Page 24 of V2

Graf laughed, despite himself. ‘You’re such a cynic, Seidel.’

‘I was a lawyer before the war. I’m trained to be cynical.’

Five minutes later, they were in Seidel’s little Kübelwagen, with its flapping canvas roof and bucket seats, jolting towards Wassenaar. A brief interval of flat grey dune land stretching down to the sea yielded quickly to the inevitable trees. Unlike the woods closer to Scheveningen, this one was dotted with smart houses. The wealthy owners had been moved out a couple of years earlier to create a three-kilometre security zone along the coast. Seidel slowed down and turned left, towards the sea. They stopped at a guard post, showed their passes and were nodded through. On either side, high iron gates offered glimpses of the gravelled drives that had been hidden in darkness the previous night. They ran across overgrown lawns, through drifts of unswept leaves, up to big steep-roofed houses. Some were as large as palaces. All looked empty apart from one, Graf noticed, which had a staff car parked outside.

‘What happens there?’

Seidel slowed and glanced over his shoulder at the open gate. ‘That’s the whorehouse.’

‘What? You’re joking? I thought the whorehouse was in Scheveningen.’

‘Don’t go there, whatever you do! That syphilitic hole is for the men. This one is for the officers.’

He put his foot down again. After the last house there was a strip of open ground that looked as though it might have been a pre-war golf course, and then the road became a track that ran into a hunting forest. This was what Graf remembered from the previous night: the sense of wildness. There was a sign: Restricted Area! We will shoot without warning! The security barrier across the road was up, the sentry post unmanned.

As the trees closed around them, Graf expected to see signs of activity – salvage, clearing-up – but it seemed that the launch area had been abandoned. In the centre of the wood the vegetation was scorched, the branches stripped bare of foliage, the ground ripped up, exposing roots. Already it felt haunted. The blackened stumps of the trees looked as if they might have been shelled. It reminded him of photographs of the Western Front. Seidel pulled up in the middle of the track and turned off the engine. The silence was absolute, unbroken by the usual birdsong or the hollow croak of wood pigeons.

They climbed out of the car and picked their way towards the launch site. Each footstep raised a cloud of ash and cinders. There was a toxic stink of soot and incinerated fuel. Fragments of the V2 were all around – blackened fuselage casing, pieces of pipe from the motor and fuel tanks, a turbo pump, exhaust nozzles. Part of an arrowed tail fin was embedded in a tree trunk. The launch table was melted and buckled. The heavy armoured control car, blown over by the exploding warhead and burned out in the subsequent inferno, appeared like a giant black stag beetle lying on its back.

‘My God,’ said Seidel. ‘What happened? Did you see it?’

‘Only from a distance,’ said Graf. ‘I was lucky.’ He let his eye take in the bigger objects and avoided focusing on anything smaller. His imagination recoiled at the thought of what he might see if he peered too closely, or what they might be treading on. ‘The rocket got just above tree height. Then it seemed to lose thrust. It sank back down and the fuel tanks exploded. Not long after that, the warhead detonated – over there. I’ll show you.’

When they reached the lip of the crater, he put one hand in his pocket and the other to his mouth and nose and surveyed the tangle of earth and roots and metal fragments. In places, smoke was rising from fires still burning underground.

Seidel shook his head. ‘It’s a hell of a destructive thing you fellows made, Graf.’

‘I know. I only wish we’d had the time to make it more reliable.’

He could not count how often he had seen the rocket fail at Peenemünde, but at least that had mostly been from a safe distance of a kilometre, and the missile had not been armed with a warhead. The engine would ignite and it would start to topple even as it rose; the gyroscopes would over-correct and it would weave its way into the air like a stitching needle. Sometimes it would level off and disappear over the Baltic to end up God knew where. Other times it would airburst in the distance like a red chrysanthemum. Or it would loop the loop and plunge into the sea or the forest. Or it would go up a few dozen metres and remain perfectly erect even as it edged shyly to one side. Or the casing would split and burning fuel sprout in flaming sheets from the rupture before it exploded. Or it would fall full-length like a swooning maiden. Or it would simply remain stationary on the launch table and blow itself up, taking the test stand with it. Oh yes, Graf was a connoisseur of failed launches.

Seidel said, ‘So? Any theories?’

Graf shrugged. ‘How many do you want? A bad weld. A frozen valve. An engine fault. A short-circuit in one of the control compartments. Perhaps there was a sudden gust of wind and one of the tail fins caught a tree branch. It looked as though there was a radio control failure and they couldn’t cut the engine in time.’

In any saner time or country, the project would have been abandoned, or at least scaled down while the technical problems were solved. But von Braun had over-promised in order to gain funding, his promises had been believed, and Peenemünde had grown vast on his irrepressibly plausible optimism. By the second year of the war, in addition to the test stands and the offices and the workshops and the wind tunnels, there was an immense factory for mass production – it was supposed to be the first of three – that was larger than two football pitches laid side by side. Construction alone required a population of thousands. There was a town for the engineers and their families, with a school and a cinema. There was even a commuter railway to bring in the workforce, equipped with the same modern S-Bahn trains as Berlin – and all for a missile that had yet to fly.

Seidel said, ‘Why don’t you walk round in that direction, and I’ll go this way? Then we can say we’ve inspected the whole scene and get the hell out of this place.’

He set off into the woods. Graf stared into the smouldering pit for a few moments longer – it was like peering into the crater of a volcano, he thought: a man-made Vesuvius – then turned and stepped into the blackened trees. He found one component intact. It was about the length of his arm and shaped like the blade of an oar – metal but surprisingly light: one of the graphite rudders that controlled the jet plume. That had been a breakthrough. He turned it around in his hands and examined it fondly. Before they hit on the idea of graphite, they had used jet vanes made of tungsten-molybdenum alloys, and they had been hopeless. He remembered the day they had finally made the rocket fly perfectly. A Saturday in October 1942. Four o’clock in the afternoon. A clear blue Baltic sky. The previous two attempts at a maiden flight – one in June and the other in August – had both been humiliating failures in front of a crowd of VIPs, and it was no exaggeration to say that if this try failed, the whole programme might well have been abandoned.

He had stood with von Braun and a group of engineers and army officers on the roof of the rocket assembly building, two kilometres from the launch site, staring through his binoculars at the missile shimmering in the unseasonal heat against the background of the sea. A television link showed live pictures on a nearby monitor. The countdown was relayed over speakers all across Peenemünde. Thousands were outside watching. There was a strange time lag between what they could see in hazy colour through their field glasses and in shaky black-and-white on the television screen – the searing flash of the motor igniting – and then the subsequent dull boom as the sound reached them. An agonising wait, and up she went.

A Doppler electronic signal carried over the loudspeakers climbed in pitch as the rocket rose. A calm, flat voice recited each second of the flight. At four seconds, she tilted. At twenty-five seconds, she broke the sound barrier and Graf held his breath. But she did not disintegrate against the compressed mass of air as many of the aerodynamicists had predicted. At forty seconds, a trail of white appeared in the blueness, and for a moment he was sure she must have exploded. But it was only her contrail, already shearing in the crosswinds. The rocket was still flying, a tiny bright dot at the tip of a white spear of vapour. The Doppler signal faded as she soared towards space.

As the reality of what had just happened sank in, there arose from the streets below the sound of clapping and cheering. Von Braun turned to him and shook his hand and clutched his elbow. His eyes were as blue as that searing Baltic sky, unnaturally wide and bright with moisture. A visionary’s eyes. A fanatic’s eyes. ‘We did it!’

That night, Dornberger held a celebratory dinner for the leading engineers. They all got very drunk. Dornberger made a pompous speech, which afterwards he had printed and gave to them as a memento, along with the menu – just as well, seeing as none of them could remember what he’d said. Graf still had his copy somewhere. He knew it off by heart.

‘The following points may be deemed of decisive significance in the history of technology. We have invaded space with our rocket and for the first time – mark this well – have used space as a bridge between two points on earth. We have proved rocket propulsion practicable for space travel. To land, sea and air may now be added infinite space as a medium of future intercontinental traffic. This third day of October 1942 is the first of a new era of transportation: that of space travel.’

It showed how far Dornberger – the solid, ambitious artilleryman who had started out wanting to build a better version of the Paris gun – had fallen under von Braun’s spell. Even Hitler had succumbed. Von Braun and Dornberger had flown to the Führer’s headquarters in East Prussia carrying a 35 mm film of the test flight, a file of blueprints and a crate of wooden models – of the rocket itself, the launch vehicles and a bunker the army proposed to build on the Channel coast, which at the time was how they envisaged the missile would be deployed against the English. This was not long after the defeat at Stalingrad, when Hitler was casting around for something – anything – that was huge enough and revolutionary enough to turn the war back in Germany’s favour; another few thousand planes or tanks would not make a difference. The hour of the rocket had arrived.

‘Weren’t you nervous?’ Graf had asked him.

‘Not at all! We landed in the middle of a huge forest and were driven to his compound – incredible security: you’ve never seen the like. Zones within zones. In the middle of it was this movie theatre, very plush, with banks of seats. So we set out all our models on a table, our film was loaded in the projector, and then we waited for him to come. And we waited, and we waited. Hours went by. Then someone shouted, “The Führer!” and in he came with Keitel, Jodl, Speer and all their aides. I must say he looked pretty awful, hunched forward and pale as a sheet, and his left arm seemed to have developed a life of its own – when he sat down, he had to hold onto his wrist with his other hand to stop it shaking. He placed himself in the front row between Keitel and Speer, I stood beside the screen and I said, “Mein Führer, with your permission, we wish to report on the progress of Waffen Prüfen Eleven!” Then I clicked my fingers, the lights dimmed, and the film began to run. I talked him through every stage of it, and I could see him sitting further and further forward on his seat, and then when the rocket lifted off, his eyes grew wide and his mouth dropped open.

‘After it was over and the lights came up, he sat there for a long time, staring at the empty screen, lost in thought. Nobody dared to utter a word. Then he stood and he said the following – these were his exact words: “Gentlemen, I thank you. If we had had these rockets in 1939, we should never have had this war. No one would have dared oppose us. From now on, Europe and the world will be too small to contain a war. With such weapons, humanity will be unable to endure it.” Then he made me a professor on the spot.’