THE BULK OF THIS NOVEL was written during the lockdown imposed by the COVID-19 pandemic. For four hours every morning, seven days a week, for fourteen weeks, I retreated to my study and closed the door – a lockdown within a lockdown – and I would like to express my love and gratitude to my wife, Gill Hornby, and our two youngest children and fellow isolators, Matilda and Sam, for their good company and cheerful forbearance during this surreal interlude.
My editor, Jocasta Hamilton of Hutchinson, read the manuscript in weekly instalments and made innumerable shrewd suggestions. Huge thanks to her for being such a pleasure to work with, not only on this book but on the five that preceded it.
I have been with the same UK publisher for over thirty years and would like to record my gratitude in particular to Gail Rebuck, chair of Penguin Random House, for her friendship and wisdom during all that time, and also to Susan Sandon, managing director of Cornerstone, for her constant encouragement. The launch troop who have worked on V2 – Rebecca Ikin, Mathew Watterson, Glenn O’Neill, Sam Rees-Williams, Laura Brooke, Selina Walker and Joanna Taylor, to name only a few – have been brilliant.
Sonny Mehta, editor-in-chief of Alfred A. Knopf, who commissioned this novel in the United States, did not live to see it completed. Like many others who knew Sonny, I miss his judgement and friendship very much; with his widow Gita’s permission, V2 is dedicated to his memory. I am grateful to Edward Kastenmeier for stepping into the breach and overseeing publication in the US.
Nicki Kennedy and Sam Edenborough and their colleagues at ILA have also been part of my professional life since the beginning, and I thank them for all they have done for this book and many others. Patrick Niemeyer, Tilo Eckardt, Doris Schuck and my other friends at Heyne Verlag in Munich have been a great support, and so – as ever – has my German translator, Wolfgang Müller. Thanks to Donatella Minuto of Mondadori, and to Marjolein Schurink and Chris Kooi of my Dutch publishers, De Bezige Bij. One rainy Saturday morning in November 2019 – a day not dissimilar to the one that opens this novel – Chris and I were driven around the old launch sites in Scheveningen by Roel Janssen, who kindly shared his local knowledge.
Ralph Erskine, an expert on signals intelligence, generously answered my questions and put me in touch with Mike Dean, an expert on the history of radar. They are not, of course, responsible for my errors. Precisely what went on in Mechelen in the winter of 1944–5 is hard to establish, and I have had to rely on guesswork and some artistic licence.
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The genesis of this novel was an obituary in The Times on 5 September 2016 of ninety-five-year-old Eileen Younghusband, which described her work as a WAAF officer in Mechelen. I subsequently read her two volumes of memoirs, Not an Ordinary Life (2009) and One Woman’s War (2011). My fictional WAAF officer bears no resemblance to Mrs Younghusband, either in character or career, and nor do any of the other members of my (entirely invented) unit. In her memoirs, which provide a vivid insight into wartime life, she asserts that two launch sites were destroyed during her first shift. I assume this is what she and her colleagues were told. Unfortunately, it was not the case. Nevertheless, I would never have written V2 were it not for her disclosure of the existence of the Mechelen operation. I will always be grateful for her inspiration.
A full list of published sources follows. I would like to acknowledge five works in particular. Michael J. Neufeld, of the Smithsonian’s National Air and Space Museum, is the world’s foremost expert on the history of the V2, and his two volumes – The Rocket and the Reich (1995) and Von Braun: Dreamer of Space, Engineer of War (2007) – were invaluable.
Also essential was Hitler’s Rocket Soldiers: The Men Who Fired the V2s Against England (2011) by Murray R. Barber and Michael Keuer, which consists of the testimony of a dozen or so men who belonged to the artillery regiments stationed in The Hague. As far as I am aware, no other historians have gathered such valuable eyewitness material – and given that any surviving veterans must now be aged around a hundred, it is highly unlikely it will ever be surpassed.
Murray R. Barber also wrote V2: The A4 Rocket from Peenemünde to Redstone (2017), which sets out in admirable clarity, and with superb illustrations, how the V2 actually worked.
Women of Intelligence: Winning the Second World War with Air Photos by Christine Halsall (2012) helped bring the people and work of RAF Medmenham to life.
Other books that enabled me to write this novel include:
Evidence in Camera: The Story of Photographic Intelligence in World War II by Constance Babington Smith (1958)
A4/V2 Rocket Instruction Manual, English translation by John A. Bitzer and Ted A. Woerner (2012)
Operation Big Ben: The Anti-V2 Spitfire Missions 1944–5 by Craig Cabell and Gordon A. Thomas (2004)
V2 by Major-General Walter Dornberger (1954)
Spies in the Sky: The Secret Battle for Aerial Intelligence During World War II by Taylor Downing (2011)
V2: A Combat History of the First Ballistic Missile by T. D. Dungan (2005)
From Peenemünde to Canaveral by Dieter Huzel (1962)
The Peenemünde Raid by Martin Middlebrook (1982)
Hitler’s Rockets: The Story of the V2s by Norman Longmate (1985)
Dora by Jean Michel (1979)
The Eye of Intelligence by Ursula Powys-Lybbe (1983)
The Hidden Nazi: The Untold Story of America’s Deal with the Devil by Dean Reuter, Colm Lowery and Keith Chester (2019)
Spitfire Dive-Bombers Versus the V2 by Bill Simpson (2007)
Britain and Ballistic Missile Defence 1942–2002 by Jeremy Stocker (2004)
The Peenemünde Wind Tunnels by Peter P. Wegener (1996)
Operation Crossbow: The Untold Story of Photographic Intelligence and the Search for Hitler’s V Weapons by Allan Williams (2013)
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Some 20,000 slave labourers died building the V2. It killed approximately 2,700 people in London, and injured 6,500; it left 1,700 dead in Antwerp and wounded another 4,500. Approximately 20,000 houses in Greater London were destroyed and 580,000 damaged. In the words of the social historian Norman Longmate, the V2 ‘did a great deal to create the housing shortage that was to be the dominant social problem of the immediate post-war years’.
Daniel Todman, in Britain’s War (2020), has described the V-weapons programme – which cost the German economy more, dollar for dollar, than the US spent on the Manhattan Project – as ‘by a distance, the greatest waste of resources by any combatant country in a supremely wasteful war’.
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V2 Page 27
