While on a trip to Los Angeles, Ley was delighted to reestablish contact with Frau im Mond’s creator. Fritz Lang’s sudden departure from Germany had come shortly after Hitler’s propaganda minister, Joseph Goebbels, banned his latest film, in which Lang had put the words of the Nazis in the mouth of an evil criminal mastermind. Lang was now working for MGM, where he had directed his first American film, Fury, starring Spencer Tracy and Sylvia Sidney. It was a provocative thriller that addressed the scourge of lynchings in the United States, though told through the eyes of an innocently accused white man. In it, Lang depicted American vigilante mob justice with visual comparisons to what he had witnessed in Nazi Germany.
Sitting on a veranda under a starry California sky, Lang and Ley discussed the impending war in Europe and mused about travel to the Moon and the planets. However, if they had wanted to revisit their earlier cinematic collaboration, finding a copy of Frau im Mond would have been impossible. Hitler’s Gestapo had confiscated every exhibition print a few years earlier. The film had disappeared.
Not long after the Third Reich’s invasion of Poland in September 1939, Britain entered the war against Germany, forcing Clarke and Bill Temple to vacate their Bloomsbury flat and shut down the British Interplanetary Society’s headquarters. Should the British forces in Western Europe fail to prevent France from falling, Germany’s Luftwaffe bombers were expected to appear in the skies over the heart of London within days. Londoners with the opportunity to do so sought out alternative lodging with friends and relatives in the city’s less vulnerable outskirts or moved to the countryside. When Clarke and Temple locked their door, they left behind Clarke’s almost-complete run of American science-fiction magazines, a collection numbering in the hundreds that had taken him nearly a decade to assemble. He would never see them again.
The worst of the Blitz didn’t come to London until the fall of 1940, when the city was bombed continuously for nearly two months. Arthur Clarke saw none of it; now working for the Ministry of Food, he had been relocated to a seaside resort in North Wales. Sometime in the early spring of the next year, their Bloomsbury flat took a direct hit, destroying everything except the outside walls.
CLARKE SPENT THE early months of the war processing paperwork that documented the precise location of each ton of imported British tea. His position in the civil service gave him a temporary deferment from military conscription, but by the end of the year, service in one of the armed forces was unavoidable. He joined the RAF in the hope that he might be able to acquire a valuable education in the fundamentals of celestial navigation, but instead he was assigned to a technical unit devoted to a new utilization of radar to assist aircraft during poor-visibility landings. It was Clarke’s first opportunity to collaborate with another group of trained scientists, a team from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology that had worked on the invention’s development.
Corporal Clarke was then assigned to an RAF training center in Wiltshire, not far from Stonehenge, where he taught night classes on the fundamentals of radar. However, the subject of the corporal’s classroom lectures frequently turned to astronautics, prompting his students to nickname him “Spaceship Clarke.” During a lecture a student might mischievously ask the instructor how a rocket functions in space, setting off a long discussion about multi-stage rockets and reaching the Moon, complete with diagrams and basic calculations. During his off hours he wrote technical articles for journals such as Electronic Engineering. His career as a published science-fiction author was yet to come, though just prior to joining the RAF he had completed the preliminary draft of his first novel, Against the Fall of Night.
As the Allied forces closed in on Germany in late 1944, Clarke and a group of the most active members of the British Interplanetary Society met in a London restaurant one evening. Val Cleaver, a society officer who worked in British aviation, told the diners details about his recent business trip to the United States. While visiting New York, Cleaver had met with Willy Ley and discussed recent reports of a large German rocket weapon that was said to have hit targets in Antwerp and London. Ley had heard reports that it was a frightening and more sophisticated successor to the V-1, a low-flying cruise missile that had appeared in the skies of southern England that summer, sometimes arriving in waves of more than one hundred missiles a day. Ley dismissed the jet-powered V-1 as a crude and inaccurate weapon of little military value, assuring his British guest that the reports of a bigger, high-altitude rocket bomb were nothing more than desperate Nazi propaganda. Cleaver, who had already seen classified U.K. military-intelligence reports detailing the existence of the big rocket, cautioned his friend, “If I were you, I wouldn’t be quite so sure.”
Laughter was heard around the dinner table after Cleaver recalled his words of caution. But no sooner had the amusement subsided than the gathering was interrupted by the sound of a huge crash outside the restaurant. “The building shook slightly,” Clarke recalled. “We heard that curious, unmistakable rumble of an explosion climbing backwards up the sky, from an object that had arrived faster than the sound of its own passage.” The abrupt intrusion had been the British Interplanetary Society’s introduction to the deadly V-2 rocket, the world’s first operational ballistic missile.
Should Ley have needed any further persuasion about Germany’s new rocket weapon, a copy of Life magazine published a few weeks later would have been sufficient. A double-page spread provided a detailed and fairly accurate cutaway diagram of the V-2 and a graphic illustration presenting its trajectory from launch to impact. Life also reproduced military photographs that pictured recovered rocket engines. It described the V-2 as a “spectacular weapon” but judged it “a military flop.” Despite its impressive engineering, the new weapon was an ineffective boondoggle. As Ley had predicted, the V-2’s destructive power was limited by its small payload capacity. In fact, fewer military and civilian casualties resulted from V-2 attacks than the total number of slave laborers killed due to the harsh conditions surrounding the weapons’ assembly. But decisively, when the German high command chose to fund the V-2 by diverting funding earmarked for fighter-jet aircraft, they ceded the airspace to Allied bombers, thus hastening their own defeat.
© NASA/Marshall Space Flight Center
A German V-2 rocket containing a small explosive warhead is readied for launch during the final months of World War II. More than three thousand V-2s were fired against Allied targets in England and Belgium, but as a strategic military weapon of destruction it was largely ineffective.
Ley published an article about the V-2 in an American magazine just as Allied forces entered Germany. In it he speculated that the large new rockets were the work of Hermann Oberth and thought it unlikely that either Oberth or his associates would survive to tell the story of the V-2’s birth. “Those who knew the full story are dead already,” he stated. “Those that are still alive will die before the war is over.” But far more important to Ley was its legacy: The V-2 had provided undeniable proof that it was possible to launch a large, fully operational guided missile.
Parts of a V-2 confiscated by the Allies were shipped to the United States, where Robert Goddard examined them at the Naval Experiment Station in Annapolis, Maryland. Goddard found the design of the V-2’s gyroscopically controlled stabilizing vanes, its fuel-injecting turbopumps, and its combustion chamber remarkably similar to features he had used on the rockets he developed and launched in Roswell, New Mexico. In the mid-1930s, when Goddard had been conducting his research far from the eyes of the press and curiosity seekers, both Hitler’s military intelligence organization—the Abwehr—and Soviet espionage officials had dispatched spies to gather information about Goddard’s progress. But despite Goddard’s suspicions that the V-2’s design had been stolen from his work, the technology for both rockets evolved along independent parallel tracks, with the Germans already ahead of Goddard by the early 1930s. A few days after Goddard scrutinized the confiscated V-2, Germany fell to the Allies and the war in Europe ended. Already ill with cancer, Goddard would die at age sixty-two four months later. His death came on the same week that the United States dropped two atomic