Wernher von Braun. I Aim For the Stars (But Sometimes I Hit London).

On July 13 1944 the citizens of London heard for the first time a strange sound.Just one week earlier,Allied forces had begun to take back occupied Europe from the Nazis with their landings on the beaches of Northern France.The unfamiliar buzzing sound coming from the sky would soon become all to familiar to them in the coming months. In retaliation for the Allied landings,Hitler was going to unleash the terror weapons German scientist had been developing in secret for years,on an unsuspecting world.

From July of 1944 until almost the last days of the war in March 1945,the Germans would launch thousands of these weapons onto London,Paris and Antwerp in an attempt to stop the Allies advance into occupied Europe.The sound the people of London were hearing that day in June of 1944 was the V-1,the first of the so called Super Weapons the Germans would reveal during the waning days of the Second World War. The V-1 used a pulse jet engine. The English were also working on a pulse jet,but the German engine was years ahead of anything that the British engineers had so far developed.But the V-1's flew relatively slow,and the Royal Air Force pilots by using radar to track the incoming buzz bombs,used this and other effective counter measures that enabled them to intercept and to shoot down these flying bombs in flight.Still there were civilian casualties.

The Germans next took aim at London with another of their Super Weapons,the V-2 rockets. The English were stunned. The V-2 actually left the earth's atmosphere and plunged to the ground from space. It reached speeds of up to 2500 mph on it's decent. The Allies had nothing in their huge arsenals that even came close to being able to counter this weapon.The V-2 was the world's first ballistic missiles. The German V-2's were the first man made object to leave and then re enter the earth's atmosphere.It seemed as if the Germans were light years ahead of the Allied scientist.

Also in July of 1944,American B-17's crews had had their first encounters with the Messerschmit ME 262,the world's first operational jet fighter aircraft. The ME 262 was able to obtain speeds in excess of 560 mph.The closest thing the Allies had to that,the Hurricanes and the P-51 Mustangs both flew a 130 mph slower than the ME 262. Both the United States and Great Britain were working on their own jet fighters,but they were no where near ready to enter production in 1944.

That these so called super weapons came to late in the war to make a noticeable difference did not lessen the impact that they had on the military leaders in American and England and in the Soviet Union as well. The fact that German scientists and engineers were so far advanced of their Allied counterparts in the fields of both jet propulsion and rocketry,was apparent for the world to see.

Operation Paperclip

The military intelligence services of the three Allied nation,the Soviet Union,Great Britain and the United States all three set out to find these scientists and engineers that had allowed Germany to take this giant lead.

The United States intelligence arm at that time was the Office of Strategic Service (OSS) The OSS is the forerunner of today's CIA .The America operation to find the German scientists was given the code name Paperclip.

It had been agreed upon at the Yalta Conference that Germany would be partitioned after the war among the victorious allied nations,so once Germany surrendered each allied nation would only be able to capture the scientists in their zone. The race was on by the three intelligence services to find as many of the German scientists as they could. Numbers wasn't the only thing they were after either. There was a prize catch that they all wanted to make. That man's name was Wernher von Braun. It was von Braun,who's invention of the directional gyroscope made the V-2 rocket possible. But Wernher von Braun had already decided that he wasn't going to be captured by the Russians. A soviet interment camp wasn't his idea of a fun time.

Wernher von Braun and his staff surrendered to American military personal on May 2 1945. OSS had their prize. Now there was only one little problem. President Harry Truman and his advisers had reluctantly agreed to the German scientist coming to America. But there was one condition.None of the German scientist who would be allowed to enter the United States could have been past members of either the SS or the Nazi party or had had any connections to the use of slave labor..

The V-2 had been built by Russian and Polish Prisoners of War. 12.000 of these prisoners had died in the construction of the V-2 through beatings,neglect or starvation. More people would die in the building of the rockets than were eventually killed by the rockets striking their targets! von Braun and his staff were well aware of the condition the prisoners were forced to endure. Plus von Braun had been both a member of the SS and a member of the Nazi party. The OSS had to go to work and sanitize von Braun's records. They had to do this to more than a few of the German's that would ended up working for NASA in America's space program.

The Russians were able to get their hands on their fair share of the German scientists too. Both the United States and the Soviet Union captured airfields with ME 262's,and both also recovered whole assembled V-2's that they were able to take back to their respective country and tear apart and study.

When American Air Force pilots flying their F-80 Shooting Stars first encountered the MIG-15 in the air space over Korea,both the Russian and American pilots had a great deal of trouble telling the two planes apart,because both planes had been modeled after the ME 262.

Likewise the rocket that launched Sputnik into orbit in 1957 was a carbon copy of the Red Stone rocket that would launched America's first satellite into space a little more than a year later.Both Russia and America used Hitler's scientists to further both of their military programs. It was making a deal with the devil.

When Wernher von Braun published his autobiography he titled it" I Aim For The Stars". Political satirist Mort Stahl had a joke I really liked.It went like this. " When Wernher von Braun wrote his autobiography.He called it I Aim For The Stars. I think it should have had a sub title,I Aim For The Stars (But Sometime I Hit London)"""