My Amazon Review of Robert Harris' "V2"

 

Rocket Science: Offense and Defense

 

Historical novelist Robert Harris tells the story of the German V2 program and the British attempts to defeat it through the eyes of a German propulsion engineer Rudi Graf and a female British air force officer Kay Caton Walsh working to defeat it through photography and algebra. The novel opens with Walsh in bed with her married lover in London about to be hit by a V2.

 

The story goes back and forth between her studying the photographs of the German rocket center at Peenemunde and her calculating the rocket trajectories from a base in Belgium to  Holland where Graf is a civilian scientific officer in charge of the launches. Graf’s boss Wernher von Braun has a few walk-on roles in the drama.

 

Through it all we learn of the magnitude of the German rocket program that produced a functional weapon that was extraordinarily inaccurate. The technical brilliance is evident, but the program was done at the cost of thousands of slave laborers and it took 30 tons of potatoes in starving Germany to make enough alcohol to fuel one rocket. Graf is a good person caught up in the nightmare of Nazi aggression.

 

Walsh’s job in Belgium with her fellow female officers is utilize radar data taken from the German launches to its ultimate rocket landing in England. The rocket follows the path of a parabola and from that it was possible to calculate the point of launch. With that data British fighter bombers would target that site. However, the rocket’s guidance and control system was not impervious to the high winds it would face and thus would invariably blow off course. As a result, instead of hitting military and political targets the rockets destroyed housing.

 

This is the third Harris book I have reviewed with the first two being “An Officer and a Spy” ( Shulmaven: My Amazon Review of Robert Harris', "An Officer and A Spy: A Novel" ) and “Munich.” (Shulmaven: My Amazon Review of Robert Harris' "Munich: A Novel") Though not as good V2 remains a good read.

For the full Amazon URL see: Rocket Science: Offense and Defense (amazon.com)