World War II Day by Day

Auburn, Massachusetts · March 16, 1926

On this date in 1926 in Auburn, Massachusetts, Dr. Robert God­dard (1882–1945) con­ducted his first suc­cess­ful rocket flight. His liquid-pro­pel­lant rocket rose 41 ft, tra­veled 184 ft, and burned no more than 3 sec­onds, but it proved the con­cept of rocket flight worked. God­dard, who received limited sup­port for his re­search and devel­op­ment work (and quite a bit of ridi­cule from scep­tics), was among a hand­ful of rocket en­thu­si­asts in the Soviet Union (Russia), France, the U.S., and Germany.

Ger­man ama­teur rock­et­ry enthu­si­asts, among them a young Wernher von Braun, began testing rockets at what was once Berlin’s Tegel Air­port. Because rockets were not ad­dressed in the 1919 Treaty of Ver­sail­les, which demil­i­ta­rized post-World War I Ger­many, they attracted in the early thirt­ies, per­haps quite nat­u­rally, the atten­tion of the Ger­man Army, which allowed doct­oral can­di­date von Braun to use its proving grounds to con­duct ex­per­i­ments on rocket pro­pul­sion.

As Adolf Hitler’s Nazi Ger­many began to move to a war­like pos­ture in the late 1930s, von Braun became a pro­fes­sional rocket devel­oper. (He also became a Nazi Party mem­ber and an SS major.) It was under von Braun’s direc­tion that the most de­struc­tive wea­pon of the Euro­pean conflict, the V‑2 com­bat rocket, was developed at Pee­ne­muende, a secre­tive site on the Ger­man Bal­tic coast. The Ver­gel­tungs­waffe 2 (retali­a­tion wea­pon 2) was a single-stage, liquid-fuel bal­listic mis­sile pro­duced in two damp, cold, poorly ven­ti­lated under­ground facili­ties by as many as 60,000 pri­soners from Mittel­bau-Dora, the con­cen­tra­tion camp in East­ern Ger­many where an esti­mated 20,000 pri­soners died. (Mittelbau-Dora, also known as Nord­hausen-Dora, was a sub­camp of the Buchenwald concentration camp.)

From Septem­ber 1944 to early 1945, V‑2 launch teams fired more than 3,200 V‑2 rockets, each with a high-ex­plo­sive, one-ton warhead, at tar­gets in Eng­land, France, Bel­gium, Hol­land, and even in­side Ger­many itself—at Re­ma­gen, whose bridge over the Rhine River had recently been cap­tured in­tact by the U.S. 9th Armored Division. Many rockets were launched from mo­bile plat­forms in urban areas and con­cealed forests, using fleets of spe­cially built trans­porters (Meil­ler­wagen) and sophis­ti­cated sup­port vehi­cles. The V‑2 had no effect on the out­come of the war; its value as a wea­pon of terror and mass destruction lay in its novelty.

V-2 Short-Range Ballistic Missile

Left: A V‑2 rocket in the Peene­muende Museum. RAF air raids on Peene­muende’s V‑2 research and pro­duc­tion facili­ties caused the Ger­mans to move pro­duc­tion to the Mittel­werk loca­tion inside the Harz Moun­tains of Thue­ringen (Thuringia), East­ern Ger­many, where slave labor built 5,200 V‑2 rockets in cold, dank under­ground caverns and tun­nels with­out running water or pro­per sani­ta­tion. Wernher von Braun admit­ted occa­sionally visiting the Mittel­werk rocket factory (but not the noto­rious Mittel­bau-Dora con­cen­tra­tion camp that pro­vided the factory with its labor), and called conditions there “repulsive.”

Right: A V‑2 test rocket four seconds after liftoff at Peene­muende, June 21, 1943. The V‑2 (its tech­ni­cal name was Aggregat-4, or A4) is perhaps the only wea­pon sys­tem to have caused more deaths by its pro­duc­tion (12,000–20,000 forced laborers and con­cen­tra­tion camp pri­soners) than its de­ploy­ment (an estimated 9,000 civil­ians and military personnel).

Left: A V‑2 rocket on a Meillerwagen transport trailer near Cux­haven on the North Ger­man coast in 1945. Meiller­wagen were one of several vehicles in a V‑2 launch battery. It brought the V‑2 to its launch site, mounted the mis­sile on its firing stand, and served as the ser­vice gan­try for fueling and launch prep­a­ration. Meiller­wagen were assembled using Ital­ian and Soviet pri­son laborers some 16 miles south of the Rhine city of Bonn in former rail­way tun­nels below vineyards and forests along the Ahr River.

Right: A V‑2 propulsion unit on a dolly inside the under­ground assem­bly facil­ity at Nieder­sachs­werfen near Nord­hausen, Ger­many. About 250 V‑2 mis­siles were found in various stages of com­pletion on the Mittel­werk assem­bly line after the war, when this photo was taken.

Footage of Peenemuende Army Research Center and Dr. Wernher von Braun, the Site’s Technical Director