Germany’s V-2 Rocket (Schiffer Military History Book)

Excellent, good as a stand alone work or as part of a V2 collection.

Excellent book on the V2 with plenty of technical details as well as its history and the developments and test program after the war. Recomended to anyone interested in the V2.

An outstanding book that takes you from early rocketeers into the establishment of the V2 programme.The author has a great narrative style and he covers equally well the human, the manufacturing and the military aspects of the story.I was particularly pleased with items such as the description of how the graphite steering vanes were produced. There political goings on behind the scenes is well covered. Another excellent aspect is compassionate description of the slave labourers suffering and of the bombs victims.There is also a brief section on the V1 and a comparison of its operational use and effectiveness in comparison on the V2.It is hard to imagine a better book on the subject

This is an outstanding book. About the 5th I have with the same title; maybe the first was by Dornberger himself...There are so many pitfalls for any writer on the V2 or Von Braun. The latter was a professional chameleon who could charm anyone he wanted to. This means that you never meet an American who does not think that he was wonderful. This can result in books by the like of Ordway that verge on hero worship or the Script to the bio-pic 'I aim for the Stars' which aimed to get Von Braun accepted by the American people.On the other hand you never meet a Brit who did not loathe and detest the man. My father both visited Dora and interrogated VB in 1945 and recommended that he should be tried as a war criminal and hung! Famed British film director J Lee Thompson was (mistakenly?) given the bio pic to direct and the result was a simple case of hate at first sight. Above all the French and the Poles would simply never let the history of Dora just go away the way the US government and NASA hoped it would. Despite all the rockets, ICBMs, satellites and the moon, these countries accounted for the most part of the 20,000 plus who died at Dora (the largest number of deaths in a non jewish camp).The normally superb Frank Winter tries juggling the great and the awful in his VB biography and it seems it just can not be done.Except, along comes Mr Kennedy with what might seem yet another book on the German rockets. I have a Globe Wernicke book case almost full of them.But Mr Kennedy's book is in many ways a masterpiece.For a start he gets right into the technical development of the main parts of the V2, many of which had very little to do with VB. Amazingly rocket men in Germany, Russia and the UK all began by reading the published work of secretive American scientist Goddard who was rather ignored in the US. As liquid fuels were a new science there were a number of problems to be solved, some of the main ones being the fuel, the fuel pumps (only firefighting pumps could handle the sheer quantity), the combustion chamber, the guidance giros and the guidance vanes which ended up being made of graphite.Mr Kennedy goes through all these problems and more and makes clear that the weapon was way short of development time with tens of thousands of changes to the end.Then Mr Kennedy painstakingly goes through the attitude of the Nazi leadership to the project. After the fall of Paris when the war was 'won', Hitler had no time or funds for new developments. This cost huge amounts of time for both aircraft and rockets. If Hitlers on-off-off-on support was vital in the history, so was the in fighting among the Nazi leaders. Himler really wanted to gain control of the rocket and eventually he did...Then the book goes on with the development and production of the V2; Peenemunde , Blizna and....Dora. I know much was made of the intelligence which led to the bombing of Peenemunde and the gathering of parts and details later from senior German PoWs in the UK, at Blizna and in Sweden (a swap deal for Spitfires...) and I know that this is the basis of David Irving's excellent 'The Mares Nest'. But I wonder if this was not all cover for things they already knew from decoding messages at Bletchley.. Anyhow, Kennedy does not hide anything about Dora but makes sure we understand who was in charge of production at each stage; these were men who, despite the bombing, had made sure that production of planes, tanks, railway locomotives peaked in 1944. And at a time when all able bodied men were sucked into the Eastern front. These achievements were not made by the UK or American ways of employing women, music-while-you-work and a finished aircraft to walk past at the factory gates. The German business model was based on unfed slaves violently ruled by political prisoners (often ex communists which amused the Nazis). So Kennedy does not ignore Dora, or make excuses or particularly inform us that some of the main members of VBs team including his brother, were involved in production on a daily basis.Then we get to the real meat of the book which was the operation of the missile. And this is just an amazing eye-opener. Firstly there is the Wagnerian idea of huge bomb proof concrete rocket launching centres. There is the repeated idea that Hitler continued with them after even he knew they would be useless as they diverted bombs from Germany. I do not quite buy that...But one can not argue with the field methods for firing a hopelessly undeveloped and unreliable rocket. I had no idea that it took a team of hundreds of (supposedly) highly trained men to launch each and every rocket. And all to launch a pretty piddly warhead way smaller than the load carried by a decent Lancaster bomber every night! And with even less accuracy (if that were possible, and it was after the use of pathfinders came in) than Bomber Harris could manage with his heavy bombers. Admittedly , with its lack of warning and tremendous speed of impact, the V2 was a major fright. But there were simply not enough of them, they were nowhere near 'sorted' and took an army of men to service. This is the main tenet of the book and it is clearly and concisely explained. Pretty well what each man in a V2 team had to do.I am glad that the author considers Antwerp in some detail. It was the major port for allied supplies and the major target for the V2 which hit the city thousands of times ...but without interrupting the use of the port.The book very simply goes on to explain what happens to the main scientists after the war; with the help of excellent modern research into Russian rocket programmes, and the attempts by the US, England, France and Russia to fire left over V2s after the war. This did not turn out to be at all just a matter of standing up a rocket and firing it!Do I have any quibbles? Well , I thought that the Operation Paperclip German scientists were housed in an atmosphere of factional hostility and even violence at the old boys school centre at Dayton USAF base. Last year I had a somewhat illicit wander around this vast base to pretty well find the area!This knowledge only came from Annie Jacobsen's book on the subject so I might be wrong.I would have liked more on the use of cottage industries in the Harz mountains to produce components locally..I forgot to mention that this excellent book is superbly illustrated with photos to actually support the text. Can not wait to read the authors book on White Sands. I have not been there yet but I have been to Woomera which deserves an accurate history of its own.