V-2

New York: Ballantine Books, 1954. Presumed First Edition, First printing thus. Mass market paperback. Fair. 237, [3] pages. Maps. Illustrations. Name in ink inside front cover. Edges of several pages repaired with tape. Some page discoloration. Introduction by Willy Ley. Major-General Dr. Walter Robert Dornberger (6 September 1895 - 26 June 1980) was a German Army artillery officer whose career spanned World War I and World War II. He was a leader of Nazi Germany's V-2 rocket program and other projects at the Peenemünde Army Research Centre. Dornberger was born in Gießen in 1895. In 1914 he enlisted in the German army during World War 1. In October 1918, as an artillery lieutenant, Dornberger was captured by United States Marines and spent two years in a French prisoner of war camp. In the late 1920s, Dornberger completed an engineering course with distinction at the Berlin Technical Institute, and in the Spring of 1930, Dornberger graduated with an MS degree in mechanical engineering from the Technische Hochschule Charlottenburg. In 1930, Dornberger was appointed to the Ballistics Council of the German Army Weapons Department as Assistant Examiner to secretly develop a military liquid-fuel rocket suitable for mass-production that would surpass the range of artillery. Dornberger took over his last military command on 1 October 1934, a powder-rocket training battery at Königsbrück. In May 1937, Dornberger and his ninety-man organization were transferred from Kummersdorf to Peenemünde. Dornberger was released and brought to the United States under the auspices of Operation Paperclip and worked for the United States Air Force for three years, developing guided missiles. The V-2, with the technical name Aggregat 4 (A-4), was the world's first long-range guided ballistic missile. The missile, powered by a liquid-propellant rocket engine, was developed during the Second World War in Nazi Germany as a "vengeance weapon" and assigned to attack Allied cities as retaliation for the Allied bombings of German cities. The V-2 rocket also became the first artificial object to travel into space by crossing the Kármán line (edge of space) with the vertical launch of MW 18014 on 20 June 1944. Research of military use of long-range rockets began when the graduate studies of Wernher von Braun were noticed by the Wehrmacht. A series of prototypes culminated in the A-4, which went to war as the V-2. Beginning in September 1944, more than 3,000 V-2s were launched by the Wehrmacht against Allied targets, first London and later Antwerp and Liège. According to a 2011 BBC documentary, the attacks from V-2s resulted in the deaths of an estimated 9,000 civilians and military personnel, and a further 12,000 forced laborers and Nazi concentration camps prisoners died as a result of their forced participation with the production of the weapons. The rockets traveled at supersonic speed, impacted without audible warning, and proved unstoppable, as no effective defense existed. Teams from the Allied forces—the United States, the United Kingdom, and the Soviet Union—raced to seize major German manufacturing facilities, procure the Germans' missile technology, and capture the V-2's launching sites. Von Braun and more than 100 important V-2 personnel surrendered to the Americans, and many of the original V-2 team ended up working at the Redstone Arsenal. The US also captured enough V-2 hardware to build approximately 80 of the missiles. The Soviets gained possession of the V-2 manufacturing facilities after the war, re-established V-2 production, and moved it to the Soviet Union. The German V-weapons (V-1 and V-2) cost the equivalent of about US$500 million. Given the relatively smaller size of the German economy, this represented an industrial effort equivalent to but slightly less than that of the U.S. Manhattan Project that produced the atomic bomb. 6,048 V-2s were built, at a cost of approximately 100,000 Reich Marks (£2,370,000 in 2011) each; 3,225 were launched. SS General Hans Kammler, who as an engineer had constructed several concentration camps including Auschwitz, had a reputation for brutality and had originated the idea of using concentration camp prisoners as slave laborers for the rocket program. More people died manufacturing the V-2 than were killed by its deployment.