RocketMan

[Jan KLIMKOWSKI]

Well well, well....

Jeffrey A. Del Col, talking about Michael Neufeld's 1995 "Rocket and the 
Reich", says:

>Neufeld stresses the extreme secrecy of the entire German rocket 
development
>project from its very inception to its very end, a feature which shoots
>the hell out of the knowledgable adventures of Slothrop, Borgesius, et, 
al.,
>but,why expect facts from fiction, right?

Thanks to an early tip-off from Paul Di Filippo, I've already started 
devouring Neufeld's tome, and come to exactly the opposite conclusion to 
JADC.  The early pages of Neufeld, discussing the small German rocket clubs 
and their turbulent relationship with the military, the secret dawn 
launchings, the failures, seem to me to be a non-fictional companion to 
Pynchon's wonderful pages about Pokler in the 30s.

TP's facts aren't  too bad, either:

"Dr Wahmke decided to mix peroxide and alcohol together before injection 
into the thrust chamber, to see what would happen.  The ignition flame 
backed up through the conduit into the tank.  The blast demolished the test 
stand, killing Dr Wahmke and two others.  First blood, first sacrifice." 
(p403 GR)

"One of Schumann's students, Kurt Wahmke, who had graduated before von 
Braun, was involved in experiments with hydrogen peroxide as an alternative 
oxidizer in the spring of 1934.  During a careless experiment, Wahmke mixed 
the hydrogen peroxide wtih alcohol to see if he could produce a premixed 
single propellant.  An explosion killed him and two assistants."  (p38, 
Neufeld)

Two of Neufeld's three footnoted sources for this little snippet are German 
language.

We could go on and have a very tedious, pedantic and niggling exchange here. 
 For what it's worth, my sense from reading about half of Neufeld so far is:
i) Pynchon's facts are generally extremely accurate, given the sources he 
was working with during the 1966-71 years of grease and passage, (Neufeld's 
1995 book is arguably the first proper history of the German rocket 
programme);
ii) More importantly, as with the use of historical material in V., TP is 
both being faithful to the material and taking off on imaginative leaps of 
his own, (what is the relationship between the "real" Malta and the Malta of 
V.?  personally, I have little interest in answering this kind of question);
iii) One of the Rocket's shadows in GR is of course Wernher von Braun. 
 Here's Neufeld quoting the unpublished version of von Braun's memoirs:

"There has been a lot of talk that the Raketenflugplatz finally 'sold out to 
the Nazis'.  In 1932, however, when the die was cast, the Nazis were not yet 
in power, and to all of us Hitler was just another mountebank on the 
political stage.  Our feelings towards the Army resembled those of the early 
aviation pioneers, who, in most countries, tried to milk the military purse 
for their own ends and who felt little moral scruples as to the possible 
future use of their brainchild.  The issue in these discussions was merely 
 how the golden cow could be milked most successfully."

Exactly.  And exactly why I read books such as Neufeld's.

The German rocketmen made rockets for Fritz Lang, Adolf Hitler and JFK.  Or, 
in no particular order, the good, the bad and the entertaining.  And as to 
how Slothrop acquires his "knowledge" of the rocket - well, that looks like 
a mighty complex subject to me...

jan