David Myhra

A contribution to the “Nazi Wonder Weapons” collection (see Hitler’s Miracle Weapons, Hitler’s Flying Saucers, Messerschmidt Me264, rel="nofollow" target="_top">Luftwaffe over America, Target:America and The Black Sun). In this case we’re dealing with Eugen Sänger’s “orbital rocket bomber”.

The book’s a pretty odd mix. The text is a biography of Austrian rocket scientist Eugen Sänger; it’s accompanied by numerous illustrations. However, many of the illustrations don’t seem to have much to do with accompanying text but are instead speculations by the author.

Like von Braun, Sänger initially wanted to develop rockets for space flight, but when the Nazis came along the money was in weaponry so he switched to that – to the extent of joining the Nazi Party and attempting to sign up for the SS (he was rejected as politically unreliable). The V-2 was what von Braun came up with; Sänger proposed a more ambitious (and almost certainly unworkable) scheme involving a piloted winged vehicle launched horizontally from a long track, using some number of A4 engines (the A4 is what powered the V-2; Sänger thought it would take two but later calculations estimated at least 30) in a “sled” pushing the vehicle. At the end of the track, the vehicle would lift off and fire its own rocket engine, attaining orbit. It would then “skip” off the atmosphere a couple of times, release its bomb load, and land on a conventional runway back in Germany. Sänger also proposed variants where the bomber would stay suborbital, release bombs, do a 180° turn, fire its engines again, and return to base.

The German RLM pretty quickly decided this wasn’t worthwhile, and put Sänger to work on ramjets instead. After the war he worked in France for a while, then returned to Germany as the head of a rocket research bureau; he was fired from that position after it was discovered he was consulting with Egypt on rocket weapons.

So far, so good. But now we get to the illustrations. It seems to me that many of these we added as “filler”. For one thing, every time the vehicle’s illustrated – and, as mentioned, there’s a lot of illustrations - the caption describes it as “a Sänger piloted, winged, suborbital bi-fuel reusable rocket bomber“. Then there are multiple pages of maps showing the range of the “Sänger piloted, winged, suborbital bi-fuel reusable rocket bomber“ with different thrust characteristics. There are illustrations of various later American and European projects for two component reusable spacecraft, with a “mother ship” carrying a spacecraft to launch altitude. And finally is a rather creepy but meticulously illustrated sequence showing the Sänger taking off on its ramp, attaining orbit, a dropping a 5000-pound radioactive dust bomb on New York City, complete with the Statue of Liberty showered with radioactive flakes. The catch here is Sänger himself never proposed a radioactive bomb as payload; it’s entirely an invention of the author.

There’s also no discussion of the technical problems. As mentioned, Sänger was hugely optimistic about the thrust necessary to get the thing going. There’s no mention of how the booster sled would be stopped on the end of its run. There no mention of how atmospheric re-entry would work (other than it would get really hot), or feasibility evaluation of the “atmospheric skip” idea.

I do have some feeling for people like von Braun and Sänger, who started out with dreams of space travel and ended up working for the Nazis. It must have seemed like a good idea at the time.… (meer)

An extended monograph on one of the more outlandish German concepts of World War II, the author pulls together a surprisingly wide range of material for such a "blue-sky" project, and puts it into context by considering the comparable post-war American and French equivalents. As with most "Luft' 46" studies, the real core of this book is the numerous digital images that suggest what the machine would have looked like had it actually come into operational service. The downside is the usual indifferent editorial direction Schiffer brings to its products. I don't know about anyone else, but whenever I look at one of their books I always come away with the feeling that one more editorial pass would have been in order.… (meer)