Trump
Mocks Macron: "They Were Starting To Learn German In Paris Before The US
Came Along"
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This week marks the 70th anniversary of the first V2 rocket attack on London. As our space correspondent Richard Hollingham discovers, the legacy of the missile lives on in today’s spacecraft.
On a sunny morning in autumn 1944, my father – then a teenager – was waiting for a train at Cromer railway station on the coast of eastern England. It was a beautiful clear day and, from the railway platform set high above the town, he could see across the calm North Sea to German-occupied Holland.
“On the horizon, I saw three streaks go up into the air and disappear into the stratosphere,” he recalls. “I’m quite certain these were V2 rockets being launched to crash somewhere – where I don’t know.”
Launched from mobile units, each V2 rocket was 14 metres (46ft) high and carried a ton (900 kg) of explosives. The first attack on London, on 8 September 1944, gouged a crater 10m (32ft) across, killed three people and injured 22.
However, unlike aircraft or the V2’s predecessor the V1 flying bomb, this was a new type of weapon, crashing and exploding without warning in target cities, such as London, Norwich, Paris, Lille and Antwerp. It took just five minutes from launch to landing. V stood for ‘vergeltungswaffen', or 'retaliatory weapon', and were a last-ditch attempt by the Germans to reverse the course of the war.
Having seen a rocket launch, Dad was fortunate enough to escape a V2’s return to Earth when he was waiting for another train at Queen’s Park underground station in north London.
“Suddenly there was a large bang in a road nearby and a great cloud of debris was thrown up in the air, and that was a V2 rocket,” he says. “It was a terror weapon, you didn’t hear it arriving, it was just there… bang!”
More than 1,300 V2s were fired at England and, as allied forces advanced, hundreds more were targeted at Belgium and France.
Grim history
Although there is no exact figure, estimates suggest that several thousand people were killed by the missile – 2,724 in Britain alone. However, a far grimmer statistic is that many more, at least 20,000, died constructing the V2s themselves.
“It’s something that’s often glossed over, but shouldn’t be,” says Doug Millard, space historian and curator of space technology at London’s Science Museum, where a V2 takes pride of place in the main exhibition hall. “The V2 programme was hugely expensive in terms of lives, with the Nazis using slave labour to manufacture these rockets.”
The prisoners – many pulled from other concentration camps for their technical skills such as welding – worked around the clock in an underground factory called Mittelwerk near the Buchenwald concentration camp in central Germany. They lived under appalling conditions, with no daylight, little sleep, food or proper sanitation. Many were executed for attempted sabotage. Eyewitness accounts describe prisoners being hanged from cranes above the rocket assembly lines.
Despite his complicity in the conditions at Mittelwerk, the engineer who designed the V2, Wernher von Braun, came to be feted as a hero of the space age. The Allies realised that the V2 was a machine, unlike anything they had developed themselves.
At the heart of the V2 was a powerful motor capable of taking the rocket more than 80km (50 miles) above the Earth in a trajectory of some 190 km (120 miles). Fuelled by liquid ethanol and oxygen, it was much more sophisticated that anything built before and effectively the world’s first space rocket.
“There had been smaller rockets built in the 1930s but this was far bigger with a greater range,” Millard says. “The V2 was a quantum leap of technological change.”
Pioneering principles
One of the most important new technologies developed for the V2 was an automatic guidance system, which operated independently of controllers on the ground. With the destination “programmed” into the on-board analogue computer, once a rocket was in flight, its gyroscopes could continuously track the craft’s position in three dimensions. Any deviations in course and rudders fitted to the fins on the side of the rocket would automatically adjust the heading and trajectory to keep it on target.
Not surprisingly, when the war ended, the Americans, Soviets and British scrambled to get their hands on V2 technology. With no desire to work for Stalin, Von Braun made a shrewd decision to surrender to the Americans, while the Russians got their hands on the V2 factory and test range.
“Both the Americans and Soviets took the V2s to bits to decipher their workings,” says Millard. “The Soviets completely recreated a V2 and the Americans took them over to America to launch and carry out some of the first upper atmosphere experiments.”
However, the US knew that it wasn’t the hardware that was as important as the men behind it. And they had Von Braun. Although the military’s priority was to develop intercontinental ballistic missiles, the German engineer now had the opportunity to pursue his dreams of spaceflight.
“After a brief hiatus, he started working for the American army on their Redstone missile and that was a direct derivative of the V2,” says Millard. “America’s first astronaut, Alan Shepard, was launched [in 1961] on a version of the Redstone missile.”
Enduring effects
So it is easy to draw a direct line between the V2 rocket – built by slave labourers and launched from Nazi-occupied Europe – and the first American in space.
“We got to the Moon using V2 technology but this was technology that was developed with massive resources, including some particularly grim ones,” says Millard.
So would man have landed on the Moon without Hitler’s weapon? Probably, but perhaps not as soon. As with so many technological innovations, war hastened the development of the modern rocket and accelerated the space age.
Even today, the fundamental technology of launchers remains the same as it did 70 years ago. The engine looks similar, rockets still use gyroscopic guidance and most are powered by liquid fuel. All pioneered in the V2.
Unwittingly, on a September day in 1944 my father had witnessed the dawn of the Space Age. “Rockets really haven’t changed a great deal,” says Millard. “We’re still living in the age of the V2.”
by Tyler
Durden
Tue, 11/13/2018 - 09:55
739
SHARES
Update (8:50 am ET): The tweets appear to have
stopped...for now, at least. Meanwhile, Macron's office has refused to
comment on Trump's claims.
·
OFFICE OF FRENCH PRESIDENT MACRON SAYS IT
REFUSES TO MAKE ANY COMMENT REGARDING TRUMP'S TWEETS CRITICISING FRANCE AND
MACRON
* * *
Update III (8:35 am ET): Without directly
referencing the rumors, Trump has branded reports that he refused to appear
at a cemetery for American soldiers because he didn't want to get his hair
wet as "fake news." In the tweet, Trump insisted that he wanted the
Secret Service to drive him to the speech instead of taking a helicopter, but
they refused because of security concerns. He added that he gave a speech at
the cemetery the next day in the pouring rain - something that was
"little reported".
By the way, when the helicopter couldn’t fly to the
first cemetery in France because of almost zero visibility, I suggested driving.
Secret Service said NO, too far from airport & big Paris shutdown. Speech
next day at American Cemetary in pouring rain! Little reported-Fake News!
— Donald J. Trump
(@realDonaldTrump) November 13, 2018
* * *
Update II (8:20 am ET): Trump's rampage
against Macron continues. The president slammed his French counterpart for
his low approval rating, as well as France's high unemployment. Furthermore,
in response to Macron's "nationalist" snub, Trump pointed out that
"there is no more nationalist country" than France...
The problem is that Emmanuel suffers from
a very low Approval Rating in France, 26%, and an unemployment rate of almost
10%. He was just trying to get onto another subject. By the way, there is no
country more Nationalist than France, very proud people-and rightfully
so!........
...before adding a spin on his
classic slogan.
......MAKE FRANCE GREAT AGAIN!
* * *
Update (8:10 am ET): Trump's
rage against Macron continues, but this time, the topic is slightly more
serious. What could be more serious than questioning the foundation of
Post-WWII military alliances, you might ask? The answer is simple - trade!
Trump conceded that while France
makes "very good wine" (an interesting claim from Trump, who
doesn't drink), the country "makes it hard for the US to sell its wine
into France, and charges very big tariffs". Meanwhile "The US makes
it easy for French wines and charges small tariffs."
"Not Fair, must
change!"
On Trade, France makes excellent wine,
but so does the U.S. The problem is that France makes it very hard for the
U.S. to sell its wines into France, and charges big Tariffs, whereas the U.S.
makes it easy for French wines, and charges very small Tariffs. Not fair,
must change!
We now await Trump's order of an
investigation into the national security implications of imported French
wine.
* * *
President Trump isn't ready to
forgive the "French diss" served up over the weekend by President
Emmanuel Macron.
Trending Articles
Trouble Brewing In Hong Kong
Hong Kong has for decades been one of the most stable places
in the world.
During a ceremony honoring the
100th anniversary of World War I at the Arc de Triomphe on Sunday, French
President Emmanuel Macron insulted Trump to his face by launching into a
screed about the dangers of toxic "nationalism" and subtly accusing
the US of abandoning its "moral values".
This did not sit well with the US president, who was already
facing criticism over his decision to show up late to a ceremony honoring the
war dead (the administration blamed it on security concerns though it's
widely suspected that Trump didn't want to get his hair wet), and Trump has
let his displeasure be known in a series of tweets ridiculing Macron's suggestion that Europe build
its own army, saying that France and other European members of NATO would be
better served by paying their fair share for NATO while daring them to leave and pay for their own
protection.
And in his most abrasive tweet yet mocking the increasingly
unpopular Macron's imperial ambitions (no, really), Trump pointed out that, historically
speaking, Europe has been its own worst enemy, and that while Macron wants to
defend the Continent from the US, China and Russia, "it was Germany in
WWI & WWII," adding that "they
were starting to learn German in Paris before the US came along. Pay for NATO
or not!"
Emmanuel Macron suggests building its own
army to protect Europe against the U.S., China and Russia. But it was Germany
in World Wars One & Two - How did that work out for France? They were
starting to learn German in Paris before the U.S. came along. Pay for NATO or
not!
Of course, Macron isn't the only French official calling for
the creation of a "European army". The country's finance minister
advocated for the creation of a Continental army during an interview with Germany's Handelsblatt -
a comment that was derided by the paper's editors, who pointed out that
Germans "weren't very supportive" of the idea. One wonders why...
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The Hunt for Nazi Scientists
The Arms Race
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6SHARES
alt="World War II heavy artillery" class=alignright v:shapes="_x0000_i1025">In
the closing months of World War II, defeat was looming for the Germans. The
invasion of Normandy on June 6, 1944 — D-Day — opened a second Allied front,
and the Allies began overtaking a host of German positions; Paris was
liberated on August 25; Romania and Bulgaria surrendered in quick succession.
But the Nazis did not intend to go down without a fight — and without
inflicting as much damage as possible on the Allies. To do so, they employed
or planned to employ an increasingly deadly array of military weapons — from
ballistic missiles to rocket planes to, perhaps, the atomic bomb.
The British, American,
and Russian governments were not content to sit idly by, waiting to be slammed
by the advanced technology. Covert teams of commandos and agents were sent
ahead of the front lines and deep into Germany, hunting for both the weapons
and the scientists and engineers who’d created them. For British and American
operatives, failure was not an option. If they didn’t capture the Nazi
technology and scientists, agents of the burgeoning Soviet Union might — and
that could spell disaster in a post-war world already feeling the chill of
the impending cold war.
The V-2
Rocket
Germany’s
Vergeltungswaffen 2 (or “weapon of reprisal”) rocket, a successor to the earlier
V-1 “buzz bomb,” was first launched successfully toward Western Europe on
September 8, 1944. The behemoth, 46-foot-tall weapon — devised by scientist
Wernher von Braun (see sidebar), head of the Nazi rocket program — streaked
across the skies faster than the speed of sound and carried over a ton of
explosives. More frightening was the weapon’s accuracy. A series of internal
and external rudders and a guidance system near the nose controlled the
flight of the rocket-fuel powered missile, so that it could hit a particular
city from a distance of over two hundred miles. The V-2 was the world’s first
ballistic missile. More than 3,000 V-2s, produced in an underground factory
called the Mittelwerk, were rained onto Europe in the months before Germany’s
surrender.
The Messerschmitt 163 Komet
This
bizarre and revolutionary plane, brainchild of German aircraft designer
Helmut Walter, was powered with a unique combination of fuels: T-Stoff (a
mixture of 80 percent hydrogen peroxide and 20 percent water) and C-Stoff (a
mixture of hydrazine hydrate, methyl alcohol, and water) that were ignited
with oxygen from the plane’s exhaust. The powerful cocktail accelerated the
fighter to speeds of 550 miles per hour and flung it to a maximum altitude of
nearly 40,000 feet in just three and a half minutes. The tailless plane, also
known as the “Flying Bomb,” had numerous drawbacks. It took off from a
trolley and touched down — without landing gear — on a skid running down the
center of the bottom of the plane. It could sustain only 8 minutes of powered
flight.
The
Atomic Bomb
In 1938, German
physicists in Berlin were the first to discover fission, the splitting of the
atom — and the basic process behind nuclear weapons. Although World War II
had not yet started, the feat caused great alarm in the United States. If the
Germans could split the atom, would an atomic bomb be next?
This concern ultimately
led to the formation of the Manhattan Project, the United States government’s
secret endeavor to build the bomb. As expected, a team of German scientists, led
by physicist Werner Heisenberg, had already left the starting gates of the
race toward the bomb — and they quickly began to collect and stockpile the
uranium that would fuel it.
The American government,
with no way of knowing how close the Germans were to success (it turns out,
not very), launched a dramatic post-D-Day mission to search Germany for the
bomb project, Heisenberg and his team, and the uranium. The mission, manned
by a crack team of agents and led by Lieutenant Colonel Boris T. Pash, was code-named
Alsos, the Greek word for “grove,” in honor of General Leslie R. Groves, the
head of the Manhattan Project.
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Willkommen
By Wendy
Lower
·
Feb. 28, 2014
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o
o
o
o
Among the trophies of the Second World War captured by
Allied intelligence agents were Nazi scientists and their research on
biological and chemical weapons. In a classified memorandum titled
“Exploitation of German Scientists in Science and Technology in the United
States,” the Joint Chiefs of Staff described these men as “chosen, rare minds
whose continuing intellectual productivity we wish to use.” Such intellectual
spoils were not to fall into Soviet hands. In 1945, Operation Overcast
(renamed Operation Paperclip for the paper clips attached to the dossiers of
the most “troublesome cases”) began. More than 1,600 Germans were secretly
recruited to develop armaments “at a feverish and paranoid pace that came to
define the Cold War.”
Although some of these men had been Nazi Party members, SS
officers and war criminals, they were valued as vital to American national
security. Thus it was O.K., American government officials reasoned, to ignore
these scientists’ roles in developing biological and chemical weapons, in
designing the V-2 rockets that shattered London and Antwerp and in the
countless deaths of concentration camp inmates who fell victim to medical
experiments at Dachau and Ravensbrück.
The journalist Annie
Jacobsen’s “Operation Paperclip” is not the first unveiling of the program.
The New York Times, Newsweek and other media outlets exposed Paperclip as
early as December 1946. Albert Einstein, Eleanor Roosevelt and Rabbi Steven
Wise publicly opposed the program, and according to a Gallup poll, most
Americans at the time considered it a “bad” idea. But Jacobsen’s book is the
first on the topic to appear since President Clinton signed the Nazi War
Crimes Disclosure Act in 1998, which pushed through the declassification of
American intelligence records, including the F.B.I., Army intelligence and
C.I.A. files of German agents, scientists and war criminals. Jacobsen’s
access to these documents, along with her research in various special
collections and her interviews with former intelligence personnel and
relatives of the scientists, make her study the most in-depth account yet of
the lives of Paperclip recruits and their American counterparts.
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Jacobsen tracks 21 of these Nazi scientists and
technicians. Eight of her subjects had worked directly with Hitler, Himmler
or Göring; 15 were active Nazi Party members; 10 served in paramilitary
squads like the SA and SS; and six were tried at Nuremberg. A few familiar
figures pop up, including several pioneers in space exploration — Wernher von
Braun, Hubertus Strughold, Walter Dornberger and Arthur Rudolph.
Image
Nazi scientists, from top:
Jürgen von Klenck, Fritz Hoffmann, Otto Ambros, Theodor Benzinger.CreditIllustration
by The New York Times; Photographs from National Archives and Records
Administration
The “classified body of secrets and lies” behind Operation
Paperclip is complex and crowded, and in some places the narrative becomes
muddled, as infamous Nazis and American intelligence operatives appear
alongside present-day historians and archivists who are unnecessarily cited
to provide basic facts. To her credit, Jacobsen deftly untangles the myriad
American and German government agencies and personnel involved, though not
without repetitious reminders of who is who.
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More gripping and skillfully rendered are the stories of
American and British officials who scoured defeated Germany for Nazi
scientists and their research. One well-known find was the Osenberg list of
thousands of German scientists and facilities, which was retrieved from a
toilet at Bonn University. Another was a huge cache of tabun (a sarin-like
chemical). While searching the I. G. Farben laboratories on the German-Polish
border, British soldiers uncovered 175 forested bunkers storing aerial bombs
with a powerful organophosphorus nerve agent. They called in American Army
chemists, who tested the chemical and found that just a drop on the skin
would kill a rabbit in minutes. In 1945, 530 tons of tabun were shipped to
various locations in the United States including Edgewood Arsenal in
Maryland.
There, Jacobsen writes, American soldiers became unknowing
guinea pigs for Dr. L. Wilson Greene, an American. In a gassing chamber,
soldiers were exposed to low levels of tabun. Greene was pleased with the
effects: Though the soldiers were “partially disabled” for one to three
weeks, they eventually recovered. Thus nerve agents and hallucinogenic drugs
could serve as more “gentle” weapons, immobilizing the enemy but, Greene
hoped, avoiding the “wholesale killing of people or the mass destruction of
property.” Greene assigned his colleague, the German chemist Fritz Hoffmann,
to research other toxic agents for military use. Hoffmann (who died in 1967)
studied everything from street drugs to Mongolian hallucinogenic mushrooms,
and may have contributed his research to the development of Agent Orange.
Hoffmann’s daughter remembered that her father was interested in producing a
substance that could defoliate trees in Vietnam “so you could see the
enemies.” In an interview with Jacobsen, she remarked: “Agent Orange turned
out not only to defoliate trees but to cause great harm in children. Dad was
dead by then, and I remember thinking, Thank God. It would have killed him to
learn that. He was a gentle man. He wouldn’t hurt a fly.”
American intelligence
agents, Jacobsen argues, were blinded by brinkmanship. Some became consumed
by the search for weapons and were double-crossed by German scientists. One
such man was Gen. Charles E. Loucks, chief of intelligence for chemical
warfare stationed in Heidelberg. So dedicated was Loucks that he found the
task of securing the German arsenal of chemical weapons for his country to be
“more interesting than going down to Paris on weekends.” He became charmed by
the notorious SS Brig. Gen. Walter Schieber, who eventually worked as a
chemist for the American Army’s Chemical Corps and then for the C.I.A.
Schieber turned out to have been a Soviet mole and international weapons
dealer, as Jacobsen discovered in the declassified files.
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There are few satisfying explanations in Jacobsen’s
account of this “tawdry group of amoral war opportunists, many of whom were
linked to war crimes.” In the end, it is not clear who was exploiting whom —
the Nazi scientists or their American recruiters. What is clear is that contemporary
public opinion had it right: Operation Paperclip was a bad idea. By shining
light on the human, ethical and monetary costs of the program, Jacobsen’s
book reveals just how bad. Nazi scientists were generously remunerated for
developing biological and chemical weapons whose cleanup and disposal took
decades and cost approximately $30 billion. American experimentation on
humans continued during the Cold War in violation of the Nuremberg Code. A
lethal chemical might have been developed for warfare, with terrible
consequences.
Jacobsen ends her study
by asking Gerhard Maschkowski, a Jewish survivor of the I. G. Farben camp at
Auschwitz, “What matters, what lasts?” In response, Maschkowski reveals his
blue-ink tattoo. Yet certain truths are obscured in Jacobsen’s disturbing
account. She writes that the Germans didn’t use any chemical or biological
weapons in World War II. Although they may not have deployed such weapons on
the battlefield, the Germans did use carbon monoxide and hydrogen cyanide
(Zyklon B, a pesticide) in mobile gas vans and gas chambers. In 1942-43, the
Allies threatened retaliation if the Germans used chemical weapons.
Apparently this warning applied only to Allied soldiers in combat and
civilians in Allied cities, not to the Jews, Soviet P.O.W.s and others who
were murdered in Auschwitz, Birkenau and other Nazi extermination sites.
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OPERATION PAPERCLIP
The Secret Intelligence
Program That Brought Nazi Scientists to America
By Annie Jacobsen
Illustrated. 575 pp. Little, Brown & Company. $30.
Wendy Lower is the author of “Hitler’s
Furies: German Women in the Nazi Killing Fields,” a finalist for the 2013
National Book Award.
A version of this article appears in
print on March 2, 2014, on Page 16 of the Sunday Book
Review with the headline: Willkommen. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe
|
Why the U.S. Government
Brought Nazi Scientists to America After World War II
As the war came to a close, the U.S.
government was itching to get ahold of the German wartime technology
By Danny Lewis
SMITHSONIAN.COM
The atomic bombs dropped on
Hiroshima and Nagasaki may have put an end to World War II, but they weren’t
the only destructive weaponry developed during the war. From nerve and
disease agents to the feared and coveted V-1 and V-2 rockets, Nazi scientists
worked on an impressive arsenal. As the war came to a close in
1945, both American and Russian officials began scheming to get
that technology for themselves. So it came to pass that 71 years ago today,
88 Nazi scientists arrived in the United States and were promptly put to work
for Uncle Sam.
RELATED CONTENT
In the days and weeks after
Germany’s surrender, American troops combed the European countryside in
search of hidden caches of weaponry to collect. They came across facets of the
Nazi war machine that the top brass were shocked to see, writer Annie Jacobsen told NPR’s All
Things Considered in 2014. Jacobson wrote about
both the mission and the scientists in her book, Operation Paperclip: The Secret Intelligence
Program That Brought Nazi Scientists To America.
“One example was they had
no idea that Hitler had created this whole arsenal of nerve agents,” Jacobsen
says. “They had no idea that Hitler was working on a bubonic plague weapon.
That is really where Paperclip began, which was suddenly the Pentagon
realizing, ‘Wait a minute, we need these weapons for ourselves.’"
But just studying the
weapons wasn't enough, and the U.S. military wasn’t the only country eyeing
Nazi scientists—their one-time allies in the Soviet Union were doing the same
thing. If the Soviets were going to press their former enemies into
service, American military officials didn't want to be left behind. So
the U.S. government hatched a plan to bring 88 Nazi scientists captured
during the fall of the Nazi Germany back to America and get them back on the
job. Only this time, according to History.com, they were working for the U.S. under a
project known as “Operation Paperclip.”
While the military did what they could to whitewash the pasts of their
“prisoners of peace,” as some of the scientists called themselves, many had
serious skeletons in their closets. For example, Wernher von Braun was not
just one of the brains behind the V-2 rocket program, but had intimate
knowledge of what was going on in the concentration camps. Von Braun himself
hand-picked people from horrific places, including Buchenwald concentration camp,
to work to the bone building his rockets, Jacobsen tells NPR.
Operation Paperclip was top
secret at the time. After all, the devices these men helped design killed
many people throughout Europe, not to mention the deaths their government was
responsible for on the battlefield and in the concentration camps. Even
agents with the Justice Department's Office of Special Investigations,
which the U.S. government tasked with hunting down top Nazi officers who
went on the lam after the war, were unaware for decades of the extent to
which government officials were collaborating with their quarry, Toby Harnden reported for The
Telegraph in 2010.
While many of the men who
were brought to the U.S. under the program were undoubtedly instrumental in
scientific advancements like the Apollo program, they were also supportive
and responsible for some of the horrors experienced by victims of the
Holocaust. Operation Paperclip has certainly left a questionable
legacy.
Read more: https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/why-us-government-brought-nazi-scientists-america-after-world-war-ii-180961110/#gfckWM6pVP1cBXLT.99 Give the gift of Smithsonian magazine for only $12! http://bit.ly/1cGUiGv Follow us: @SmithsonianMag on Twitter |
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