Impact

It all began with a loose-knit group of scientists and engineers in Weimar Germany. Fixated on the idea of rocket propulsion, they formed "The Society for Space Travel" in 1927. Some people called them dreamers who gained their inspiration from Jules Verne and the movie "The Woman in the Moon." Their experiments with rockets often came to naught and sometimes blew up in their inventors' hands. Twelve years later, Adolf Hitler had plunged Germany into the most terrible war in history. By mid-1944, German armies were reeling on all fronts and vast Allied bomber fleets were devastating the Third Reich, while Germany had no strategic air force of its own. The Allies, after their conquest of Normandy, thought the war would be over by Christmas. But then the German rockets appeared. From the flaming continent of Europe, robot bombs with one-ton warheads suddenly came soaring against England. These sinister weapons took no evasive action and could not be deterred by bad weather or darkness -- they could not be stopped unless they were destroyed. This book provides rare, unpublished information on the terror that fell on Antwerp and the city of Liège in the winter of 1944-45. The rockets did not stop falling until their launch sites had been overrun by Allied troops. This work provides an operational context to the Third Reich's missles that has previously been neglected or ignored. - Jacket flap.