Red Moon Rising Sputnik and the Rivalries That Ignited the Space Age - Matthew Brzezinski [3]
Now in the final moments of its four-minute flight, the V-2’s target area sprawled out beneath it in every direction. The rocket was blind. Its navigation system had stopped working at the seventeenth-mile point of its journey, where it had been hurled on a predetermined trajectory. But the V-2 was an imprecise aiming device; where exactly within a ten-mile radius the missile would land was a matter of geographic chance. The East End, the City, and the Tower of London whirled past. The western part of the British capital magnified into view. The rocket’s target range grew narrower. A neighborhood, Chiswick, now loomed ahead. Its red-tile roofs and cobblestone streets approached at three times the speed of sound. But no one heard the V-2 coming. Its sonic boom, that shrill thundering crack that sounded like a nearby lightning strike, hadn’t caught up to it yet.
Silently, the V-2 slammed into Staveley Road at Mach 3, gouging a crater thirty feet long and eight feet deep. A millisecond after impact, its 1,627 pounds of high explosives, a pink, puffy mixture of ammonium nitrate and Amatol, detonated.
The explosion and ensuing sonic boom deafened John Clarke. His parents’ house, and the homes of six of their neighbors, crumbled around him. The bedroom walls parted and fell away. Floors imploded in heaps of dust and plaster. Bricks and wood splinters crashed through windows like shrapnel. Furniture flew. Ceilings collapsed. Hallways caved in. And all this occurred in an eerily noiseless vacuum. “The best way to describe it is television with the sound off,” Clarke told the BBC sixty years later.
When the mushroom cloud over Staveley Road dissipated, Clarke saw that the bedroom where his sister had been playing stood intact. Miraculously, his sister also seemed unharmed. “There wasn’t a mark on Rosemary,” he recalled. He shook her, but she didn’t respond. The blast wave had collapsed her little lungs. She had died where she sat.
Two minutes later, another V-2 struck North London, killing six more people. That night, Edward R. Murrow informed his American listeners of a new German weapon that rained “death from the stratosphere.”
“German science,” he predicted in a subsequent broadcast in November, after 168 people perished when a Woolworth department store suffered a direct V-2 hit, “has once again demonstrated a malignant ingenuity which is not likely to be forgotten when it comes time to establish control over German scientific and industrial research.”
• • •
The war was over—at least in the technology corridor of Adlershof, just outside Berlin. Marshal Georgy Zhukov’s tanks and the First Ukrainian Red Army Group had rolled through the industrial suburb several days earlier, on April 26, 1945, and the fighting had been brief. Artillery still echoed from the not-too-distant German capital, where the Führer had gone to ground in his bunker under the Reich Chancellery, but in Adlershof residents were already clearing debris from streets, filling in the bomb craters along Rudower Chausse, and carting away glass from shattered storefronts. There was a sense of relief and resignation throughout the town, as if its inhabitants had already made peace with a new era and master.
Boris Chertok had no trouble finding the big brown brick building. It was exactly where Soviet military intelligence said it would be. Downshifting his commandeered gray Mercedes, Chertok pulled up to the entrance. The main gate had been ripped off its hinges, and a body lay slumped near a twisted bicycle stand. But otherwise the research center seemed undamaged. Cautiously, Chertok made his way inside. He was nervous. Berlin’s new masters were still jumpy, unnerved by the perplexing sight of ordinary Germans calmly tending their lawns and rose gardens as Soviet T-34 tanks clattered past their homes to blast the Reichstag.
Unholstering his pistol, Chertok