He instructed the telephone: That makes absolutely no difference. Over there they’ve got nothing but low-quality Slavic formations.
Then it was time to confirm with Göring that our rocket-planes were ready.
As a matter of fact, we weren’t even supposed to have tanks. Even armored scout cars had been forbidden us by the Anglo-American plutocrats. Well, what about rockets? Our enemies had overlooked those. I myself was already a fervent rocket man and had been ever since the Rhön Gliding Contests of 1933. How else were we going to get the Polish Corridor back?
If we could only go to the moon! sighed Herr Doktor von Braun.—I met him once—a certified genuis. He died in America, long after the war. Imagine! He’d sold himself to the victors, just so somebody could get to the moon.
But in the sleepwalker’s time, our moon-wooers were flying inside of bombs powered by intermittent propulsive duct engines.
You probably don’t even remember your first rocket, for the same reason that I forget my first telephone. The first rocket I ever saw was a long grey-green monster with a helmeted, goggled man in the cockpit, black crosses on each wing, screaming engines and fat little bombs, not to mention a pair of machine-guns on the upper deck. You wouldn’t call it a rocket at all; you live in the future, when the Americans stand on the verge of conquering Saturn. That first rocket was actually nothing but a fighter with a rocket engine, its bomblets only for show. Doktor von Braun hadn’t started working on our V-weapons; the Russians hadn’t yet stolen a march on us with Sputnik. Still, why not call it a rocket? By the way, it happened to be equipped with a quintuplicator to record five pieces of aerial data; that I can swear to, because I invented the quintuplicator myself! Oh, yes, I was there; I was there at the very beginning; even before the Heinkel-Hirth turbojet experiments. I’d always wanted to visit the moon myself, you see.
Of course I was also practical. As Heidegger writes: The upward glance passes aloft toward the sky, and yet it remains below on the earth. You’re too young to understand the spiritual nature of flight because rockets and planes are everywhere now; flying’s debased. When I was a boy, we’d all run out into the streets to watch our fire-red biplanes pass over us! Just take it from me: You’ll never understand.
I don’t mind telling you that we cheered when that rocket-plane took off on its maiden voyage, rising up a ladder of speeding flames! Where did it go? That’s top secret, but we all saw it, everyone who mattered saw it as it sped over villages decked with flags and flowers; I’m reliably informed that it made a soft landing in the sand dunes of East Prussia. You’re probably sneering, but that was an achievement in those days, especially given the political limitations imposed by our adversaries; East Prussia might as well have been the moon, and yet we got there! I’ll never stop believing that this was a triumph for the human race.
Before 1934 was half over, we had BMW jet propulsion power units in production. (By the sleepwalker’s orders we couldn’t say anything about those, of course; you’re the first person I’ve ever told.) I was there, and in uniform! By 1937 the Junkers company was also experimenting with jet propulsion; and I’ll never forget the maiden voyage of a certain immense steel bullet with shark-fins and German designs—swastika on the rudder, black cross on wings and fuselage—my heart glowed even more than the first time I heard the sirens of a Stukageschwader 77! When a rocket or anything at all rocketlike soars into the sky, there’s a beautiful inevitability to the experience. Gravity has been defeated, overruled, just like that! And how easy it’s turned out to be! With that rocket go all of us, rising toward our dreams, steel in motion, doing what we’ve been told all our lives we can’t do! And there it went, faster and faster, growing upward, steel fruit of a tree of flame, the flame clinging to earth for a long time, then rising behind the rocket, uprooting itself to go somewhere new, the steel bullet diminishing into a metal speck, then into nothingness; all we could see now was the flame; and then the flame entered a cloud and was gone. Even though the security situation didn’t permit us to talk about it, Germany saw it! We saw it in Swabia and we glimpsed it from the Ostmark; we tilted up our heads as we stood in crowds on Hermann Göringstrasse and we saw our dreams arise. Meanwhile, Professor Focke invented the world’s first helicopter.
In those days I dreamed of nothing but flight. Whenever I was with a woman, her arms around me reminded me of the inverted gull wings of the Ju-87. By the time that the BMW-003 project had begun in 1939, I’d seen it all. Have you seen it all? You most definitely haven’t unless you’ve seen the test flight or better still the combat flight of a Me-163B rocket-plane, which deserves its name because it’s powered by a genuine Walter rocket. (Walter was a friend of mine.) As with so many other things in life, you have at best five or six minutes in the air in this machine, due to the ferocious rate of fuel consumption; moreover, you need to jettison the undercarriage, which never makes for happy landings; but whether you come back or not, you can dictate your sensations and emotions to the world by laryngophone!
We had T-Stoff and C-Stoff for fuel in those days; I knew it all. Unfortunately I never got to fly a rocket myself, but I stood so close to the action that it seemed to me I could have done it in my sleep: Press the black button so that the hydrazine hydrate and alcohol begin to marry the hydrogen peroxide, then press the red button, and experience the shriek of flame! In a twinkling you’ve risen past the Ack-Ack Tower; you’ll land on a secret runway in Dreamland, then continue on by armored car… Stay cool and brave—you’ll win an Iron Cross!
Rocket-flame is sacred, like a flower placed in the hands of a wounded German soldier. Rockets are sacred because their mission is to approach the ideal. And with each new generation, right up to the V-weapons and beyond, they become more themselves. Their slimness grows more elegant, their tapering payloads more aerodynamic. But now that the war’s over and they’re perfect, nobody cares. Isn’t that sad? That’s the reason why I prefer to dwell on maiden voyages. Our rockets were mere prototypes then; our test pilots took risks; nobody knew what might happen. When I go back in time to 1936, before the sleepwalker called Göring on the black telephone, I see squatter, cruder rockets traversing our German skies. That was when we reoccupied the Rhineland. In 1935 the rockets were even wider, almost rectangular. They burned alcohol mixed with liquid oxygen. In 1934, when we purged Röhm and those scum, our flying machines were essentially square in cross-section, and their double wings resembled metallized pages of sheet music. In 1933, when the sleepwalker took power, I happened to be a philosophy student in Freiburg. It was night. We stood in a circle outside the library, waiting. The command came. I was ready; I did my part. Liftoff! And so it rose and flew, gloriously propelled by human force; with indescribable joy I watched it spinning sharp-cornered like some strange new propeller device designed to cut the wires of enemy barrage balloons. I estimated its mass and velocity; I predicted its trajectory; I foresaw the duration of the flight down to the last second; I already knew the combustion temperatures involved. Just before it reached maximum altitude, it vanished for the merest eyeblink in the smoke that rose up all around us; next it entered the zone of pitiless light, first as a silhouette, then, once its descent had begun, it opened, revolving about its spinal axis with the print on its pages stark enough for me to read it, had I wanted to, all the way across the pyre—it was some Jew book, something about pacifism, I believe—and Professor Heidegger, now unanimously elected Rector since his Anglo-Bolshevik predecessor had resigned, was speaking to us, or shouting, I should say, his voice deep, exultant, and more certain than it had ever sounded in any lecture I’d ever heard; he was telling us all that this marked a new night for German culture; that the old must burn for the sake of the new. Beside me stood my classmate Edelgard, who would later be killed with both her children in a British bombing raid; and I got excited by the firelit rapture on her face; she was hurling books by the handful, and her hair was more beautiful than fire; so I grabbed the collected works of the Jew Freud and threw them right up into the sky; they reached their apogee just as the first book I’d launched swirled finally down to commit itself to the flames of German summer. ‣