could have built rockets for the Soviet Union, for the French, for the British. It could have worked out differently. Do you think he would have been treated differently by these different post-war powers?

I almost certainly think he would have been treated very differently. I doubt he would have been celebrated in the way that he was. He would never have been called a hero by the Soviets if they'd have captured him. I believe some German scientists did defect to the Russians, particularly, I think, the communist sympathies. And there was this joke when America got to the moon that that's because our Germans are better than their Germans. That's the joke the Americans told us. Yes. At the end of the war, and this is one of the things I find annoying about Wernher von Braun, at the end of the war, he sought out the Americans.

He had a choice. And I think that the pragmatic choice is the Soviets probably wouldn't treat him very well. He'd have ended up in Siberia living in a gulag, perhaps still doing the same research, but he wouldn't have been a comfortable lifestyle.

So the French, I'm guessing after the war, wouldn't have been all that welcoming to him or accommodating to him. They would have certainly taken him on. So there's another kind of Nazi scientist engineer in parallel, who's Ferdinand Porsche, so the famous Porsche car makers. He was very good friends with Hitler. He joined the Nazi party about the same time as von Braun joined the Nazi party. Equally, von Braun was in the SS and Ferdinand Porsche was in the SS. They both came up with kind of slightly grandiose, harebrained,

technical schemes. He made perfectly usable military kit, Kupelwagens and other Jeep type things. But he also wanted to make a massive 100 tonne mouse tank. A mouse tank is a tank for mice? I guess it's a joke. The idea is it's a massive tank. Like Little John and Robin Hood. It's the mouse tank because it's enormous. Like a castle on wheels that would trundle along and win the war. And obviously it was a complete disaster. And so both of these characters were very, very entwined in the Nazi war in Hitler's grandiose schemes. Falsely.

Ferdinand Porsche fell into the hands of the French and was basically imprisoned by them. They assumed he's a war criminal, all of the same things that he did for Hitler. You could argue that von Braun did for Hitler. The French imprisoned Porsche. They wanted him to work for them, but they certainly weren't rolling out the red carpet. Yeah, they weren't putting him on Disney. Yes. Well, when Wernher von Braun surrendered to the Americans, he also was interrogated by the British. There was a little bit of cooperation between the Anglo-American allies. He said he had a moral duty...

to give the technology, the terrible weapon that he developed, a moral duty to give that to a nation. I think the quote is something like, a nation that lives by the Bible, the Americans.

Obviously, that's in comparison to the godless communists. The idea is you suddenly think, well, maybe he's a wonderful Christian. And then his daughter would once ask about what were his views of Christianity? He said, well, he wasn't really. We'd go water skiing every Sunday morning. So he never went to church. He didn't really talk about God. He was kind of spiritual, but he wasn't. So I think there's a real kind of sense that he claimed to have a moral responsibility to deliver this weapon to the Americans. It was okay when he was giving to the Nazis and dropping bombs on all and sundry or doing whatever he did in the factories that made the bombs.

But he suddenly had a great moral duty. So I think he was very good at telling the Americans what they wanted to hear and making out that he was a good fellow. One of the things that we explore in the three-part series is early on we're hearing a lot of von Braun's descriptions of himself and then later we start to hear...

a more objective viewpoint, and you start to see what's going on in a different way. When he did go to talk to the Brits, there is this extraordinary moment where he's being driven through southeast London, and there's a site that has basically been flattened by one of the V2 rockets. And he's a bit irritated because they've cleared all the rubble away. And what he really wanted to do was examine the site fresh. He could understand what the V2 had actually done.

So there's something very cold there. It's like a scientist examining a rat in a laboratory. Which goes against lots of the other defences he has. He says, I wanted to make it a spaceship. I always wanted to go to the moon. I didn't really want to make a weapon. And then that anecdote tells another story. I do have a quote from him, which I find interesting. Because I was saying that he never really expressed regret about what he'd done. And actually I was wrong. So I found this quote. I have very deep and sincere regret for the victims of the V2 rockets.

But there were victims on both sides. And I find... How? Well, I find that, A, I mean, who does he mean by victims? The victims are manifold. It's not just people like the shoppers at Smithfield Market and my great-grandmother. I mean, the destruction of housing stock in the last few weeks of the war, I think one of the figures I've seen is 600,000 houses in the southeast destroyed.

were either damaged or destroyed by V2s. My grandparents found it very difficult to find housing after the war. So unfortunately, my grandparents had to live in kind of a dilapidated hut that was formerly a kind of barracks through which disease spread, overcrowded, unsanitary conditions.

And those health problems had huge impacts on my family for decades afterwards. So there are kind of a number of victims. It wasn't just necessarily the people who were killed. There were bigger ripples that go through British society. And also these bombs landed in Holland, in Antwerp, Liege, areas in Belgium. But also there were a number of other victims. The people who made the bombs and people who were involved in constructing the factories and constructing the railway lines and constructing the other machinery that made this weapon possible were often slave laborers. Yeah.

Thank you, Ryan. We will hear more about Vandervan Brown and a little bit from the satirist Tom Lehrer after the break.

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We're back. I'm Tim Harford. I'm with the founding producer of Cautionary Tales, Ryan Dilley, and we're talking about Werner von Braun and the V2 rocket. One thing that we didn't get to include in the series was Tom Lehrer's famous song about von Braun. Tom Lehrer, many people will know, still with us in his 90s, a great satirist of the post-war era, and he...

I think reflected some of the controversy about should this guy who built this super weapon be working for NASA? Let's have a little listen to the Von Braun song. And what is it that put America in the forefront of the nuclear nations? And what is it that will make it possible to spend $20 billion of your money to put some clown on the moon? Well, it was good old American know-how, that's what.

as provided by good old Americans like Dr. Werner Von Braun. Gather round while I sing you a Werner Von Braun A man whose allegiance is ruled by expedients Call him a Nazi, he won't even frown "Nazi schmaltzy," says Werner Von Braun

We shall hear a little more of that in a moment. So this was originally recorded live in 1965 for the album That Was The Year That Was. So was he a Nazi? Well, I immediately want to say yes. I think he was certainly very culpable in Nazi crimes. I think he was culpable in violence.

Developing this weapon, I think he began to develop a weapon before the Nazis came to power. As a teenager, he was making rockets, but largely kind of glorified fireworks. They'd be packed with kind of explosives, not hugely powerful rockets. He was apparently not a good student, but he performed really well at university. So he got multiple degrees. He got degrees in engineering, he got degrees in physics. So he was kind of like a wunderkind in the perfect sense. And his work was spotted by the army.

They said they would fund his PhD project, which is to make a rocket.

And about a few months after that, Hitler comes to power. And then he's got a choice. Yeah. The reason that the army were funding him wasn't because they were interested in getting to the moon. They were interested in weaponry. And this was a time when the German state had been disarmed by the First World War allies. The rockets were an alternative to artillery because artillery was banned. Yes. And also it was very difficult to have an air force. So there were lots of restrictions they were trying to get around. The idea that a 25-year-old would suddenly become the darling of the German army...

I presume his father, who was a minister in the government at the time, probably would have had a role in introducing to people and advising him. So Wernher von Braun was not an innocent in this. A kind of harebrained dreamer. Certainly his behaviour throughout his career shows he had political nous. He wasn't just wandering into things. And by the end of the war, he was a senior SS officer. This is one of the most evil organisations in the history of human civilisation. Now, we can argue, and we discuss it in the series...

why he joined the SS, whether it was because he was absolutely committed to the genocidal goals of the SS or because he wanted to build rockets and he didn't much care about the genocidal goals of the SS if it helped him build rockets, that was fine by him. Let's hear a little bit more from Tom Lehrer. Don't say that he's hypocritical. Say rather that he's apolitical.

Once the rockets are up, who cares where they come down? That's not my department, says Werner Von Braun. Do you think he could have washed his hands of where the rockets came down? I mean, he knew where they were going.

But he knew their weapons. I've been mulling this over a lot. So that part of me thinks that could he not have slowed the progress of the rocket program down? Could he not have essentially sabotaged it? He was the kind of lynchpin. I think people have described him as being a kind of organizer. Yeah, he was a brilliant technical director. He had a great breadth of knowledge, but not a great depth of knowledge, is what one of the people who worked with him at NASA said. And I think the idea was if you'd really wanted to,

he could have stopped. He could have maybe slowed down the progress of the bomb. Lots of programs in Nazi Germany, lots of harebrained schemes failed.

Huge amounts of money were being pumped into the V2. It was a huge effort, apparently comparable to the American effort to create the atomic bomb. Huge amounts of money being essentially wasted on this project. But there were other projects that were equally expensive, which just failed. And they didn't take the scientists out. They didn't take the directors out and shoot them against a wall. They were just, you know, fair enough, didn't work. I wonder possibly if Wernher von Braun could have

slowed it down. He knew what was happening in Nazi Germany. He knew what the regime was doing. He also knew that the writing was on the wall and it was all going to be over quite soon. And yet ploughed on. Yeah, absolutely. To the extent that he was nearly killed in a car crash because he and his chauffeur were working so hard. This is in the final weeks of the war. They're driving all over the place trying to get stuff done and the chauffeur falls asleep at the wheel. And von Braun is asleep in the back and nearly killed him. And that was overwork.

But the other part of me is actually, despite the deaths of all of the people who worked on the project and despite the deaths in London and other cities in Europe, the money that was draining out of the Nazi regime because of the V2 project was actually quite useful. If they'd spent it wisely, they maybe could have kept the war going slightly longer. They could have chewed up more lives. They could have kept more people. At the same time,

The launch sites for the V2 were mainly in Holland because that was where you could basically reach London from The Hague. So the Germans were basing themselves there and they weren't withdrawing, partly because of the V2 sites there. And they were starving the population, which is awful. The V2 did more damage to the German war effort than the cruelty inflicted on many hundreds of thousands, if not a million people. It did enormous, enormous damage to the German war effort. There's one physicist I quote who said we were very grateful for...

to von Braun because it was as though they'd pursued a policy of unilateral disarmament. So much money that could have been spent on planes, fighter planes or tanks was going on this V2. But I mean, it did cause mass starvation purely because of all the potatoes. It sounds absurd. The potatoes required...

to make the alcohol, which was an important part of fueling this rocket. And millions of people, literally millions of people, were starving to death in Eastern Europe at the time. Let's listen to the end of the Tom Lehrer song. ♪

Some have harsh words for this man of renown But some think our attitude should be one of gratitude Like the widows and cripples in old London town Who owe their large pensions to Werner Von Braun You too may be a big hero Once you've learned to count backwards to zero

In German or English I know how to count down. And I'm learning Chinese, says Werner Von Braun. What's the China reference about?

So Tom Lehrer's argument was that he would sell himself to the high speeder. I think it was an open question who he would work for. I doubt it would have been the Chinese, but there were other people interested in his services. So in the immediate aftermath of the collapse of Germany, the Allies were still fighting Japan. It was quite a good idea to grab hold of these rocket scientists and these rockets, and maybe you could reversion these rockets to work for the invasion of Japan. Fire V2s on Tokyo or something. Kill the Japanese, save American and British lives. That, I guess, was the plan.

There's a slight hiatus. So when Wernher von Braun went to America initially, he complained about lack of funding. But actually, between 1945 and 1950, there wasn't a huge amount of interest in those rockets. It wasn't until the Cold War really started to ramp up with the Berlin blockade, and then, of course, in the Korean War, there's a sense that maybe we need to

to arm ourselves against the communist threat. And that's when the money started to flow. And for most of his career, he was actually a weapons scientist. Only towards the end did he then turn to working for NASA for the thing that he often claimed was his ultimate goal, which was getting to the moon or getting to Mars. Wernher von Braun, when he was made into an American citizen, apparently, his daughter says, it was the proudest day of his life. So for being a man who says, like, you know, I need to fight for Germany, I need to fight for my homeland, I need to make weapons for Hitler because I love Germany.

Within two or three months of arriving in America, he's very, very keen to be American. Yes. Apolitical, as Tom Lehrer says. He found it very difficult to speak up and try and help the workers in his factory, try and help people who were persecuted by the Nazis. He felt it wasn't safe. He shouldn't do it. But when he was in America, he played a very, very high-stakes game of criticizing the American government, his employer.

for not giving enough resources. And there's one point where he even accepted an offer to speak in Russia, and there was a real worry that he might not come back. So there was a sense in the 1960s with Tom Lehrer that this man who preached morality, who preached being a loyal American, was actually up for the highest bidder. And anyone who would finance his dream would win his loyalty. And that was certainly a fear that...

both sides had at the end of the Second World War. I say both sides, both sides of the Cold War. So the Soviet bloc and America and its allies were both worried that these German scientists would go off and join the other lot. Whether that was actually true or not, that was certainly what people were afraid of and clearly was something that von Braun was willing to exploit. But certainly, to return to your question about how we've been treated differently, I think this article from the Daily Mirror, which is from 1947, actually reiterates

He writes very angrily about the conditions that the German scientists kept him. Yeah, so this is a British newspaper. Yeah, this is the British newspaper. Most notorious among the scientists is Professor Wernher von Braun, 35, principal inventor of the V2 rocket which brought death to many British men, women and children. Although Nazis guilty of much milder crimes have been executed or imprisoned, von Braun and his bride are being entertained and made a fuss of. Yeah, so he should have been shot is what they're saying.

Well, the Americans certainly did not come close to shooting him. They put him on Disney. Even in the next paragraph, there is a campaign to whitewash them. Some US Army officials insist they were merely nominal Nazis. And now they're 100% pro-United Nations, so pro-ally. Many Americans, shocked, point out that the usefulness of a criminal is no excuse for not punishing them for their misdeeds. Fascinating. Fascinating. And...

There is a reason in the end that we didn't use the Tom Lehrer song in the series, much as I love Tom Lehrer. And that's, I think, uncharacteristically, Tom Lehrer missed the point. He missed the most important fact about the V2 weapons program. And if people want to find out what that fact is, they can listen to the V2 trilogy. Ryan Dilley, at last, in front of the microphone. Thank you for joining us. It's been a pleasure for me, if not for the listeners.

All three episodes are available now ad-free exclusively for Pushkin Plus subscribers. You can join on the Cautionary Tales Apple show page or at pushkin.fm slash plus. That is it from me and from Ryan today, but I'll be back again next week on Friday the 4th of August with another brand new episode of Cautionary Tales on our main ad-supported feed.

Cautionary Tales is written by me, Tim Harford, with Andrew Wright. It's produced by Alice Fiennes, with support from Edith Ruslow. 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 Guttridge, Gemma Saunders and Rufus Wright.

The show wouldn't have been possible without the work of Jacob Weisberg, Ryan Dilley, Greta Cohn, Leet Almalad, John Schnarz, Carly Migliori and Eric Sandler.

Cautionary Tales is a production of Pushkin Industries. It was recorded in Wardall Studios in 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.fm slash plus.

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