Hitler’s devastating secret weapon: V2, by Robert Harris, reviewed

After Stalingrad, Hitler desperately needed an encouraging novelty. Wernher von Braun, Germany’s leading rocketeer in the second world war, expertly and persuasively briefed him on the latest secret weapon, a powerful ballistic missile, with a film to demonstrate its capabilities. Hitler was enchanted. He said: ‘Gentlemen, I thank you. If we had had these rockets in 1939, we should never have had this war. No one would have dared oppose us.’ Hitler made the aristocratic von Braun an honorary professor — and ordered the manufacture of 10,000 of the new rockets.

Germany had already been bombarding London with the V1, ‘Vengeance Weapon One’, the relatively slow-flying bomb that Londoners called the ‘doodlebug’, as if the nickname made it less fearsome, although, on a small scale, it was devastating. In contrast, the V2 flew at three times the speed of sound and reached an altitude of 58 miles before falling to earth with its one-ton warhead. It was always aimed at Charing Cross station, but nobody could predict its exact course; the launchers considered any hit within a five-mile radius of the centre of London to be on target. In London the V2 was inaudible and invisible before its cataclysmic explosion. After blast-off, there was no defence.

Robert Harris masterfully presents well researched history, with some relevant high-tech gobbledegook, imaginatively embellished with the colourful quirks of human behaviour. V2 depicts British and German antagonists with remarkable objectivity, relieved by hints of conflicting sympathies. Readers in 40 languages will be both educated and entertained.

The story opens in a flat near Gray’s Inn, where young Kay Caton-Walsh, a section officer in the Women’s Auxiliary Air Force, while sharing a bed with a married air commodore (ah, Waafs!) is nearly killed by a rocket.