My Father's Day Story
That Time Wernher von Braun’s Rocket Tried To Kill My Father
Keith’s note: I thought Father’s Day might be an appropriate time to repost this story.
“As best I can collate the facts, on 18 March 1945, a V-2 missile was launched from Statenkwartier in The Hague in occupied Netherlands at 9:25 am by Battery 485. It was one of the last V-2 launches before Germany lost the ability to use these weapons. As the rocket sped away from the surface it reached an altitude of over 50 miles – perhaps more – the edge of space. After a flight time of 5 minutes or so it fell from space with a vengeance and slammed into London at nearly 2,000 miles per hour. It hit near the Marble Arch Underground station – specifically at Hyde Park (near Speakers Corner) in Westminster. The blast created by the impact formed a crater 60 feet across and sent a supersonic shockwave outward. An instant later and several blocks away the shockwave picked my father up out of bed in his room above a pub and threw him through a set of glass doors. He had no warning that this was going to happen. No one ever did. While he was badly cut up, he was otherwise all right – physically. My father had been invited to go out for beers with his roommates – but he was broke – so he went to bed early instead. He never saw his roommates again. My father was 22 at the time.”
Thanks for sharing, Keith. Without getting too personal, I’m curious if that experience affected his or your opinion of the honors von Braun received decades later from NASA.
My father was not much of a fan of von Braun’s. I think his Nazi past has been overlooked and whitewashed, and as I mentioned in the article people overlook it as if he made up for it later in life. He never apologized.
My father’s immediate family were all murdered by the NAZIs. My grandfather, grandmother, two aunts and an uncle. There were many more murdered in my extended family. My father was a slave laborer, including work on missiles, but he survived. He never blamed von Braun, attributing it instead to the entire German population. He also cautioned that if we thought it could not happen here, in the US, we are wrong.