Customer Reviews

The Rocket and the Reich: Peenemünde and the Coming of the Ballistic Missle Era

5 star:		(1)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(5)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

If you want to know a lot of technical information about the German rocket program in World War II this is the place to start. Neufeld has a grasp of the technical side of the program like no other historian, however his writing style leaves much to be desired. A good plus of the book is that he includes diagrams of the missles as well as a couple sections of pictures that give the reader an idea what the things and places he writes about look like. I found being able to visualize certain things makes understanding it much easier. He also includes an appendix with a chronology of the German rocket program that readers will find helpful for quick short references to each successive rocket in the program. Overall this is an excellent book, I give it 4 stars instead of 5 only due to Neufeld's writing style which makes this book tough going in some sections that include lots of boring, and in my opinion, overkill, technical detail.

The book covers both the political and technical matters of the V-2 (A-4) missile development. As the book is intended for a general audience the coverage of the technology is sufficient for the purpose of the book but not extremely detailed. This is also clear from the title of the book. The description of the political background and military situation is done in a very clear way. The list of references are extremely detailed and it is obviuos the the author has outstanding knowledge of the subject. The important persons are described in what I consider a very balanced way. I recommned this book to anyone wanting to learn about the inner workings of parts of the German WW2 military and political system as well as a the technology of these rockets. An excellent companion is the V-2 by Walter Dornberger which of course must be read with some caution due to the position of its author and time of publication.

This is an excellent book that goes into exceptional detail about the engineering process and technical feats of the V-2 development. It is one of the best books on the V-2's techincal development aspects, where others are quicker and focus more on the effects of the V-2 attacks.

For example, Neufeld discusses at length problems of weight distribution, fin control, fuel, guidance, and even telemetry. The V-2 was an incredibly complicated weapon to develop; a casual person might think that putting a warhead on something long with fins with a rocket engine was easy - it was not.

Several years after reading this book, I worked on US missile engineering programs; the V-2 lessons were applicable 50 years later.

I have two minor issues with this book; first, the discussions of slave labor, personal responsibility, etc. could arguably be saved for another book. Understanding that to ignore them would be revisionist, this should be first and foremost a book about the rocket's technical history. Even the political history gets to be a distraction. Second, as a technical book, it does not and should not have widespread appeal. While I personally found the technical history fascinating, it is clear that not everyone will.

If Neufeld were ever to rewrite these books, perhaps a two or three part series covering the technical, political, and sociological histories separately would help readers focus on the aspects of the Rocket and the Riech that interest them most.

The two most important techonological developments of the Second World War were the Atomic Bomb and the V-2 ballistic missile.
The development of the V-2 by a group of German scientists, led by Wernher von Braun led directly to the space age and America's
successful effort to beat the USSR to a landing on the Moon. This book describes the efforts of von Braun and his team to build and operate the V-2. 3200 of these rockets were fired in anger, mostly at London and Antwerp. Von Braun and many from his team in Germany became prominent personalities in the Unites States space program, some of the well-known to the public at large. What is less well known is that the people who actually produced the rockets for operational use were part of an army of slaves who were terrorized, brutalized and murdered under the watchful eye of the dreaded SS.
It took nine years of development to get the V-2 to an operational status and the author describes the technological, administrative and political difficulties von Braun and his people faced. At one point, SS chief Heinrich Himmler tried to get control of the program as part of his "empire building". In order to accomplish this, he had Von Braun arrested for a short time. Von Braun's apologists in the US in later years pointed to this in order to whitewash his checkered background, claiming that he was really anti-Nazi. However, the author shows that his arrest had nothing to do with any "anti-Nazi" beliefs he may have had, but was simply part of Himmler's power play, made in order to pressure the heads of the program to agree to the SS's take-over attempt.
The author describes the horrors in which the slave-labor team worked in building and operating the Mittelwerk plant where the operational rockets were produced and the connections between this and von Braun's team. Von Braun is shown to have not had any direct connection with these atrocities, although he did hold the rank of Captain in the SS, but others, who later played a prominent role in the US space program, such as Arthur Rudolph had direct responsibility, which towards the end of his life, led to his depotation from the United States.
One of the most interesting points brought out in the book was the fact that the V-2 program ended up being a disaster for Nazi Germany. It was comparable in size and cost, relative to Germany's war economy, to the American Manhattan Project which successfully developed the A-bomb, yet the total weight of explosives sent by the V-2's was less than that delivered by a single large RAF bombing raid. The rocket program ate up scare resources that could have been better invested in other types of armaments. The major irony is that the ultimate benefit from this massive investment by the German taxpayer was not reaped by them, but by Germany's enemy, the United States and its successful space program.
The book is written in a dry style, so for that reason I give it only 4 stars, but it is still a very important and interesting book.

A rather serious book that focuses more on the politics and organizational challenges than on the technology and day to day operations. He also discusses the forced labor workers who worked not only at Peenemunde but also in the underground factories, worked literally to death in some cases. The book itself is rather dry and the political aspects tend to dominate the narrative. Only recommended to those who wish to study the subject.

This book told me more than I wanted to know about the development of the V-2. It goes into excruciating detail about everything that went on: who did what and when, who in the Reich supported the effort, who opposed it (and how the supporters got around the detractors).

I was most interested in the technical challenges and how they were dealt with (and bemused to find that some of the most gifted of the engineers were killed during the war-one wonders how much better Project Apollo might have gone if they'd still been around). There's also significant insight into how the Third Reich really worked (more a collection of competing bureaucracies than the monolithic entity it's generally considered to be) and an extensive discussion of the culpability of von Braun and some of the others in the atrocities of the Third Reich and the V-2 manufacturing effort itself, particularly the slave labor camp at Mittelwerk.

In short, interesting but a bit too much; however, still the definitive work on the subject. I will have to reread Ordway's The Rocket Team for comparison someday.

Obviously, the book stresses more the organisational issues (which can be cumbersome) than the technical details of the V2 project. An organigram of the ordnance/ministry/SS would have been helpful, as well as a map of the various sites. Not many technical details, especially on the Wasserfall project (I am not sure I understand by which mean the missile were to hit a plane...). Subjects are not always presented according to their chronological order. No detailed information on the actual devastations caused by the rockets (where, how many, hit rate). Otherwise, it seems that the information is pretty accurate.

Neufeld does an excellent job of presenting documents and detailed information on Dr. Wernher Von Braun during World War Two. Where he goes astray is in his interpretation of the information. He presents a flimsy thesis of Von Braun as a Nazi collaborator. He stops short of calling Von Braun a war criminal but states he is morally responsible for the slave labor used from the Dora camp. Neufeld does not present any viable alternatives for Von Braun except that he should have done something to protest the use of forced laborers on the V2. Much is made of Von Braun's SS connection but Neufeld seems to ignore the consequences for those who crossed Himmler and the SS. Neufeld gives the reader a good look at the Peenemunde days while drawing the wrong conclusions of the situation for Von Braun and the German rocket team. No excuses are needed for Von Braun. The job for readers of history is to put what occured then in context of the time and situation.

I am familiar with Michael Neufeld's earlier work with the Paper-Clip interviews on audio tape on file at NARA. What is enigmatically missing from these interviews (and the book) is what these pro-Nazi scientists knew about BERGKRISTALL/ESCHE 2 Guzen II <BERGKRISTALL/ESCHE 2 underground tunnel installation at St.Georgen/Gusen Austria> at Mauthausen Concentration Camp. Yes the ME-262 jet engine was engineered and stored there but some <other> very interesting mind boggling technologies were developed there with the help of Jewish slave labor. These slaves were murdered to eliminate any oral historical record of this new strange technology and the Nazi otracirites. Eventually in May of 1945 the invading US 41st Recon Squad 11th Ard Div 3rd US Army liberated the camps. But Russians got to this technology in the tunnels before the US forces could as our boys did not know what they had found until the O.S.S. went over photo recon much later.

By November 1947 the Russians had scooped up and exploited as much as they could and eventually dynamited the tunnels leaving us with nothing but scrapes. To this day they still have unfettered access to this technology but we caught up to them (so to speak) by bringing these Paper-Clip boys to Wright Field (Wright-Paterson AFB today)in Dayton Ohio. This was the real beginning of the Cold War Space Race.

In the Neufeld interviews you will learn of some NEW things you never knew before about the Pennemunde Boys like Project Wasserfall (i.e, submarine fired missle system), the Washington and Brooklynn Rocket Program (V-9 or the V4a bastard rocket - first attempt at ICBM). Maybe some day soon someone will discover the connection between Kplt. Hellmut Neuerburg's U-869 REAL mission from Kriegsmarine and this Wasserfall project! (i.e., a Type IXC/40 submarine that accidently sunk itself with an acoustic T5 torpedo off the coast of New Jersey halfway between Brooklyn and Washington DC in early 1945 near the end of the WWII.)