Rod Pyle - Amazing Stories of the Space Age: True Tales of Nazis in Orbit, Soldiers on the Moon, Orphaned Martian Robots, and Other Fascinating Accounts from the Annals of Spaceflight

CLASSIFIED: TOP SECRET IN NAZI GERMANY, DECLASSIFIED AFTER THE END OF WORLD WAR II

A scenario:

March 12, 1945, is a blustery day in Manhattan. Couples are strolling, enjoying the early spring weather. Earnest men dash across crowded boulevards; wool suits, ties, and fedoras are the uniform of the day. It is only 4:00 p.m., but the sidewalks are already shadowed canyons on Wall Street. The district is packed with those departing from work early, eager to begin the trek to the boroughs and home.

Most people are dashing to the subway, while others are engaged in animated conversation as they walk in pairs. The noises of urban life almost drown out the soft, twin pops that echo down the busy avenues, reverberating from the endless expanse of concrete and glass. A few look around, wondering what might have created the odd soundit was too deep to be a backfiring taxi; it sounded almost like distant artillery. Nobody thinks for a moment that it might signal a few tons of explosive death falling into dense air high above the metropolis. Far downrange, a machine from the future glides silently onward, seeking escape from the impending cataclysm.

Then, a blinding flash of light heats the street to incandescence. Within seconds a shock wave devastates a two-mile-wide section of the city, shattering windows, gutting skyscrapers, and devastating multiple city blocks below. The Chrysler Building and Empire State Building are rendered skeletal, windowless wrecks. Fires rage unchecked, and an estimated 300,000 die within moments. Twice that number are injured. Manhattan is a ruined inferno, its streets scattered with the smoldering forms of the dead and dying. And an invisible enemyradiationwill stalk the city for weeks.

High above, in the tranquil blackness of space, a lone German pilot attempts to radio his success to Axis ships hiding in the Atlantic, having shaken off his awe at the utter destruction he has wrought. He is mildly surprised to find that his radio no longer functions, but that is of little consequence. His craft, the Silbervogel Amerika Raketenbomber, will cross the United States in record time at Mach 3.4. Soon he will land on Japanese-held territory in the Pacific, and will later be awarded the Reich's highest honor when he returns home by conventional aircraft. His silver spaceship, the bringer of war to American shores, will follow, lashed to the deck of a Japanese aircraft carrier. In Berlin, military planners are certain that World War II will soon be over, and the thousand-year Reich will emerge triumphant.

Of course, this nightmare never occurred outside the overheated minds of a handful of Nazi leaders, a small crew of aerospace engineers, and a brilliant rocket designer. But the Germans did work diligently for a time to develop a nuclear weapon, and Eugen Sanger and his partner Irene Bredt did develop detailed plans for a suborbital skip bomber ultimately intended to bomb Manhattan and other US targets, called the Silverbird.

Sanger was the driving force behind the rocket plane project. Born in 1905, he studied civil engineering as a young man until a stunning new book grabbed his imagination. Hermann Oberth, a German physicist and engineer, had written Die Rakete zu den Planetenrumen (By Rocket into Planetary Space) in 1923. Oberth was an early rocketry pioneer and saw the future clearly: rockets would one day allow people to travel into space. Many scoffed, as people will do when encountering new and visionary ideas, but Sanger, like his future rival Wernher von Braun, was fascinated by the book, and immediately altered his career trajectory to pursue aeronautics.

Fig. 1.1. Aeronautical engineer Eugen Sanger and his future wife, mathematician Irene Bredt, work on the Silbervogel (Silverbird) rocket bomber early in WWII.

Sanger joined a group of brilliant young German engineers, the VfR or Society for Space Travel, that had begun experimenting with rockets. Other nations had their own devotees of rocket propulsionnotably the US and USSRbut the German amateur rocketeers were well organized and made swift progress through the 1930s. As a group they followed the ideas of Oberth, and Sanger and von Braun became enthusiastic devotees. At a time when liquid-fueled rockets were a mere curiosityRobert Goddard had pioneered the technology in the United States in the 1920sit was an extremely dangerous endeavor, and experimentation frequently ended in disfiguring explosions. But from such determined origins spring great things, and humanity's reach into space was born in Goddard's workshop and the VfR's fiery experimentation.

In 1932, Sanger joined both the fledgling Nazi party and its elite paramilitary SSmembership in both organizations was beneficial to engineers and scientists seeking to advance their technical careers, especially if the projects in which they were interested had military applications. Like Oberth before him, he wrote of rocket-powered flight for his graduate thesis, which was rejected, as Oberth's had been, for being too fanciful. Again following in Oberth's footsteps, he later published the treatise as a book.