Ley was a rocket enthusiast of the 1930's in Germany -- a associate of Van Braun -- and an SF enthusiast. This was likely written in 47, or so, after the war. Wait... the start says this is written while war is still raging.
The fascinating part here is the revolution rocketry brought to space travel possibilities between the 1920's and the 1940's. Remember that Jules Verne and H. G. Wells, writing at the turn of the century, were launching their space vehicles with giant cannon. Um... not an easy start for a journey! And it offered no possibility for slowing down or matching speed at the destination. Some writers, including Verne, came up with anti-gravity or gravity-nullifying plates -- the fanciful transporter technology/warp drive equivalent of their day.
Launching ships was a tough, tough issue for space travel. Then... poof!... rocketry rather suddenly solved that issue. This is a story of that happening. The forward has a prediction of a manned Moon landing in the mid-to-late 1950's... not too far off the mark considering how distant the possibility looked before the rocketry concept burst on the scene.
According to this rocketry was developing an enthusiastic cluster of "true believers" in the early 1930's. This included some early frauds. He mentions a rocket carrying human cargo hoax in 1933 in Germany. These early efforts were carried on by a handful of people, almost literally.
One of the early issues was whether or not liquid-fueled rockets could be developed at all. (Solid fuel rockets dated back to the dawn of fireworks.) Some of the early efforts powered rocket cars. It's story-like because these early players were all very human and this tells about their personalities.
The middle of the story is a nice discussion of the technical issues as seen by someone who hasn't actually seen a liquid fuel rocket -- what's hard, what's easy, what are the advantages over artillery as a weapon delivery tool? (the existing competition) This part is a neat read in part because it isn't about people or what people are thinking.
Interesting... something I hadn't realized: The reason the single stage liquid fueled rockets of today -- those being produced by Iran, China and so on, have such similar performance characteristics to WWII German V-2's is due to physics. It's determined by the power-to-weight ratio of the fuel, and that hasn't changed much. And this is why rocketry capabilities aren't going to change much in the future until we switch to fuels with higher power-to-weight ratios, such as nuclear and matter-antimatter. Multiple stages (levels as Ley calls them) by the way, change that limit. That's why they are so popular and useful.
Ley states that the performance limiting issue for liquid fuel rockets was the pump that would move fuels from the tanks to the combustion chamber. The performance characteristics of this pump would determine the feasible size for rockets -- the smaller and more efficent the pump, the smaller the feasible rocket.
The first peaceful use that came to mind for these pioneers was moving mail. Interesting because moving mail fast has been an incentive for faster transportion systems since horse-based courier systems were established in Ancient Persia in BC times. Railroads and airlines are two other transport systems that grew in their pioneering days on transporting mail.
The description of the start of the lab at Peenemünde sounds overly dramatic. This at this point is very uncertain technology. Why would it get such high security attention? But... then again... the Manhattan Project also got this same kind of top secret attention. ...So...maybe. These must have been quite scary times, indeed. Also interesting, checking on Wikipedia description, the Professor Hermann Oberth who is the heart of Lay's story gets no mention at all in Wikipedia articles on Peenemünde, but he does have his own article.
Lay's description of the success of the bombing raid of August 1943 reads like propaganda. He speaks of great success and great timing and of five thousand scientists dying in the attack. The 2011 Wikipedea article on the subject says the timing was controlled by need for moonlight for night bombing, that bombers mostly missed their targets, and two scientists were killed. Lay and Wikipedia agree that this was a massive, and dicey, raid for that time period, and the British aircraft casualty count was high. They also agree that the raid delayed V-2 rocket bombing for about six to eight weeks... not much considering the size of the bomber force committed to the raid and the casualties it suffered. That may explain why this attack is less legendary than say, Operation Market Garden, another Allied assault in World War Two which had mixed success.
Note that the Peenemünde raid took place at the same time as the Battle of Kursk on the Russian front. This was the battle that demonstrated the Russian win at Stalingrad six months previous was not a fluke. This is also when the US and British forces took Sicily. For those following these events real-time in Germany, this was the time to transition from feeling "We're winning... just need a bit more patience." to "What's the best way to lose this?" As the dust settled on that summer of excitement, things were far from hopeless, but things were a lot more disturbing than they had been six months earlier.
Lay describes a lot of rumor-mongering about war rockets that took place in the winter after the Peenemünde raid. This may have been German leadership's attempt to distract from on-the-ground problems by flag-waving about upcoming high technology victory producers. The Peenemünde raid did not have much relevance to changing to this tactic, it was generated by the ominous events elsewhere. But, it's easy to believe Lay missed that in the timeframe he's writing in.
Some interesting statitics on the V-1 -- the flying bomb. Launched for just two months, 8,000 lanuched, about 2,000 of those made it to London. There they killed about 6,000 people and made uninhabitable about 75,000 homes.
... Sounds like an impressive amount of trashing to me, although quite random in nature -- even more so than most war-time collateral damage. And, as Lay points out, while it made war vivid for London civilians it did not seem to increase the anti-war feelings. The earlier German bomber blitz's had not done so, and this one was no different. And, likewise, the Allied bomber blitzes of German and Japanses cities didn't seem to build anti-war sentiments in those nations, either.
This brings up an interesting question to which I don't have a good answer: When does terrorizing civilian bystanders benefit a war effort? This description of WWII futile terrorizing contrasts with tales of earlier ruthless conquerers who were described as leveling villiages to indicate how ruthless they were. I now wonder: How true? How effective at helping their conquest efforts?
Another thought comes to mind on this: Perhaps these acts are useful not because they inimidate enemies but because they encourage the home crowd and allies?
Lay brings up an interesting point that is relevant to my theories about why nuclear power is such a still-born industry. Rocketry was born is this same crucible. Prior to the war is was a wishers and dreamers technology, and the war proved its viability. And it proved it by being first used as a terrifying weapon.
So... this adds mystery and shakes my theories about why nuclear was still-born. By my theories, rocketry should have also been still-born. It was first used as a terrifying weapon. So... I guess the question is, even though it has a much more positive feel in our society... is rocketry really a still-born industry? Could rockets be doing a whole lot more, in a much wider range of sizes and applications, and a whole lot cheaper, than it is currently being used?
... I don't think so. Rocketry has developed a large amature following. There is a lot of on-going backyard experimenting in rocketry. So in this it is quite different than what happened to nuclear. Rocketry grew beyond its first terrifying use, nuclear did not.
The V-2 started being used in fall of 1944, about two months after the V-1 was stopped. By this time Allied forces had liberated much of France, were on the German border, and clearing out the Low Countries. Russian troops were on the Polish border as the Germans finally crushed the month-long Polish uprising in Warsaw, and the countries south of Germany were falling from German allies into chaos as the Russian army closed on them as well.
Ley is a pessimist. As he is writing this piece, he figures no rocket scientists will survive the Gestapo. He figures they figure this information will be too valuable to let slip out... even if the Reich itself is no more. (In fact, many scientists survived and ended up on rocket programs in the US, Russia and England.) But he figures that rocketry will advance quickly notheless because the Germans have decisively demonstrated the workability of the concept. In this, he was quite right.
(From Wikipedia to complete this story: "Over 3,000 V-2s were launched as military rockets by the German Wehrmacht against Allied targets during the war, mostly London and later Antwerp. The attacks resulted in the death of an estimated 7,250 military personnel and civilians... the offensive began on 8 September 1944 with a single launch at Paris. ...The Germans themselves finally announced the V-2 on 8 November 1944 and only then, on 10 November 1944, did Winston Churchill inform Parliament, and the world, that England had been under rocket attack "for the last few weeks". ...An estimated 2,754 civilians were killed in London by V-2 attacks with another 6,523 injured, which is two people killed per V-2 rocket. ...The final two rockets exploded on 27 March 1945." [VE day was 8 May 1945])
These numbers from Wikipedia indicate this V-2 attack was comparable in quantity and damage to the V-1 attacks, but spread over seven months instead of two.