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In a speech yesterday on missile defense, Deputy Secretary of Defense William Lynn talked about a "new and more complex era of hybrid threats" in which potential U.S. adversaries might combine high-tech and low-tech tools to mount a surprise attack. And to make his point, he drew on a history lesson: German plans during World War II to develop a longer-range version of the A4 ballistic missile, better known as the V-2 rocket (pictured here in postwar testing).
"Had the war lasted longer," Lynn said, "The Wehrmacht may have been able to hit New York."
Lynn then made an intriguing reference to another secret Nazi rocket program. "In a desperate attempt to attack targets in the U.S. with existing capabilities, they launched Project Laffarenz," Lynn said. "What the Germans lacked in range they tried to make up for in inventiveness."
In the deputy secretary's telling, Project Laffarenz involved using U-boats to tow a battery of V-2s across the Atlantic on submersible barges. "Once within striking distance of the East Coast, the V-2 carrying containers would be flooded with water, righting launch tubes," he said. "The Germans got as far as building a carrying container at the Baltic port at Elbing before the allied assault stopped any deployment."
So, did the Germans come close to building a sort of prototype for a submarine-launched ballistic missile? According to Michael Neufeld, an authority on early rocketry and chair of the division of space history at the National Air and Space Museum, not even close.
"The one somewhat dubious source I saw made it clear that this was the same project as 'Test Stand XII' that was undertaken in the last months of the war, to create a towed V-2 canister behind a submarine," he told Danger Room. "The canister would be flooded to float upright and the V-2 fired. They were building a few such canisters at the end of the war, but there is absolutely no evidence that the Germans were anywhere near ready to actually launch a missile out of a container."
And what of the Nazi "Project Amerika" intercontinental ballistic missile, capable of hitting New York? That, too, was a paper project. The Nazis were that never close to building a staged ICBM, Neufeld said.
"A lot of reports of Nazi secret weapons that could have been deployed late in the war are just fantasies based on paper projects even less real than this one," he said. "The A9/A10 ICBM which you refer to as Project Amerika (not a real codename to my knowledge) was just such a paper project. They were not anywhere near to becoming a reality. In fact the technology did not exist in 1945 to make an ICBM."
Neufeld, who is author of The Rocket and the Reich and Von Braun, added: "I’ve spent a lot of time contradicting popular mythology about Nazi secret weapons, to little effect, I’m afraid. It keeps coming up in odd places like this Lynn speech apparently."
[PHOTO: Wikimedia]
