Vengeance 10

Author’s Note

I have taken some liberties with events in Germany between 1935 and 1945 and with the characters in my story. Some – the obvious ones – were real people. Others are composites or else made up out of whole cloth. In either event, I trust I have treated those well who deserved it, and ill those who deserved that.

In 1960, President John F. Kennedy announced before the United Nations General Assembly that the United States of America would land a man on the moon before the end of the decade. It was not, as many critics charged, a publicity stunt but rather a notice to the world that the future of man lay beyond this planet. Over the past twenty years, the money, time and effort expended to land Apollo 11 on the moon has been returned a thousand-fold in new technology, business opportunities, and scientific and medical advances. Just as Wernher von Braun predicted in 1939.

It is a tribute to the men of Peenemunde who, although they built war weapons, never lost sight of the ultimate goal, space travel. The American lunar landing programme was solidly based on technology developed first at the Raketenflugplatz, at Kummersdorf and Peenemunde in Germany and later refined at White Sands, Huntsville, and Cape Kennedy.

It is more than possible – given logical decisions at the right times, efficient organisation of industry, military, and science, and a coherent leadership in Berlin – that Germany might well have sent the first human being to the moon. It had always been the intention of Wernher von Braun and his closest associates to do so, as his arrest in 1944 showed.

Twenty-four years later they proved it.