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By Root 744 0

look innocuous, and at the same time simple. Yet the weapon perfected here, and manufactured in the thousands at Dora, wrought enormous devastation and terrorized the skies of free Europe and England. Before I left Vancouver on this trip, my museum’s board chair told me about his childhood just outside London. The memory of “doodlebugs” or “buzz bombs” as the British called the V-1, were still a source of both terror and anger to him. “You could here them coming,” he told me, “and as long as you could hear them, it was alright.” Only when the rocket motor cut off would the V-1 plummet to earth and explode. That’s when you ran and hoped you were outside the blast zone. I think of him and the memories he still carries of these missiles as I gaze out at the now peaceful Baltic from the lip of the V-1 launch track.

From here, we drive into a forest and park next to a mound of broken brick, glass and twisted steel that was once the assembly building for V-2s at Prüfstande (test stand) 7. Blasted flat by the Soviets after the war, it towered above the plain to house an upright rocket before it was rolled out on rails to its launch platform and the actual test stand. Nestled inside an earthwork that still rings the launch site, the firing position is now a forested glade pockmarked by bombs and designated by a small granite marker. Here, humans first reached beyond the skies into space, but any thrill connected to standing at this monument to the beginnings of the space age is tempered by the grim reality of the evil that drove the invention of these rockets and the horrific human cost of their development and use. We pick our way carefully through the site, closed to public for the very good reason that many unexploded bombs still lie here.

Our next stop is a lagoon. Frozen by the winter’s cold, it grips the protruding remains of a Lancaster bomber. As we slowly trek out across the ice, pulling our dive gear in a sled behind us, we talk about the raid that blasted Peenemünde and led to the creation of Dora. On the night of August 17–18, 1943, a force of 596 bombers set out to hit Peenemünde. In all, 560 bombers made it in, dropping 1,800 tons of bombs that hit the concentration camp and the scientists’ housing project as well as the liquid oxygen plant and the rocket-launching facilities. A diversionary strike at Berlin drew off German fighters at first, but the Germans caught on and joined with antiaircraft crews on the ground to shoot down forty of the attacking bombers. Sam Hall, who was in one of the bombers, recalls that “after we’d bombed, the mid-upper gunner said, There’s a fighter coming in! It’s got a Lane, it’s got another, it’s got another!’ Three Lancasters were going down in flames. You didn’t waste too much time thinking about it.” Wilkie Wanless, in another bomber, remembered after the war that “They shot down a lot of aircraft from the Canadian Group in the last wave… Very few got out in the dark. At 4,000 or 5,000 feet your chances of getting out are slim.”

No one got out of the Lancaster that we’re approaching. One of our German guides tells us that this bomber came in burning, hit the shallow lagoon and cartwheeled as it exploded into pieces. Some of these pieces are sticking up out of the ice. Willi Kramer and I identify one as part of the tail of the Lancaster. Lying flat on the ice and wiping it with our gloved hands, we can make out the tail fins and the unmistakable outline of holes punched by cannon fire through the metal. John Davis and Mike Fletcher, meanwhile, outline and then start cutting a hole through the ice as Warren Fletcher gears up and prepares the video cameras. The ice proves to be 6 inches thick. After John finishes cutting the hole, both Fletchers drop into the icy water but find themselves only chest deep. This is a shallow, muddy pond. Dropping down, wedged between mud and ice, they slowly survey the wrecked aircraft as we stand on the ice above their blurred outlines and the tracks of their bubbles that form beneath our feet.

Much of the plane is remarkably well preserved, albeit