The Sound of Silence: 10

Summary

Summary of "The Sound of Silence: 10" Episode from The Man Who Calculated Death

Introduction

In the tenth episode of The Man Who Calculated Death, titled "The Sound of Silence," host Suzanne Rico delves deeper into her family's tumultuous past intertwined with World War II technology. This episode focuses on the infamous V1 flying bomb, exploring its engineering marvels and the personal connections that link Suzanne's family to this historic weapon.

Unveiling the V1 Flying Bomb

[01:41] Suzanne Rico sets the stage by transporting listeners to 1944 London, where the German war minister showcases the V1 flying bomb—a pilotless, robotic plane designed to terrorize Great Britain. The press conference is depicted as a blend of "Beauty and fear, optimism and death," illustrating the bomb’s dual nature as both a technological marvel and a weapon of mass destruction.

Discovering the Family Connection

Suzanne and her sister, Stephanie, uncover a pivotal piece of their family's history when they find an old article from Flight Magazine detailing the V1. [02:29] Suzanne explains, "Somebody made a copy and wrote on this. Please do not lose," revealing the profound significance of the document to their mother, Gabriele.

Technical Analysis of the V1

The sisters examine the intricate design of the V1, described by Stephanie as looking like a "complete Rube Goldberg machine" ([03:06]). They criticize the bomb’s complexity and impracticality, quoting the original author, Mr. William Shackleton, who titled his essay "Wasted Talent" ([04:01]). Shackleton acknowledges the V1 as a "brilliant technical achievement," yet questions its military utility, comparing its value to "the Fuhrer's ridiculous mustache."

Engineering Innovations and Challenges

Suzanne highlights the V1's pulse jet engine, noting its unprecedented design powered by 45 mini explosions per second ([05:30]). She reveals her grandfather, Robert Lusser, was responsible for the critical task of attaching the volatile engine to the 2,000-pound warhead. This ingenious yet precarious solution was essential for the bomb's functionality, a detail that underscores the precarious balance between innovation and destruction.

The Mechanism of the V1

A key focus is the V1's guidance system, which included three gyroscopes, a compass, and a barometer to maintain altitude and direction ([08:06]). However, without modern remote control, the bomb relied on a tiny air-driven windmill to trigger its detonation sequence ([09:08]). Suzanne elaborates on this mechanism, likening it to a "Rube Goldberg machine" and explaining how a Vet counter and detonators would initiate the bomb’s steep dive ([09:28]).

The Sound of Silence

One of the most chilling aspects of the V1 was its "sound of silence", a byproduct of the bomb's design rather than an intended feature ([12:12] Suzanne). This silence preceded the bomb’s impact, creating moments of intense terror as civilians awaited the inevitable destruction without knowing its precise location. Barbara Robeson, a survivor, recounts how her mother would hold her throat, hoping the bomb would miss their home ([12:37]).

Impact on London

The episode details the devastating effects of the V1s, with nearly 2,500 bombs hitting London’s homes, businesses, hospitals, churches, and schools ([13:09] Suzanne). Despite the significant destruction, Suzanne muses that the outcomes could have been worse, highlighting London's resilience and the strategic limitations of the V1s.

Personal Reflections and Future Episodes

Suzanne reflects on the profound personal and historical revelations uncovered through her family's connection to the V1 flying bomb. She teases the next bonus episode, which will explore "The battle of the flying bombs and how Great Britain fought back" ([14:04]), promising listeners further insights into this critical aspect of World War II.

Notable Quotes

• Suzanne Rico [03:31]: "A Rube Goldberg machine, named after the eponymous American cartoonist, is defined as any contraption that is deviously complex and impractical."
• Stephanie [04:21]: "Never before was such a gigantic volume of real engineering and scientific talent wasted on such an effort."
• Barbara Robeson [12:37]: "When we prayed for the bomb not to fall on us, we were praying that it was going to fall on somebody else."

Conclusion

"The Sound of Silence: 10" masterfully intertwines historical analysis with personal narrative, offering listeners a comprehensive understanding of the V1 flying bomb's technological intricacies and its impact on both wartime London and Suzanne Rico's family legacy. Through detailed discussions and poignant survivor accounts, the episode underscores the profound human and technological dimensions of this dark chapter in history.

Transcript

[Host]

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[Suzanne]

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[Host]

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[Suzanne]

I created this bonus episode because I wanted to learn more about how the.

[Host]

Flying bomb worked and why it went quiet just before impact. This is the sound of silence, and thanks for listening.

[Suzanne]

It's 1944 London, and in a smoke filled room, the English war minister has Germany's newest weapon on display. Flashbulbs pop as men in bowler hats jockey to photograph the pilotless robot plane with its windowless fuselage and stubby, inelegant wings. Sitting sidesaddle atop this flying bomb, a pretty young woman smiles for the cameras as if it has not been terrorizing Great Britain for months. Beauty and fear, optimism and death, all in one raucous press conference. Wow. That's the original from 1944.

[Stephanie]

That's the original?

[Barbara]

Yeah.

[Stephanie]

That's super cool.

[Suzanne]

I got this scene from an old article in Flight magazine published shortly after the world's first guided missile was revealed to the public. Crazy. Stephanie and I found it stuffed into one of our mom's old manila envelopes. Somebody made a copy and wrote on this. Please do not lose.

[Mom]

Mom wrote on that.

[Suzanne]

It's five pages, single spaced. Words and pictures crammed close together. The first in depth look my sister and I have ever had into how our grandfather's V1 or Vengeance weapon worked.

[Stephanie]

Somewhere in here, they say it looks like a complete Rube Goldberg machine.

[Suzanne]

That's not a flattering comparison.

[Stephanie]

Mom has that quote somewhere.

[Suzanne]

A Rube Goldberg machine, named after the eponymous American cartoonist, is defined as any contraption that is deviously complex and impractical.

[Stephanie]

Oh, yeah, here we go. We have now seen and examined a flying bomb. It is a brilliant technical achievement and it bristles with the cleverest of ideas. One feels, however, when examining it and realizing the purpose for which it was designed and the use to which it has been put, that it is the product of a collection of insane professors. Oh, my God.

[Mom]

Who wrote this?

[Suzanne]

The author was Mr. William Shackleton.

[Stephanie]

Look at every single page.

[Suzanne]

Who titled his essay Wasted Talent.

[Stephanie]

Wasted Talent.

[Suzanne]

Shackleton definitely starts out downplaying the V1's destructive force. Prime Minister Winston Churchill didn't want the press corps rattling a public that had been suffering under the Nazi barrage for more than four years.

[Stephanie]

Never before was such a gigantic volume of real engineering and scientific talent wasted on such an effort. We imagine that militarily, it has been about as useful to Germany as the Fuhrer's ridiculous mustache.

[Suzanne]

Oh, my goodness. But eventually, Shackleton can't hide his admiration for this revolutionary weapon. It is a remarkable aircraft, he writes, painted a drab olive on top with its underside a duck egg blue. You. Using adjectives like ingenious and unorthodox, the reporter paints an intricate picture of the airborne killing machine that was one of desperate, deranged Adolf Hitler's last hopes. Oh, my gosh.

[Stephanie]

She's got wire wound compressed air boxes.

[Suzanne]

Look at. They mapped the whole thing out. Flap value card, fuel jets, mixing chamber, ventures, sparking plug. Cheaply constructed out of sheet steel, plywood and mixed metals, the flying bomb resembled a small plane. But that's where the similarities end.

[Stephanie]

Here you got the crazy jet engine.

[Suzanne]

The pulse jet engine was something no one had ever seen before. Powered by 45 mini explosions per second, the sound it made in flight was so unique and so terrifying that the British dubbed the V1 the buzz bomb. And while this early jet propulsion system was not my grandfather's design, he was the guy who had to figure out where to attach the wildly vibrating red hot engine to the 2,000 pound warhead itself. The flimsy wings would have caught fire immediately. So they were out. And can you imagine what would have happened if he'd tried to attach it to the bomb's underside? From episode three, you might remember that my grandfather figured it out while on a train.

[Mom]

For hours, I doodled in the margins of a magazine. Suddenly, I found the most promising configuration. The head of the engine attached to the back of the fuselage and hinged to the fin with a shock absorbing strut. And then he had to make the whole thing fly.

[Suzanne]

With the pulse jet engine sticking up from the back of the missile like a rifle scope. The V1 was launched from a Walter catapult, a long inclined ramp that accelerated the bomb to a speed of 320 kilometers per hour. I found a World War II era film that shows a German soldier firing up the V1's engine and then running like hell. Flames shoot out the back as the V1 hurtles forward with an impressive roar. Getting the bomb airborne was a key piece of the engineering puzzle. The next challenge was to keep it flying straight and level and in the direction of London.

[Narrator]

London, battered, bloody but unbowed after four years of bombing, looks to the skies, bewildered. What is this strange object?

[Suzanne]

What the English discovered when they first recovered and then examined that unexplod was that it had three gyroscopes in the tail, a compass in the nose and a barometer on board to control altitude. These fairly common devices were what guided the flying bombs from the coast of occupied France, where the Germans launched them from over the English Channel. But then what? Remember, there was no remote control that some faraway guy could use to trigger the bomb to stop, stop and drop over the target. So Robert Lesser invented something completely new, something small and simple that impressed virtually everyone who saw it. Okay, listen to this, including Will Shackleton.

[Mom]

It is an extremely important bit of mechanism as it is responsible for the arming of the bomb after some 60km have been covered and it also controls the range of the machine.

[Suzanne]

That important bit of mechanism was a tiny air driven windmill mounted on the bomb's nose. But how would what was basically a little fan be able to stop a flying bomb? Well, remember that three dimensional board game called Mouse Trap?

[Narrator]

Mouse Trouble, then you name Mouse Trap.

[Suzanne]

It's also a kind of Rube Goldberg machine. Complex and impractical. But Stephanie and I loved building this weird contraption as kids.

[Narrator]

Just turn the crank and snap the blank and boot the marble right down the chute.

[Suzanne]

Loved how every little piece triggered the next in order to catch the mouse.

[Narrator]

It's the man into the hand. The trap is set. Here comes the net.

[Suzanne]

Just like Mousetrap's simple plastic crank, that little windmill kicked off a chain reaction that ended in the bomb diving toward the ground. Shackleton's description of the domino effect is more complicated than mousetrap, for sure, and much darker. I've elaborated on it a bit for clarity. The spinning windmill activates something called a Veter counter, kind of like, an odometer, which starts clicking backwards. When it gets to zero, it triggers two detonators which blow out a piece of metal which forces down the spoiler flaps. At the same time, a mini guillotine comes down, severing the rudder tubes. And the V1, with no controls begins to tip forward and free fall.

[Mom]

So this explosion makes the V1 go into a steep dive from everything that happens.

[Suzanne]

I'm going to let my physics teacher sister explain what happens from here.

[Mom]

And when a moving object changes direction from going straight ahead to straight down, it experiences centrifugal force to the outside of the curve. And that's what happens to the fuel in the V1's tank. It gets forced to the top, which makes the motor quit.

[Suzanne]

Oh, my goodness.

[Mom]

The silencing of the motor was probably not part of the design, but that silence was what everyone feared the most.

[Suzanne]

This is the part that blows my mind more than the detonators, the jet engine, or onboard guillotine. For all the brain power, money, and creativity that went into the V1's design, the flying bomb's most defining feature was incidental. And the sound of silence. Something that wasn't planned or invented or given any thought at all would come to terrorize a nation.

[Barbara]

So what would happen? You'd be there in your shelter. You'd hear this dreadful noise, silence. And then you'd wait, wait and wait. But you never knew where it was going to land.

[Suzanne]

These moments of terror are what survivors, like Barbara Robeson remembered long after the war was over.

[Barbara]

You'd hear it cut out, and then you'd go, oh. Oh. And this was when my poor mother would stand in the corner of the room and she'd hold her throat. Somehow, she'd put her hands up to her throat and she would play silent. Please, please, please, please, please let the bomb go over. Don't let it fall on us. But it was terrible.

[Host]

You can imagine.

[Barbara]

When we prayed for the bomb not to fall on us, we were praying that it was going to fall on somebody else. It was going to fall somewhere you see it.

[Suzanne]

And fall. The V1s did, nearly 2,500 of them, hitting targets in and around London. Homes, businesses, hospitals, churches, and schools. But believe it or not, it could have been much worse.

[Narrator]

London suffered and London worked and London fought.

[Suzanne]

I'm Suzanne Rico. And coming up in the next bonus episode of the man who Calculated Death, the battle of the flying bombs and how Great Britain fought back.

[Host]

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