Word: v2
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...from having found a defense against V2, Britain apparently still knew little more about the rocket bomb's makeup...
Whatever military intelligence might have gleaned about V2, the Allied public was given almost no inkling of what got it off the ground, what made it zip to 60-plus mile altitude, what actual damage it was doing. Launchings in The Netherlands were in sight of Allied front lines (at night there were gigantic flashes and a cometlike streak of light through the sky). Some of the rockets fizzled at about 20,000 feet, exploded behind German lines...
...What Is V2? Last week V-2 was still almost as great a mystery as V-3. If the British had recovered any duds for examination, they were keeping mum about it. Some Hollanders claimed they had seen V-2 launched from bare ground; others, from 80-ft. concrete pits. Some experts thought it could have been launched from barges off the Dutch coast. V-2 was variously reported to be guided by radio, by gyro compass, by fins, by spinning. But on one thing experts agreed: V-2 is a self-contained rocket, carrying its own oxygen and traveling...
Glimpses of the Moon. Last week Britain's famed jack-of-all-sciences, J. B. S. Haldane, philosophically predicted a big postwar future for V2, which he thought could rise to 200 miles if fired vertically. Mused Haldane: "it could take photographs . . . [of] the sun and perhaps other heavenly bodies. . . . For the cost of a day of war, it should be practicable to send a series of rockets round the moon and photograph its far side...
...weeks southern England had been under a bombardment as lurid as something out of an early Wells novel. Both London and Berlin kept the business under wraps. Then, last week, Berlin announced that London was under heavy fire from V2, the second Vergeltungswaffe or "vengeance weapon"-the long-range rocket which Berlin had long threatened and London had long anticipated...