Vengeance 10

On 2 May 1945 Magnus von Braun rode an old bicycle down a mountain road to make contact with a leading element of the American Army, the 324th Infantry Regiment, 44th Infantry Division, in the village of Schattwald, near the Austrian border. A few hours later a party including, among others, Magnus, Wernher von Braun, Major General Walter Dornberger and Jan Memling — disguised as a German technician — surrendered to First Lieutenant Charles L. Stewart, an intelligence officer assigned to the 44th Infantry. Memling was flown to London the following day.

* * *

Jan Memling and Wernher von Braun met for the next and last time on 15 July 1969 in a Cocoa Beach, Florida, motel room, and the following day, the two greying, middle-aged men stood beside one another in the VIP gallery as Apollo 11 began its historic journey to the moon. The photograph taken after the launch shows them standing arm in arm, tears clearly visible in their eyes.

Author’s Note

I have taken some liberties with events in Germany between 1935 and 1945 and with the characters in my story. Some — the obvious ones — were real people. Others are composites or else made up out of whole cloth. In either event, I trust I have treated those well who deserved it, and ill those who deserved that.

In 1960, President John F. Kennedy announced before the United Nations General Assembly that the United States of America would land a man on the moon before the end of the decade. It was not, as many critics charged, a publicity stunt but rather a notice to the world that the future of man lay beyond this planet. Over the past twenty years, the money, time and effort expended to land Apollo 11 on the moon has been returned a thousand-fold in new technology, business opportunities, and scientific and medical advances. Just as Wernher von Braun predicted in 1939.

It is a tribute to the men of Peenemunde who, although they built war weapons, never lost sight of the ultimate goal, space travel. The American lunar landing programme was solidly based on technology developed first at the Raketenflugplatz, at Kummersdorf and Peenemunde in Germany and later refined at White Sands, Huntsville, and Cape Kennedy.

It is more than possible — given logical decisions at the right times, efficient organisation of industry, military, and science, and a coherent leadership in Berlin — that Germany might well have sent the first human being to the moon. It had always been the intention of Wernher von Braun and his closest associates to do so, as his arrest in 1944 showed.

Twenty-four years later they proved it.

Joe Poyer

Orange, California

1980

By his own admission, Joe Poyer has been fascinated with the possibilities of space travel since he was a small child. The late Wernher von Braun, with whom he corresponded, was a personal hero, and the idea for Vengeance 10 was suggested by something Dr von Braun once told him. Mr Poyer brings personal experience to Vengeance 10, having worked during most of the 1960s on various phases of the Apollo Space Programme. He is the author of twelve novels including North Cape, of which Alistair MacLean said, it’s the ‘best adventure story I have read for years’. The Washington Post called Tunnel War, his previous book, ‘a marvellously detailed and suspenseful fiction’, and the London Financial Times described it as ‘a really excellent example of an action novel.… exciting and intelligent all the way through ‘.