L'étrange histoire des armes secrètes allemandes

Victor Debuchy retraces the history of Germany's secret weapons of the Second World War, from the origins of liquid-fuel rocketry (Tsiolkovsky, Oberth, Goddard, then the von Braun and Dornberger team) at Kummersdorf and Peenemünde to the V1 flying-bomb and V2 rocket offensive against London and Antwerp in 1944-1945. The book follows in parallel the German technical effort (the A4 project, the underground Mittelwerk factory, the launch bunkers of northern France) and the Allied counter-offensive: the Oslo Report, the photographic interpretation of Peenemünde, the "Crossbow" operations, the Hydra raid, and the recovery of rocket debris in Sweden and Poland. It closes on the Allied scramble for the Reich's scientists and archives in the spring of 1945, a prelude to the space age.