Текст книги "Adventures of a Sea Hunter: In Search of Famous Shipwrecks"
Автор книги: Clive Cussler
Соавторы: James Delgado
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With the war over, many of its combatants were acclaimed as heroes, among them Theodore Roosevelt, Admiral William Sampson, Richmond Hobson and the crew ofMerrimac.Hobson gained fame for his exploits and his good looks, earning the sobriquet of the “most kiss-able officer in the Navy.” He, like Roosevelt, rode his fame into political office. His crew also fared well. On November 2, 1899, the seven sailors of Merrimacwere awarded the Congressional Medal of Honor. Hobson did not receive the medal because of a provision barring its award to naval and marine officers. It was not until April 29, 1933, that then Congressman Richmond Hobson finally received his Medal of Honor from President Franklin D. Roosevelt.
Our plane drops from the clouds and banks along the line of cliffs that define the shores of Cuba’s southeast coast. As we approach Santiago, I look out the window and see the walls of El Morro flash below me, then the lighthouse, and then we’re down, bouncing on the airstrip that stretches out next to the ancient fortress. The Sea Huntersteam is here to explore waters rarely dived in search of a doomed fleet and one forgotten American collier that a century ago had been the talk of a nation.
We’re in Fidel Castro’s Cuba, with his permission, to dive all of the wrecks from the Spanish-Cuban-American War of 1898. We have toured Havana and the site of the destruction of USS Maine, visited the U.S. memorial monument to Maine’sdead on the city’s oceanfront drive, the Malecon, and interviewed Cuba’s top historians and curators about that war. Now The Sea Huntersteam heads to Santiago to see the sites: Daiquiri and Siboney, where the American troops landed; San Juan Hill, where the Rough Riders stormed up to victory; Santa Iphigenia Cemetery, where the dead of the battles are buried, and El Morro. Standing on its parapets with Mike Fletcher and John Davis, I look down into the narrow harbor mouth at the scene of Merrimac’slast mission. The collier would have steamed just a few yards away from El Morro’s closest guns and into the mouth of more guns that doubtless rained fire into Merrimac’shull. “It’s a miracle the ship made it through with no one killed,” Mike says, and John and I nod in agreement. “It will be a miracle if anything has survived in that channel,” John says. Looking out at the active shipping, we agree.
After touring the battlefields and memorials on land, with their manicured lawns, statues and bronze plaques offering a distant, cleaned-up and sanctified image of that hundred-year-old war, we head out to sea to search for Cervera’s sunken fleet. Mike and his son Warren start by diving to find the wrecks of the torpedo boat destroyers Plutonand Furor.Their shattered and scattered remains litter the steep slope of the seabed, 100 to 120 feet down. From there, we head to the cruiser Almirante Oquendo.Dozens of shells ripped through the cruiser during her final flight and fight, and at the end, burning fiercely with more than half of the crew dead, the wounded ship hit the rocks near shore and broke in two. Very few men made it off Oquendo.Today, the cruiser’s grave is marked by one of its large u-inch guns sticking up out of the sea. We follow it down into a broken field of debris that only after a careful survey reveals the outlines of the ship.
The wreck of the Spanish cruiser Almirante Oquendo, a turret and gun sticking up out of the water. She was sunk off Cuba during the Spanish-American-Cuban War at the Battle of Santiago in 1898. James P. Delgado
We travel farther down the coast to look at Oquendo’ssister ship, the cruiser Vizcaya.Running flat out, Vizcayaslugged it out at near point-blank range with Schley’s flagship, USS Brooklyn.The fight ended when Vizcaya’s bow exploded as she lined up to either ram Brooklynor fire a torpedo from the tube set into its bow. An American shell detonated the torpedo before the Spaniards could fire it. Sinking and ablaze, Vizcayacould no longer fight. Wounded and “faint from the loss of blood,” the cruiser’s commander, Captain Juan Antonio Eulate, was in the sick bay where he met one of his junior officers, Ensign Luis Fajardo. An American shell had torn off one of Fajardo’s arms, but he told his captain “he still had one left for his country.”
Captain Eulate, in his official report of the battle, said: “I immediately convened the officers who were nearest… and asked them whether there was anyone among them who thought we could do anything more in the defense of our country and our honor, and the unanimous reply was that nothing more could be done.” As Spaniards, some with their uniforms ablaze, leapt screaming from their burning ship into the sea, some men on Texasstarted to cheer their victory until Captain John Philip yelled out, “Don’t cheer, boys! These poor devils are dying!” USS Iowa, commanded by Robley Evans, approached next. Evans, incensed that Cuban sharpshooters were gunning down Spanish survivors struggling in the surf, sent a boat ashore and told the Cubans to stop firing or he would shell them.
With Mike Fletcher and his son Warren, I drop down into the sea, swimming past twisted armor plate and the broken engines of Vizcaya.We swim along the hull, punctured here and there by shellfire and the rocks where the burning hulk settled. Looming up in the milky sea, washed by the surging of the surf that breaks overhead, is the bulk of one of the cruiser’s turrets, its u-inch Hontoria cannon still in place but resting on its side in the sand. With Mike, I drop down to the narrow gap that the gun passes through. The men at these guns died at their posts, heavy shells raining down and setting off the powder inside as they raced to load and fire. Oquendo’ssurvivors said that a 350-pound charge of powder exploded from a hit on a turret and flashed through it, killing the gun crew laboring inside before erupting in a sheet of flame that ripped off the head of a nearby officer. Similar scenes of horror played out on Vizcaya.
I shrug out of my dive vest and tank, and shove them through a narrow gap in the armor. Then, kicking and squeezing, I work my body into the turret. It is still and dark, as it should be – this is a tomb. Mike follows, and we strap our gear back on and carefully float in the enclosed space, filming it. We’re probably the first living people to be in here in more than a hundred years, and we quietly and respectfully document the turret, disturbing its peace only with our lights and air bubbles in order to share the story of what happened here with the world.
Our last dive on Cervera’s fleet is the cruiser Cristobal Colon, scuttled at the end of the battle by its crew. After opening the seacocks, they ran Colonup on the beach and abandoned ship as the Americans approached. Eager to salvage the newly built warship, the U.S. Navy tried to tow Colonoff the rocks but, flooded and open to the sea, the cruiser sank in 100 feet of water. The sea is clear and calm, and as we descend down into the deep, the wreck of Colonis laid out before us, with gear on the decks and railings on ladders leading into the darkness of the cruiser’s hull. Flicking on our lights, we cannot resist the siren call of the secrets within the hull. We drift into a magazine half filled with mud and open to the seabed outside thanks to a large hole blasted through the side. Sticking out of the mud are rows of shells, still live and deadly a century after Colon’sdemise. Passing out of the hole, we follow the hull, now festooned with marine life and growth that make the steel hulk a beautiful artificial reef, a haven to countless fish. The warm, sunlit waters have granted new life to Cristobal Colonand helped lay to rest some of her ghosts. As we surface, we agree that the time has come to find the elusive wreck of Merrimac.
SEARCHING FOR USS MERRIMAC
Our boat pushes past the fortress of El Morro, following the track of Merrimac’sfinal run. Richmond Hobson published a book about the mission in 1899, and with it in hand, we’re following the course he plotted in its pages to where the wreck should lie. Discussions with our Cuban hosts have given us hope. There is indeed a wreck near the spot, but it is a battered hulk that harbor authorities blasted around 1976 to clear the shipping channel. Now it may just be a pile of debris that we will have a difficult time proving was the famous collier. Getting permission to dive in this forbidden zone has also proved challenging, but the Cuban authorities, interested in learning just what lies there, and wanting all of the story told, have given their okay.
With five Cuban divers, we suit up – myself, Mike and Warren– and drop into the dark green water at slack tide. Even so, the current is strong, and we hang on to the weighted line we dropped earlier and follow it down. The water is dirty with silt, and we cannot see our hands in front of our faces. It gets darker, closing in, grayer, verging on black… and then suddenly, 30 feet from the bottom, the water clears dramatically. Below us is the mangled stern of a large steel ship. We trace the stern and find the rudder, knocked free of its mounts and resting against the hull. We follow it to the bottom and find the propeller. Mike shines the light on it, pointing out that one of its blades is missing – and it looks like it was shot away.
We continue on, under the overhang of the hull, past steel plating that dangles from the hull, and up onto the deck. I swim back to the stern and look into a tangle of debris. Lying in there is the ship’s steering gear, and it, too, looks as if it was hit by gunfire. Gouges and broken steel castings provide evidence of a tremendous blow, and I’m reminded, floating and kicking against the current, of Hobson’s account of how Merrimac’sstern was hit by gunfire and lost her ability to steer.
My excitement grows as we drift with the current along the deck, moving towards the bow. The decks of the wreck are laid out exactly as on Merrimac’splans, with large coal holds, scuttles and ventilators, and the mounts for the ship’s two masts each lying between pairs of coal holds. This has to be Merrimac.I grin with my regulator clenched in my teeth and turn to Mike with a “high five” sign. The centrally located superstructure is badly mangled, the bridge smashed and gone, but, lying in the debris, I see a broken Champagne bottle. It’s too perfect, I think. We know that just before they headed in, Hobson and his crew drank a toast in a melodramatic moment, and I wonder if this is their bottle. It could have been tossed in years later from a passing ship, but just the same, I wonder.
Nearby are pairs of the ship’s davits used to launch Merrimac’sboats, again situated exactly where the plans indicate they should be. Shell holes in the decks are graphic evidence of heavy fire. One shell hole penetrates the deck on the starboard side of No. 3 hold, at an angle that suggests it was fired from an elevation off the ship’s starboard quarter, so presumably from El Morro just after Merrimaccleared the harbor entrance and was proceeding in.
Swimming forward, we find that the charges lowered into the water by the Cubans in 1976 have torn the hull down to below the waterline at the bow, scattering steel fragments along the seabed. And yet, buried in the mud, is the forward anchor. Concealed by silt with only one shank exposed, it is connected to the mangled stem by thick anchor chain. Later, Warren Fletcher finds the stern anchor above the silt off the ship’s starboard side, tightly held by chain, suggesting that instead of being shot away, as Hobson suspected, it had jammed and remained suspended alongside the hull when Merrimacsank. We also find two rows of anchor chain, partially buried in the buckled plating and sediment that covers the deck, running from the bow to the stern, exactly the way that Hobson described how his crew had rigged it.
We can find no definitive evidence of damage from the scuttling charges, though a hole and damage to the port quarter conceivably could be related to the charge that Hobson placed there. The hull is set into the silt of the harbor bottom to a level above the waterline, and our limited time on each dive does not allow for a comprehensive survey of the side of the hull to see if there is blasting damage. But we do see other damage that testifies to Merrimac’send – and that demonstrates dramatically why Merrimac’screw, like the men in the Spanish ships who fought through flame and shot – deserve the honor of being called heroes. The decks are warped and twisted from the intense heat of the fires that burned through Merrimac’scoal for an hour. Reaching into the torn hull, I pull out chunks of coal that laboratory analysis later shows are “coked” as a result of the fire.
There is nothing pretty about war, and when the pomp and ceremony and the glamour are stripped away, what is left, so visibly on this wreck and on the shattered hulks of Cervera’s sunken fleet, is harsh evidence of the intensity of battle, the costs of war, and the strength of character and love of country that inspires people to sail into harm’s way to fight for a cause or to defend what they hold dear. As we surface from the muddy grave of Merrimac, I think of how raw and untouched this undersea battlefield is compared to the museum-like setting of San Juan Hill and its cleaned-up, memorialized and glorified view of war.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
HITLER’S ROCKETS
NEAR NEUSTADT, GERMANY
More than 400 feet beneath the Harz Mountains of Germany, we trudge through darkness, climbing over fallen rock and twisted metal, splashing through pools of stagnant scummy water. The darkness is as thick and oppressive as the silence that fills the tunnel. We interrupt both with flashes of light and the sound of our footsteps as we work our way deeper into the mountain. The chamber stretches on into blackness, and we can’t help feeling some dread as we continue into what we know once was literally the depths of hell itself.
Ahead of us lie 12 miles of tunnels and subterranean galleries, hewn from the rock by slave laborers. Hastily constructed by the Third Reich in the wake of the unrelenting Allied air war against Hitler’s Germany, this underground complex was once part of the Nazi concentration camp system. Buried deep within the mountain was a factory where inmates built jet engines and assembled V-1 and V-2 rockets. Abandoned by the Germans in April 1945, the complex was sealed shut in 1948 and disappeared behind the Iron Curtain, because it was in the Russian occupation zone.
Since 1964, the area above the former KZ (Konzentrationslager– concentration camp) Mittelbau-Dora has been the site of a memorial, and in 1974 a museum was built on the grounds. The barracks, guard towers and barbed wire are gone – only broken concrete foundations, cracked and rutted streets, and the crematorium on the hill that rises above the camp are grim reminders of what happened here. But below the surface, inside the mountain, lies a moment trapped in time. To access that stark, unmitigated evidence of evil and suffering, a reunified Germany completed a new 500-foot tunnel that cut into Kohnstein Mountain in order to reopen some of the underground complex for visitors. Only 5 per cent of the tunnels are open to the public because when the Russians blasted it closed in 1948, they brought down rock and portions of the concrete and metal that divided the tunnels into a multilevel factory. Postwar quarrying of the mountain above also cracked and loosened the rock, so the tunnels are dangerous. Large rocks fall without warning, and some galleries, once open, are now choked shut. To move deeper into the mountain, and back into the untouched past, we are wearing the rig of hard-rock miners as we climb, slip and slide over huge boulders, gravel and mud. Even so, at least a third of the complex lies sealed beneath cold water that has seeped in and flooded the tunnels, along with their assembly lines, workshops and offices.
It’s December, and outside, the temperature is well below freezing, with snowflakes dancing in the wind. Inside the mountain, the temperature hovers just above freezing. Our breath fogs as we haul our dive equipment deep into the heart of the mountain. We will be among the first to slip beneath the water and explore the flooded depths of Mittelbau-Dora. Our goal is to venture into some of its forgotten rooms and bring back film footage to share with the world.
Our Sea Huntersteam is now a close-knit band of brothers in the field, underwater, underground, on the decks of ships and in the studio. Producer and team leader John Davis, chief diver Mike Fletcher, his son Warren, our second underwater cameraman, Marc Pike and soundman John Rosborough make up the core team. Guided by our colleagues Dr. Willi Kramer, Torsten Hess (curator of KZ Mittelbau-Dora) and a mine safety engineer, we find ourselves in a unique situation, diving into the depths of a flooded underground concentration camp to see what untouched evidence remains of Nazi crimes against humanity. Dr. Kramer, who is with Germany’s Department of Monuments and Culture, is the chief underwater archeologist for Northern Germany and the government’s only underwater archeologist to work with Germany’s hydrographic office and the military. That assignment has included diving to explore sunken warships and U-boats, downed aircraft and subterranean chambers. Willi was the first to dive here, and now he leads us into the darkness.
I turn to John Davis and say, “This looks like one of the rings of hell.” He replies, “Dante couldn’t have imagined this.” He’s right. The dark, the cold, the silence and the overwhelming sense of the horrors that took place here engulf us as we travel deeper into the tunnels.
ROCKETS FOR THE REICH
The achievement of the age-old dream of human flight in the early twentieth century spawned a new dream of flight into space. Scientists in various countries experimented to perfect rocket designs through the 1920s and ’30s, with varying levels of success. In 1932, the new Nazi government set up a rocket program. Among the scientists who joined that program was Wernher von Braun, who, with full funding and Wermacht (Army) support, developed a series of rockets: the A1, A2 and A3. The Germans built and tested these first rockets at an artillery range outside Berlin. By 1935, they needed a new facility.
The island of Usedom, on the Baltic coast at the mouth of the Peene River, proved to be the ideal locale. Known as Peenemünde, this new test center, developed by both the Wermacht and the Luftwaffe (Air Force), opened in May 1937. There, in isolation, von Braun and his team began the design and testing of a new rocket, the A4. That weapon, designed to be a long-distance combat rocket, would later become notorious as the feared V-2. But the testing of the A4 was plagued by problems, because its twenty thousand individual parts required meticulous assembly. As the Germans worked to improve the range and targeting of the A4, they also took steps to simplify its construction on an assembly line.
The first successful launch of an A4 rocket came only after Germany lost the Battle of Britain and at Hitler’s urging, as he wanted results after years of costly development and tests. On October 3, 1942, an A4 roared off the pad. The space age had begun, but with a deadly purpose. Hitler demanded that five thousand rockets be built for a mass attack on London. At the same time, the rocket scientists had designed a smaller but also deadly weapon, the Fi 103, later designated the V-1, to attack Britain. These small winged rockets were the world’s first cruise missiles.
The “V” designation came from Nazi propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels, who called the rockets Vergeltungwaffe(vengeance weapons). The V-2, a single-stage rocket, was 46 feet long, weighed 14 tons, carried a one-ton payload (two-thirds of which was the explosive charge) and traveled at a maximum velocity of 3,600 miles per hour, with a range of 200 miles. Facilities for constructing the rockets were built at Peenemünde, using prisoners from concentration camps as workers. The first assembly lines to build V-1 rockets started up in July 1943, and in early August, a new line was added to build V-2s. First fired at Paris in early September 1944, V-2s were also fired at London and Antwerp. In all, out of 4,600 V-2s built, the Nazis fired about 3,200 in anger, most of them, despite popular belief, not at London but at Antwerp. The V-1 and V-2 rocket barrage against the Allies killed about five thousand people. Ironically, four times as many – nearly twenty thousand – died in slave labor camps constructing the rocket facilities and making the weapons themselves.
Located in the middle of Germany near the town of Nordhausen, about 35 miles from the infamous Buchenwald concentration camp, the Dora labor camp (later Mittelbau-Dora) became the primary center for the manufacture of V-1 and V-2 rockets after Allied bombing raids struck Peenemünde in August 1943. The bombers did not cause extensive damage, but Peenemünde’s work was not a secret and it was vulnerable to further attack. Production and assembly of the rockets was taken over by the dreaded SS, which decided to relocate rocket production to underground factories built and manned by slave laborers from concentration camps. In late August 1943, the SS established a sub-camp of Buchenwald in an underground fuel storage facility at Kohnstein. A series of tunnels, originally excavated in the mountain for a gypsum mine, became the basis for a massive underground factory known as the Mittelwerk.
While scientific research and testing continued under von Braun at Peenemünde, the underground camp and complex were being hacked out of rock to serve as the primary production facilities for both the V-1 and V-2 rockets. From late August 1943 through to the end of the year, prisoners from Buchenwald lived in the tunnels, drilling, blasting and hauling rock in grueling twelve-hour shifts in the midst of incessant noise, dark and damp conditions that killed thousands. Jean Michel, a French resistance leader arrested by the Gestapo, who arrived at the Dora complex on October 14, 1943, described his first day as “terrifying”:
The Kapos [prisoner bosses] and SS drive us on at an infernal speed, shouting and raining blows down on us, threatening us with execution, the demons! The noise bores into the brain and shears the nerves. The demented rhythm lasts for fifteen hours. Arriving at the dormitory [in the tunnels]… we do not even try to reach the bunks. Drunk with exhaustion, we collapse onto the rocks, onto the ground. Behind, the Kapos press us on. Those behind trample over their comrades. Soon, over a thousand despairing men, at the limit of their existence and racked with thirst, lie there hoping for sleep which never comes; for the shouts of the guards, the noise of the machines, and explosions and the ringing of the bell reach them even there.
The prisoners worked twenty-four hours a day in alternating twelve-hour shifts. Tiers of wooden bunks in the dripping wet chambers served as their sleeping quarters, with oil drums cut in two serving as toilets. Very little water was available, save that which wept from the rocks and soaked everyone. Disease broke out and added to the death toll caused by overwork, falling rock and exhaustion. In such hellish conditions, the casualties were high. French historian Andre Sellier, himself a former inmate of the complex, documented the arrival of 17,535 inmates between August 1943 and April 1944. In that period, 5,882 either died and were cremated in the ovens at the complex or Buchenwald, or were “transported.” Those prisoners too ill or too injured to work were shipped to Bergen-Belsen and the Majdanek camps in “liquidation transports.” As new inmates kept arriving, the death toll grew higher. In all, some 26,500 died at Dora, according to Sellier’s research: 15,500 in the camp or on “transports,” and 11,000 at the end of the war, when the SS marched many survivors out of the camp and most of those unfortunates were killed.
The prisoners at Dora were for the most part prisoners of war– Russians and Poles – as well as French resistance fighters, German prisoners of conscience, political prisoners and, later in the war, Jews and Gypsies, who were singled out for particularly brutal treatment by the ss. Other nationalities also joined the ranks of Dora’s inmates. After Italy’s withdrawal from the Axis, the Germans turned on their former allies with a vengeance. A group of Italian officers, sent to Dora to work as slave laborers, balked at entering the tunnels, so the Germans shot them all. A Greek inmate, Anton Luzidis, spoke for all the prisoners at the end of the war when he testified: “The meaning of Dora was fright. I cannot find the proper words to characterize the conditions there. If often happened to me that I asked myself whether I was still alive in the world, or whether I was brought into this hell after my decease.”
Production of Dora’s first rockets began in January 1944 when the prisoners started work on V-2s. That same month, 679 prisoners died in the camp. By August 1944, work had started on the first V-1 rockets in the tunnels and the death toll of prisoners mounted. The V-1 factory was set up by the SS and their industrial partners in the manufacture of the weapon, Volkswagen. By March 1945, reacting against what they termed “sabotage,” which could be something as simple as using a piece of scrap leather to make a belt to hold up a pair of pants that had grown too large because of starvation, the SS began rounding up inmates and hanging them in groups from the cranes in the underground factory. The executions increased in the last month of the camp’s operation. When American forces began closing in, the SS evacuated the civilian support workers and the last remaining rocket scientists. Most of the inmates were shipped out to other camps for liquidation, while thousands were “death-marched” in the snow. At a barn in nearby Gardelegen, the SS locked 1,050 prisoners in a barn, set it on fire and machine-gunned those who made it out of the burning building. Only thirty-four men made it out alive.
The SS abandoned the camp on April 4, 1945, and the U.S. Army liberated Dora and its tunnels seven days later. Several hundred starving, dying inmates, all that remained of the approximately sixty thousand slave laborers who had filled the camp and built the rockets, greeted them. The Americans, well aware of the scientific and military value of the German rocket program, removed the parts of about a hundred V-2 rockets from the tunnels before the Russians arrived in July, because the camp and complex were within the recently established Russian zone of occupation. In October 1946, the Russians, too, removed rocket parts and equipment and shipped them to the Soviet Union. The Russians tried to destroy the tunnels with explosives but could not complete the job. In the summer of 1948, they blasted the entrances to the tunnels to seal them, supposedly forever.
PEENEMÜNDE
The Sea Huntersvisit to Germany starts with a visit to Peenemünde, which, like Dora, was once locked away behind the Iron Curtain and was inaccessible, due to its use as a Soviet and East German fighter base. Peenemünde sits on the Baltic coast, at the end of long, low, sandy peninsula, surrounded by shallow marshes on one side and the open Baltic on the other. The cold wind blowing off the sea chills us to the bone as we drive through the largely intact base. Decades of harsh life under communist rule meant that little changed here, and as we pass fences and grim brick and concrete buildings, it is easy to imagine Peenemünde “in its prime” as a top-level Nazi base. It is a surreal moment made all the more so when we visit the former Luftwaffe airfield on our way to the rocket-launching sites.
As locked gates swing open, we drive past rows of bunkers, their huge blast doors hanging open, and rows of deteriorating East German MiG-21 and MiG-23 jets. Until 1989, this was part of the vast Soviet bloc, a potential foe that we were prepared to fight, and these aircraft were here to shoot down our planes in the event of war. The fall of the Berlin Wall, the end of the German Democratic Republic, the reunification of Germany and the unraveling of the Soviet Union are such recent events that I shake my head in wonder as our vehicle speeds through the abandoned air base. Not too many years ago, my presence here with a camera would have resulted in a death sentence, just as it would have sixty years earlier when this was the heart of Hitler’s rocket program.
We stop first at the buckled concrete rails of the V-1 test firing range. Blasted and ruined by the Soviets in 1945, the collapsed bunkers and broken concrete 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.