{"id":14943,"date":"2023-10-12T12:33:28","date_gmt":"2023-10-12T16:33:28","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/aleta.life\/?p=14943"},"modified":"2023-10-17T12:36:37","modified_gmt":"2023-10-17T16:36:37","slug":"once-the-rockets-are-up","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/aleta.life\/index.php\/2023\/10\/12\/once-the-rockets-are-up\/","title":{"rendered":"Once the Rockets Are Up\u2026"},"content":{"rendered":"
Position: 54\u00b008’18.4″N 13\u00b045’49.0″E<\/a><\/h6>\n

For reasons I\u2019m about to explain, rockets run deep in my family\u2019s history. Well, as deep as modern rocket history goes. Back to 1912 or thereabouts, when Robert H. Goddard<\/a> was launching his scientific career through the fog of tuberculosis. This story revolves around my uncles Eric and Hugh, my wife Carol, her dad Bob, and their relationships to Wernher von Braun<\/a>, Robert Goddard and Tom Lehrer.<\/p>\n

M<\/h6>\n

\"Eric-Sarah\"<\/a><\/p>\n

My Uncle Eric was Mycroft to my father\u2019s Sherlock. According to Kenneth, his elder brother was the more intelligent and sensitive of their two [great] minds. Eric joined Britain\u2019s Secret Intelligence Service soon after the outbreak of World War II. His piercing intellect, fluency in German, dashing good looks, and quiet sense of humour were all assets the SIS needed, and prized. Despite rising to the rank of Major, he never spoke much about his role in the war effort. Not to his nephews and nieces at any rate.<\/p>\n

My father once described Eric’s role as that of \u2018M\u2019, James Bond\u2019s spymaster. That his work involved analysing reconnaissance information, aerial photos, spy reports, that sort of thing. From that he determined where special operations forces would be best deployed in the field. As you might imagine, the stress of sending good men and women into dangerous and frequently deadly situations took its toll on him.<\/p>\n

He never quite recovered the panache he had before the war, preferring a quiet life as father of my cousin Sarah. He taught at Eastbourne College<\/a>, a boys (now coed) preparatory school, and was master of Reeves<\/a> house. My brother attended the school for three years, commuting from Chicago on a BOAC VC10<\/a> twice a year. I envied Julian’s jet-setting lifestyle right up to the time I was sent off to boarding school in Canada. That is another story.<\/p>\n

Operation HYdra<\/h6>\n

\"RAF-Recon-Peenemunde\"<\/a><\/p>\n

One of the few stories of Uncle Eric\u2019s endeavours involved the identification and targeting of the Nazi\u2019s top secret rocket development and testing range in the Baltic Sea coastal hamlet of Peenem\u00fcnde. In 1943, Peenem\u00fcnde\u2019s most famous resident scientist was Wernher von Braun, lead designer of the V-1 and V-2 rockets. At the end of the war von Braun, in case you\u2019d forgotten, dropped his Nazi drawers and signed on to help America build ballistic missiles. He eventually serve as technical director for the Apollo space program and helped land the first man on the moon.<\/p>\n

The story I heard was at some point in the middle of the war Uncle Eric was handed a pile of intelligence (RAF reconnaissance photos and detailed technical plans of Peenem\u00fcnde) and immediately recognised the site\u2019s importance. He kicked his analysis upstairs and (I\u2019m surmising here) it eventually resulted in the RAF\u2019s massive air raid on Peenem\u00fcnde known as Operation Hydra<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Some 596 bombers took off on August 17, 1943, in the largest RAF action against a single target of the war. The facility was badly damaged, delaying V-2 rocket development by about two months. That might not sound like much, but it turns out the delay at that point in the war was just enough to prevent a far worse outcome.<\/p>\n

Operation Hydra was intended to decapitate the many headed snake of Nazi special weapons research. In the event, it accelerated the relocation of V-2 development to various sites around Germany. A new, underground manufacturing location called Mittelwerk<\/a> became the principle research and development site. Located in the caves of Kohnstein<\/a>, a hill in Thuringia, prisoners of war built the factory at gunpoint.<\/p>\n

Museum<\/h6>\n

Thus, when I realised that Wernher von Braun\u2019s secret Nazi rocket lab was only a gyroscope\u2019s throw from Rostock<\/a>, of course I insisted we visit. What\u2019s left of the site includes an aging power plant and acres of undergrowth covering the forced labour camps, launch pads, and almost all the rest of the facilities.<\/p>\n

As soon as we entered the site, I headed straight for the men\u2019s room[1]<\/sup><\/a>. That done, we turned towards the three floors of the transformer house annex that houses the historical museum<\/a>. Each floor charts a stage in the development of Germany\u2019s missile research up through the end of the war. Then it continues more generally through the Cold War and into the 1960s. Wreckage of V-1 and V-2 prototypes recovered from the Baltic Sea demonstrate how far von Braun\u2019s team had come, and how far it had to go. The twisted and shorn chunks of cast iron with their primitive guidance systems would today be most at home in the pages of a steampunk comic book. As comprehensive as the display is, I was disappointed the self-guided tour\u2019s verbiage soft pedals the presence, forced labour, and deaths of thousands of eastern European prisoners of war who built the site.<\/p>\n

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