Hitler’s Rocket Heist: A thoroughly engaging story of the frantic race to smuggle a V-2 rocket – The Irish Times
On July 12, 1944, a column of Nazi soldiers muddied through the countryside Poland They stopped two trucks driven by men wearing German uniforms and asked for a ride. They sat on cylinders in the back, smoking and drying and cursing the weather. After about half an hour, they jumped up, and one of them said jokingly to their new friends: “You are holding the air!”
As Guy Walters notes in his poignant and suspenseful book, it was “one of those moments that history would describe as improbable if documented.” [to prove it] “He wasn’t there.” The drivers were disguised members of the Polish resistance movement, transporting cargo that could have meant instant death if its passengers had taken a closer look. Those cylinders contained the stolen components of the V-2 rocket, the world’s first long-range ballistic missile and likely the key to Nazi victory.
“My magic bullet [wonder weapon] “It will have a decisive impact on the war.” Adolf Hitler He bragged to his generals. “The enemy will have no defense against him.” The V-2 rocket is about 50 feet long and can be blasted to the edge of space before silently plummeting to Earth at supersonic speeds and killing civilians without warning.
Fearing that Hitler might be right, British scientists desperately wanted to examine a live specimen for possible vulnerabilities. When intelligence reports came in that a test V-2 had almost completely crashed in a remote Polish swamp, they saw their chance. A frantic race ensued, with pilots, partisans and politicians playing crucial roles in what sometimes reads as an old-school war comedy.
Walters does a very effective job of reconstructing this surprisingly little-known episode from each side’s perspective, supported by his emotional visits to the places where the events occurred. Wisely, he focused less on technological details and more on complex figures such as Nazi engineer Wernher von Braun, who later pioneered the US moon landing.
“Science… is like a knife,” he protested when asked about his ill-fated past. “If you give it to a surgeon or an assassin, they will each use it differently.”
Walters, also the author of several thrilling World War II novels, sometimes goes so far as to invent dialogue or imagine people’s thought processes. This reservation aside, Stealing Hitler’s Missile is a thoroughly engaging story of everyday heroism—and one that practically begs to be filmed.
Andrew Lynch is an independent reviewer
