Customer Reviews

The Peenemunde Wind Tunnels: A Memoir

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A war, a good story, and well-written without indulgence, this book is worth the read. My father Peter Wegener lived through the last world war on the German side, caught in a maelstrom not of his making. A young man cannot judge the situation, but has to make the best of it, and this memoir captures this human and ordinary situation. Intelligent and bewildered, he watches and remembers, and then tells the story here.

The story unfolds in chronological order and is mostly his own narrative. However, he spent several years investigating archives and interviewing other participants to shed light on what was happening, so everything is in perspective. Famous participants of the drama include Werner von Braun and various scientists and generals. The book is also a unique historical record of the German scientific project to create new weapons.

Self-preservation was everyone's motive in this strange time. Totalitarian means constant fear, stories of betrayal, and yet all these stories are intensely human. He does not indulge in lectures or morals, but simply relates how it all unfolded. Driving a tired Opel through the country to gather a research archive, he visits the Mittelwerk, the underground factory where the V2 was built with slave labor. Despite total destruction all around, everyone acts normal on the surface, and nothing happens, but the situation seethes. As the war finally closes in, he runs into the street to greet the first American officer to tell him not to destroy the laboratory. This laboratory became a starting point for the post-war space effort in the US.

Enjoy!

First, I want to say I am in agreement with the prior review written by the author's son and those contained in Amazon's listing for this book. Still, I would like to give my impressions of this fascinating book written by a highly qualified individual who was on the scene during and after World War II.

THE PEENEMUNDE WIND TUNNELS is an account of author Peter Wegener's experiences during the last half of World War II and the years shortly afterwards. Mr. Wegener had been a German anti-aircraft gunner in the Wehrmacht during the campaigns against France and Russia but not in the historic battle for Stalingrad. It was at this point that he was transferred to the Peenemunde Research & Development facility which the author believed probably saved his life. While at Peenemunde, Wegener worked on experimental research and development of supersonic flow in support of the design of the famous V2 rocket and the never used Wasserfall anti-aircraft missile. Peter Wegener was a highly skilled engineer/scientist in a field known as gas dynamics.

I found this book to be a very personal account of the events that took place in the author's life during the war years and his time in the United States after the war ended. However, it is still an objective book written mostly on official documents plus the author's own personal dairy. Those with an academic interest will find this book has both a solid chronology of events concerning the Peenemunde wind tunnels as well as detailed notes and background information on related topics.
I was also pleased with the various illustrations which consisted largely of technical and historical photographs.

The wind tunnels themselves were build at Peenemunde, in the eastern part of Germany, beginning around 1939 and were technically very advanced. The wind tunnels were moved after the serious air raid of August 1943 to Kochel, Bavaria.
(The wind tunnels and the Aerodynamics Institute that housed them were amazingly unharmed by the air raid.) At the time, these wind tunnels were the largest (400mm x 400 mm cross section) and the highest Mach number (up to almost 9) facilities in existence.

In regards to his discussion of technical matters, Wegener concentrates mainly on aerodynamics and wind-tunnel technology but I found the book not to be overly detailed since its presentation is aimed more for the general reader/layman as opposed to scientists and engineers. As an example, the coupling of the huge V2 motor to the controls was a problem that took many test flights to straighten out but it was only touched on lightly in the book.

After the capture of the wind tunnels and their shipment to the United States at the end of the war, Wegener found himself as one of the German scientists moved to America under Project Paperclip. This phase of his life, as seen by one who actually participated in the U.S. government project, made for interesting reading. To his credit, Wegener here and elsewhere in his book, compares his perceptions and judgments with others especially as it touches upon the various personalities at Peenemunde. These include Dr. Wernher von Braun and General Walter Dornberger, the respective heads of the civilian and military operations at Peenemunde, Rudolf Herrmann, head of the Aerodynamics Institute, and the notorious Arthur Rudolph who, after the August 1943 air raid, moved with the V2 factory from Peenemunde to the Mittelwerk in central Germany, a mine that was converted to an underground factory in which prisoners from the concentration camp Dora were forced to build the weapons under appalling conditions.

Wegener in his book rates the application of rockets to warfare as one of the three most important developments in military strategy during World War II (the other two being the atomic bomb and radar). While I personally agree with Wegener's assertion, I think most historians and military thinkers today feel that the deployment of the V2 was far less effective that the A-bomb or radar (while acknowledging that the V2 had a significant influence on post-World War II developments in both the United States and the Soviet Union). I believe it was Homer J. Stewart, an American rocket researcher during the period between 1938 and 1949, who pointed out that the impact of the German developments on the U.S. missile and space program was not so much technological (except for the use of large engines) as psychological: the V2 had shown the feasibility, and thus the immediate utility, of guided missiles in war.

Wegener's book gives the reader many lasting impressions. First, there is the fact that German science and technology in several areas was quite impressive -- the wind tunnels themselves were the most advanced of their kind at the time. The men like Wegener who worked on such projects were far more interested in science and engineering than in any Nazi ideology. Having said that however, another lasting impression from reading the book, which Wegener does not hide or gloss over, is the ghastly statistic that significantly more people died as a result of the inhumane conditions under which prisoners were forced to build V2s than through the weapon's deployment and use in the war.

With this book, the late Peter Wegener (who became an American citizen in 1954 and joined the faculty of Yale University as a professor in 1960) has given us a valuable and well-written narrative, complete with an excellent set of academic notes and comments, concerning a period of great scientific and historical interest for the United States. As such, I consider this book to be an important addition to the literature on the development of the V2 rocket and it subsequent affects in various other areas both in the U.S. and elsewhere. I recommend Wegener's book to all readers from a variety of backgrounds -- it is a book of genuine interest and value.