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- [00:00]
Suzanne Rico
Hey everyone, it's Suzanne Rico.
- [00:02]
Unknown
Just a quick reminder that new episodes of the man who Calculated Death are.
- [00:07]
Suzanne Rico
Available for free every Tuesday wherever you get your podcasts. Thanks for listening. And now onto the show. We have a developing story now on CBS too. Well, we are just days away from TV's biggest night. Thanks for joining us. I'm Suzanne Rico and welcome to CBS 2 News. For eight years I dragged myself out of bed at 3:00am to anchor the news in Los Angeles, Louisiana. Landmark, closed for almost a decade, is back on track. With a big cup of coffee on set, I worked my way through a two hour live broadcast of local and national stories, traffic and weather. Let's get your marathon forecast because it is Sunday 26. It was usually pretty light stuff. This was the morning show after all. But In March of 2003, that changed. My fellow citizens, at this hour, American and coalition forces are in the early stages of military operations to disarm Iraq, to free its people and to defend the world from grave danger. The invasion began with 40 Tomahawk cruise missiles launched at Iraq from battleships in the Persian Gulf. These are pictures via videophone, thus they're a little bit blurry. But this is somewhere in Baghdad. You can see there on the left of your screen an explosion, black smoke rising into the sky. Our news banner read America at war.
- [01:30]
Unknown
Now, CBS 2 News at 5:00am and.
- [01:35]
Suzanne Rico
In the studio, I wasn't sleepy anymore. Dramatic pictures coming out of Baghdad this morning. Operation Iraqi Freedom was off to an astonishing start. Shock and awe has definitely begun. It's heart stopping. When these bombs fall, they send some kind of shockwave through the air. And because coalition troops used mainly high tech weapons, they suffered few casualties. Not so for the Iraqis. Iraqi hospitals at capacity not being able to take any more people because of the mass civilian casualties. For weeks I reported on the death toll, the search for Saddam Hussein, and the victorious soldiers who tore down the dictator's statue in central Baghdad. But I never stopped to wonder about the history of the shock and hostile of warfare that got them there. Someone somewhere had created the first guided missile. I just had no idea that person was related to me. It would be years before I realized that every single Tomahawk launched in that invasion was a direct descendant of my grandfather's most infamous project.
- [02:51]
Unknown
They come droning and sputtering and you don't know when they'll suddenly stop and drop you. A new chapter opens. The battle of the flying Bomb.
- [03:05]
Suzanne Rico
Hello, I'm Suzanne Rico and this is the man who calculated death. Episode 4 V is for Vengeance.
- [03:14]
Unknown
The birds are about to fly.
- [03:17]
I see black in the future.
- [03:20]
Suzanne Rico
Come in, come in. This is an invitation. This is gonna blow your mind. Cause it blew my mind.
- [03:26]
Gabrielle Lesser
So you listen really well.
- [03:29]
Unknown
This is the only original of the Man.
- [03:32]
Suzanne Rico
Holy cow.
- [03:33]
Unknown
Calculated Death.
- [03:34]
Gabrielle Lesser
The man who calculated death. Der Mann der den Tod er reghnete.
- [03:52]
Suzanne Rico
That's my mom and her three sisters singing German songs called Cannons. The snow recedes and May begins and birds are singing all around. One voice building on another in this perfect harmony. This recording was made in 2002 at my aunt Dola's house in Ohio. But the Lesser sisters learned these songs back in Germany during World War II. The year was 1943. Robert Lesser was busy working on a top secret mission and the city they'd just begun to call home in ruins. My mom, Gabrielle, wrote about this turbulent year before she died, before she handed down the task of finishing her memoir to my sisters and me in Kassel.
- [04:53]
Unknown
The world as I knew it had collapsed. We became refugees of an escalating war that didn't care who you were or what you had, everyone and everything was fair game.
- [05:07]
Suzanne Rico
Gabi, as everyone called her back then, was six years old when a British firebomb hit the roof of her apartment building. Sitting in the street, she watched her dad run in and out to save what he could, including his teenage daughter, Dole, who refused to leave her beloved piano. When dawn broke, it was clear they had to find another roof to put over their heads. And in my grandfather's usual bounce back fashion, it wasn't just any old roof.
- [05:40]
Gabrielle Lesser
We moved into a mansion around the corner.
- [05:46]
Suzanne Rico
The mansion, abandoned by owners who'd long since fled Kassel, was mostly intact, and there was no one to stop the Lessers from moving right in.
- [05:55]
Gabrielle Lesser
This was like on two acres, and it had a carriage house and servants houses and had a huge garden.
- [06:04]
Suzanne Rico
The second floor was completely boarded up, so the whole family slept in the cold, cavernous living room, huddled together for warmth. Inside, the house smelled of ashes and despair. But outside, winter was giving way to spring and Gabi's spirits bloomed.
- [06:23]
Unknown
Charred walls jutted into an improbably blue sky. The firestorm of October 1943 had run its course, and it became a shadow in a child's mind. A gutted house became a playground, dense with vines and wildflowers. They don't know not to grow in a wilderness of broken bricks. Like me, they pointed their faces sunward.
- [06:50]
Suzanne Rico
Tante Heidi, who came home from her hated Hitler Youth camp whenever she could, felt that sense of hope too. Sitting on a terrace supported by Greek columns. The sisters, unwashed, unfed, turning a little wild in the devastated city around them. Shelled peas bought on the black market.
- [07:12]
Gabrielle Lesser
We'd sing, and that's where we learned all the cannons. And we sang and sang, and of course, we weren't very fast.
- [07:18]
Suzanne Rico
Without peely, you're pea shelling.
- [07:21]
Gabrielle Lesser
Without pea shelling. Yeah. 200 pounds of peas.
- [07:29]
Suzanne Rico
But as they shelled and sang and scampered around a ruined house and garden, the bombs kept falling.
- [07:35]
Gabrielle Lesser
There were constant alarms. Constant. And my mother was constantly in the cellar.
- [07:42]
Suzanne Rico
The toll it took on my grandmother must have been huge. Comforting and caring for five kids when there was no one around to comfort her. My grandfather's new weapons project took him away from home almost all the time. And because the job was classified, he couldn't even tell Hilda what he was doing.
- [08:02]
Unknown
That was some postcard that somebody wrote on, I think probably Hilda.
- [08:07]
Suzanne Rico
Oh, my gosh. Yeah, our grandmother wrote that. The postcard my sister and I find from this time is so old, I'm afraid it'll fall apart in my hands. And when Stephanie translates, it's like our grandmother is there in the room, talking out her deepest fear that fate and a flying bomb are tearing her and her husband apart.
- [08:33]
Unknown
How am I feeling? Well, every morning, as my morning prayer, I have to push off this heavy burden in order to appear happy and carry on. Sometimes I feel miserable, but emotionally it's a lot worse.
- [08:52]
Suzanne Rico
God, the story is as old as time. Separation, longing, a cry for connection to the one person who makes you whole.
- [09:03]
Gabrielle Lesser
It was put into my head from early childhood on that my mother put him first. And he made her, in the truest sense of the word, his partner. That wasn't always easy for us because he would demand much of her time. But I saw this font and accepted it. In fact, you know, she used to say to us, first comes my goddess.
- [09:37]
Unknown
Which is what she called him here, her little God.
- [09:40]
Gabrielle Lesser
And then comes nothing. Then comes my Godd again, and then come you.
- [09:50]
Suzanne Rico
As for Robert Lesser's mindset as he worked frantically far away from his family, only one cryptic letter survives, written in a time when people assumed Nazi spies were reading their every word.
- [10:04]
Unknown
Hilde. During the night, I took the train to Berlin. One has to have good nerves, and it has to be springtime so that one can find it bearable. And I let myself go into a feeling of suspension, between heaven and earth, of a threefold type, between homeland and the sinfulness of Berlin, between family life and profession, between you and me. Waiting to see each other once again.
- [10:39]
Suzanne Rico
At the abandoned mansion in Kassel, Gabi watches her mother struggling to keep it together.
- [10:45]
Unknown
Muti is so skinny. She is so tired. We eat lots of oatmeal because Muti can't find much else to eat. The stores are all burned down.
- [10:56]
Suzanne Rico
But as her girls sing into the spring air to keep their spirits up, Hilda slips farther away into a deep hole of depression.
- [11:06]
Unknown
All that pain. It's the pain of Cassila and the bombings. And then the pain of her difficult marriage and being alone.
- [11:16]
Suzanne Rico
Their mother's jagged emotional state is a tough subject for Heidi, who braved a burning man at 78, goes quiet when I ask about it. She's not crying. My aunt doesn't cry. But in her blue eyes I can see the little girl who needed the reassuring arms of a mother who had very little reassurance left to give. Then my old Tanta searches through her files for a story she wrote decades after her mother's death. And when she reads it, my mother. It breaks my heart.
- [11:50]
Gabrielle Lesser
I remember wanting to tell my mother what happened. Mama, listen. Mama, listen to me. I want to tell you. I remember that she only sat there staring straight ahead. I wanted her to turn her head and look at me so I would know definitively she was listening to me alone, not to some other voice inside. A voice louder than mine, more insistent than mine. I put my hand under her chin to turn her head to me. I remember the soft, warm skin. And I remember the pull of her chin away from me until she finally turned her head. I remember my joy as I felt her turn. And I remember panic as her eyes, unfocused, looked past me. What is it, child? She asked. But I could not remember what it was I wanted to tell her.
- [12:59]
Suzanne Rico
And what do you think she was thinking?
- [13:03]
Gabrielle Lesser
I think she was thinking about her impending death.
- [13:15]
Unknown
This is Peenemunde, Germany's top secret rocket research facility in the marshes and sand dunes near the Baltic Sea.
- [13:23]
Suzanne Rico
As Hilde is single, parenting five kids in a war zone, Robert Lesser is on a remote, windswept island, working on a cutting edge invention. Until now, Hitler has sent pilots in expensive airplanes to attack his enemies, chalking up horrific losses. But this new weapon, if my grandfather can get it to work, would give the Germans the ability to wage war remotely.
- [13:50]
Unknown
The resurgent military strength of the Third Reich is developing the strange new technology of the 20th century. Germany is moving toward the new era of robot war.
- [14:08]
Suzanne Rico
The strange new technology will go down in history as the first guided missile.
- [14:15]
Unknown
At test stands at Peenemunde and elsewhere in Germany, the birds are about to fly.
- [14:23]
Suzanne Rico
The test stand is a long inclined catapult, and the test weapon, filled with nearly a ton of concrete instead of explosives, is ready for launch. From the safety of a nearby bunker, my grandfather and his engineers watch as the V1 suddenly roars to life. It streaks into blue sky, flames trailing from its loudly pulsing engine. When its shadow casts a dark cross on the waves below, there's a moment of pure elation in the bunker. The wonder weapon works. But then, as the relieved engineers head back to the research facility, they hear a buzzing sound. Like Frankenstein, the monster that defied its creator. Their revenge weapon has taken on a life of its own. It's flying back toward the military base, primitive guidance system gone rogue. Overhead, the V1 begins to circle. Then it's pulsed. The jet engine quits and silently the 4,000 pound flying bomb dives toward the ground. When it hits, the wreckage tumbles straight toward the stunned scientists, skidding to a stop less than 100ft away. That, one of them quips, was almost the revenge of the revenge weapon.
- [16:04]
Unknown
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- [17:36]
Suzanne Rico
We are far, far north and that is the Baltic Sea. To see where that long ago test flight took place, Stephanie and I have driven over 500 miles. Pinimunde, a stone's throw from Poland and Lithuania to the east and Denmark and Sweden to the north, is a nice little tourist town now with beaches of fine white sand and air scrubbed clean by incessant wind. You can get yourself a bratwurst and a beer. Lots of kids here. But a hundred years ago, this was a desolate outpost. Rabbit farming was Peenemunde's main industry and I can see why. Fur lined everything was necessary. By 1940, the German military had taken over, building a testing ground for its new wonder weapons.
- [18:30]
Unknown
It was a power plant that generated everything that they needed for their work here.
- [18:38]
Suzanne Rico
That, that massive red brick power plant is the only intact structure from that time. Looking like a cross between a prison and a mental institution. It's now a museum. The two life size displays out front upping the dark tourism factor by a lot. Oh, it's a heavy looking thing. V1, our grandfather's flying bomb, olive green against blue sky, is forever frozen. Halfway up the catapult, its jet engine, an external cylinder perched on the back of the fuselage. Reminds me of a rifle scope. Doesn't look like it could fly.
- [19:16]
Unknown
You gotta get it going fast enough. Yeah, it has very stumpy little wings.
- [19:21]
Suzanne Rico
V1 looks like a child's toy next to the 50 foot tall V2, the world's first ballistic missile. And size isn't the only difference. Winged guided missiles have engines, while wingless ballistic missiles blast off with rockets, then fly on their own before coming silently back to earth under the pull of gravity. One ton of explosives in that rocket. Wernher von Braun's genius idea. Von Braun, who would later become known as the father of space travel, when he ran the program that put Americans on the moon, powered his silent supersonic V2s with alcohol and liquid oxygen.
- [20:05]
Unknown
And it went so fast that nobody knew it was coming. So you couldn't prepare for it. It just fell out of the sky onto wherever it fell and then kaboom.
- [20:17]
Suzanne Rico
Back in the day, the Peenemunda research facility was a place of secrets and tension, excitement and fear. With the scientists who worked there strongly divided. Tante Heidi gave us some background before we left for Germany.
- [20:31]
Gabrielle Lesser
The relationship between my father and von Braun dates way back. The V1 was developed in Peenemunde west and the V2 was developed in Penaminde East. And there was a fence in between.
- [20:47]
Suzanne Rico
Barbed razor wire split the research facility in two with signs warning, Betraten Streng verboten. Trespassing, strictly forbidden. There was no, Deutschland uber Alles. Team spirit here.
- [21:01]
Gabrielle Lesser
Lusse was with his own group, designing and redesigning the V1. Von Braun was with his draftsman.
- [21:11]
Suzanne Rico
And did they have a cordial relationship?
- [21:14]
Gabrielle Lesser
No, they had a competitive relationship. Very competitive.
- [21:18]
Suzanne Rico
Wernher von Braun was a wunderkind, a prodigy not unlike Robert Lesser had been years before. And in Peenemunde, their career trajectories were also miles apart. Lesser, a seasoned, opinionated aircraft designer in his 40s, has just barely survived a cutthroat power struggle, while von Braun, who has just turned 30, is a handsome, charming star on the rise. But both were fierce competitors, and my grandfather actually wrote about their team's rivalry years later in a speech. And of course, Tantahidi has the transcript.
- [21:57]
Unknown
You must have put that on like carbon copy paper.
- [22:01]
Suzanne Rico
I shall give you first hand impressions of the original V1 and V2. Oh, again. My cousin Thomas reads my grandfather's words.
- [22:09]
Unknown
When our first missiles roared east along the shore of the army reservation, the V2 people were incredulous at first, and then somewhat irritated. After all, this cheap winged bastard was no match for the giant multi billion marks V2.
- [22:31]
Suzanne Rico
Making this cheap winged bastard work has become my grandfather's obsession. Having narrowly escaped a war crimes trial, he knows that beating von Braun's big daddy ballistic missile into mass production will keep him in Luftwaffe chief Erhart Milch's good graces, not to mention Germany's desperate Fuhrers.
- [22:51]
Unknown
What I want, says Hitler, is annihilation, annihilating effect.
- [22:56]
Suzanne Rico
And Robert Lesser, over on his side of the fence, is so close to proof of concept. What kind of person making this noise? No one knows the dark history of Peenemunde better than Rudolf Satoff. An aeronautical Engineer in his mid-60s, Rudy looks like the German version of Tony Soprano. The sea eagle's trying to eat the. And like Tony, he learned a thing or two about survival of the fittest when he worked at Penamunda in the 70s and 80s. When the Soviets ran the base in the 90s, after communism crumbled and the base shut down, Rudy pivoted from science to history and started giving guided tours with Peenemunde. The world suddenly changed, he says, unlocking the gates of the defunct military outpost where it all went down. Stephanie and I load into his beat up East German minivan.
- [23:57]
Unknown
This is a DDR bus and we.
- [23:59]
Suzanne Rico
Drive along a river, passing a dilapidated guardhouse and lots of broken concrete slab.
- [24:08]
Unknown
So here's where you lived. So this is where our grandfather lived.
- [24:13]
Suzanne Rico
There's nothing much left. Just Ruins, trees and sky. But just when I'm thinking this tour's a bust, Rudy pulls over on a patch of faded weed pocked asphalt and takes a smart tablet from the glove compartment. A silent black and white film flickers to life, showing this same stretch of road, only the asphalt is shiny. Black men in military uniforms push a wooden cart, straining under the weight of a flying bomb as they struggle to move it onto a catapult, Rudy directs our attention to the landscape out the front windshield. There in the blowing sand, I can barely make out the catapult's remains sticking up like the spine of a dinosaur, each skeletal vertebrae slowly eaten away by time. Wow. The film now shows a group of scientists and engineers studying the V1. A man in a trench coat and brown fedora stands to one side, the look on his grainy face intent. When he turns toward the camera, Rudy zooms in and I find myself staring straight into my grandfather's eyes. That's Robert Lussa right there, you can see.
- [25:42]
Unknown
Yeah.
- [25:44]
Suzanne Rico
That'S the guy, confirms Rudy, who made the V1 fly.
- [25:49]
Unknown
Yeah, he was the key engineer.
- [25:52]
Yep.
- [25:54]
Suzanne Rico
Before we can really process all of this, Rudy gets out of the van and walks right into the desolate scene where that film was shot all those years ago. Passing gnarled trees bent sideways by centuries of wind, seabirds screeching overhead, Rudy leads us to what he wants us to see. Nestled in knee high marsh grass is vengeance weapon number one. The resting hulk of the world's first cruise missile lies on its side, looking old and harmless.
- [26:34]
Unknown
So here we are. We're sitting on a V1 that was used as one of the tests for the catapult.
- [26:41]
Suzanne Rico
Now it's used by the cormorants. Now it's shit on. How did that make you feel when he said yeah, yeah, I mean, Robert Lester should get the credit. And he was the one that solved the problems that made it work. The push pull of emotion is hard to explain. On one hand, Rudy's confirmation that our grandfather made this bomb fly is nauseating. On the other, it's weirdly vindicating. I don't know if it's because of mom, why that feels so emotionally significant. An uneasy sense of pride battles with a feeling I can only describe as shame. With thousands of deaths caused by the flying bomb, the weight of our grandfather's legacy is heavy. But there's also a part of me that wants to separate his brilliant engineering achievements from their brutal real world implications. Sitting next to my sister in the bleak birthplace of modern day missiles and Rockets. I think about the speech Robert Lesser gave and how he rationalized creating a weapon of mass destruction.
- [27:56]
Unknown
Many inventions have resulted in death and destruction, yet never have such considerations caused the inventor to destroy his creation. You can say we were all a bunch of fanatic Nazis because we pursued these Vergeltungswaffen so strongly. But we were patriots, we wanted to defend our country and we were inventors, we were creative.
- [28:27]
Suzanne Rico
I imagine my grandfather up there on some podium and I wonder, did his audience of fellow engineers applaud these words? And back when the V1 threw that first dark cross over the English Channel, did he have any doubts, concerns or second thoughts? Or was his engineer's mind so focused on winning the competition with Wernher von Braun that he just didn't care? 1943 defeat at Stalingrad. Bombing raids on the Reich, burning cities. The Nazi regime is under pressure. In February of 1943 as Robert Lesser scrambles to fix problems with the V1. Russia's victory over the German invaders makes world news. Trying to rally waning public enthusiasm for the war, Adolf Hitler's propaganda minister, Joseph Goebbels gives his infamous total war speech. Gaunt and square shouldered, the Nazi swastika black against his tan suit jacket, Goebbels riles up an audience of thousands. Do you want a war more total and radical than anything we can even imagine? He shakes his fist at the crowd and people jump to their feet, hands pointed skyward in the Heil Hitler salute. Goebbels finishes with the rallying cry, Rise up and let the storm break loose. This war cry wasn't just bluster from a man known for his persuasive public speaking skills. Total war meant the Nazis shut down non essential businesses, conscripted women into the war effort and drafted, young, old and disabled men. Germany was clearly losing. But way up north on the Baltic Sea there was cause for excitement. With the V1 guidance problems finally ironed out, Robert Lesser has proof of concept. A two ton unmanned bomb that can fly more than 150 miles. Enough range to reach England from the coast of France. But with Germany quickly running out of money, Adolf Hitler must decide where to spend every precious Reichsmark. And he must choose between two wonder weapons.
- [31:22]
Gabrielle Lesser
And so they decided to have a wet renin, a demonstration demonstration of the superiority of one or the other.
- [31:30]
Suzanne Rico
The Wetrinen between the V1 and the V2 takes place on a summer day in 1943. Hitler's appointed a 12 man commission to decide which revenge weapon to green light von Braun's huge Complicated rockets are impressive, but the small, simple V1 is cheaper and you can make 100 of them in the time it takes to make one V2. But the handsome, charismatic von Braun is determined not to lose.
- [32:00]
Unknown
The V2 people staged a big show of their missile and its many implements. Then came the launching demonstrations. And two V2s were fired successfully.
- [32:15]
Gabrielle Lesser
And it was straight up beautiful.
- [32:18]
Unknown
Then 3v1s failed.
- [32:23]
Gabrielle Lesser
They all fell in the ocean. They all tumbled.
- [32:28]
Unknown
The V1 was in grave danger.
- [32:32]
Gabrielle Lesser
My dad said, oh no, I mean, we've had it.
- [32:36]
Suzanne Rico
Afterwards, my grandfather waits nervously as Hitler's commissioners argue for hours behind closed doors. Finally, Albert Speer, Minister of Armaments, makes a decision. And surprisingly, he greenlights both projects. The V1's simplicity and bargain basement cost save my grandfather's job. But the race is far from over. Now the challenge is how to quickly produce thousands of complicated, brand new weapons to try to reverse Germany's losing course. And it's not like the engineers have their pick of missile manufacturers. There are no missile manufacturers. So the V1 production contract goes to.
- [33:23]
Unknown
Looks like it does it again.
- [33:27]
Suzanne Rico
Yep, the same engineers who've been cranking out VW Beetles are now going to crank out flying bombs. What could possibly go wrong?
- [33:38]
Unknown
Fuselages broke into pieces. Wings broke off. We saw thundering pulse jet engines hanging off the back of the missile like a cowboy riding a horse at a rodeo.
- [33:54]
Suzanne Rico
The first problem, several hundred V1s have been welded incorrectly. But even after that's fixed, missiles dived.
- [34:03]
Unknown
Into the water, rolled over the wings, hung in a 50 degree pitch angle in the air like wash on a clothesline.
- [34:13]
Suzanne Rico
Second problem, VW engineers use too thin sheet steel to build the wings.
- [34:20]
Unknown
One single little piece, the wing rib.
- [34:23]
Suzanne Rico
Led to on catapult, the wings ripping off of everyone. Of everyone.
- [34:28]
Unknown
It was a total failure.
- [34:30]
Suzanne Rico
Oh my God. Another 750 flying bombs hit the scrap heap.
- [34:35]
Unknown
We began to realize that we had hit an entirely new problem. That of reliability, or rather, unreliability of complex automatic equipment.
- [34:50]
Suzanne Rico
This is a eureka moment. One that will save the V1 program and change the trajectory of my grandfather's career. From the ashes of disaster, he and his team will create a mathematical formula that can predict the reliability of complex machines. Machines like guided missiles and airplanes. And remember that old saying, a chain is only as strong as its weakest link. Well, Lesser's Law, as the formula will become known, proves that a chain is actually weaker than its weakest link. And since Stephanie has one of her many degrees in mathematics, I'll let her.
- [35:33]
Unknown
Explain let's say we just have a really simple plane that has 100 parts and each part is 99% reliable. Then the whole system is 99% reliable, right? Wrong. What Robert Lesser figured out is that it's not the average that you want. You need the product of the reliability.
- [35:54]
Suzanne Rico
Of all those parts.
- [35:55]
Unknown
And you got to go back to your third grade math class. Product is just a fancy word for multiply. So you gotta multiply 99% a hundred times. Guess what? That equals less than 37% predicted reliability for that plane as a whole system. Nobody's getting on that plane with those kinds of odds.
- [36:20]
Suzanne Rico
Lusser's law is now a tried and true engineering principle. And it's actually what led to my grandfather being dubbed the man who calculated death.
- [36:34]
Unknown
He was not just calculating the death of his missile, he was calculating the death of people, of test pilots. Like before, they would just say, okay guys, hop in and let's see if it works. And the first test pilots were always the military guys, and those were expensive assets, right? So it was a pretty cool calculation of how they could save the plane and more importantly, how they could save their people.
- [37:01]
Suzanne Rico
Ironically, Robert Lesser would spend his post war career trying to save pilots and even astronauts instead of developing killing machines. I'll dive into that later in the podcast, but for now, let's go back to early 1944, when wings were ripping off the V1.
- [37:21]
Gabrielle Lesser
All of a sudden we all grasp the truth.
- [37:27]
Suzanne Rico
The mathematical truth of Lesser's law applied to the flying bomb is what helps it become reliable enough to deploy. By June of 1944, the Germans have amassed thousands of them on the coast of France. But the delays caused by their early reliability problems will cost the Nazis dearly. Because as they prepare their surprise attack, the Allies are preparing a surprise of their own.
- [37:56]
Unknown
D day minus one. Invasion forces began embarking in England. Destination Normandy. Operation Overlord, the code name for the invasion, was close at hand.
- [38:10]
Suzanne Rico
On June 6, 4,000 Allied ships and boats head into the English Channel.
- [38:16]
Unknown
One week later, on June 13, 1944, on the channel coast of Europe, the age of the missile dawns. Vergeltung eins vengeance weapon number 1v1 is fired against England by Adolf Hitler.
- [38:37]
Suzanne Rico
Robert Lusser wins the competition with Wernher von Braun. All right, the V2 rocket won't be reliable enough to launch for another three months. But the price of my grandfather's success is that the V1 is now going to bomb the hell out of the country where he studied English as a boy. It was the 13th of June, just before dawn, sleeping Britons are awakened by a buzzing noise. In the black sky above London, we saw what appeared to be a small plane and it appeared to be on fire.
- [39:13]
Unknown
That's the engine with the burning fuel coming out the back.
- [39:19]
Suzanne Rico
And it was sort of chug, chugging along.
- [39:21]
Unknown
They made a terrible noise, a dreadful noise, roaring noise.
- [39:31]
Suzanne Rico
The English would dub it the buzz bomb.
- [39:34]
Unknown
That awful what they used for me.
- [39:39]
Suzanne Rico
Getting louder and louder and louder. Suddenly the motor stopped and you knew.
- [39:46]
Gabrielle Lesser
That when it stopped, it had turned and it was going to come down.
- [39:51]
Suzanne Rico
And then you'd wait, wait, wait. Please, please, please, please, please let the bomb go over. Don't let it fall on us.
- [39:59]
Gabrielle Lesser
And then there was this almighty bang.
- [40:10]
Suzanne Rico
That first V1 kills six people. When I came back, the bus stop where I had been waiting was just a great big hole. And of course the three people who I'd been waiting with must have all been blown up just like that. Dozens are injured, hundreds left homeless. It's quite extraordinary how close death came to everybody really, in those days. Three nights later, the number of flying bombs that hit England grows from 1 to over 100. Hitler's total war is on. Coming up on the man who Calculated Death.
- [41:03]
Unknown
They just stuffed him in that underground cavern and they never saw the light of day again.
- [41:10]
Gabrielle Lesser
Dear Director Lusser, I take this occasion as a new German weapon daily devastates the enemy. To express my deepest thanks to you, the creator of this gigantic idea.
- [41:26]
Suzanne Rico
12577.
- [41:28]
Unknown
Correct.
- [41:28]
Suzanne Rico
And is that an A?
- [41:29]
Gabrielle Lesser
A A is for.
- [41:31]
Suzanne Rico
A is for Alex. Auschwitz.
- [41:34]
Unknown
It was brutal. It was pure power and terror.
- [41:39]
Suzanne Rico
I think you know my history, right? Your history? Uh huh. I don't know anything about you. Oh, your background. I was going to ask you that question. Wow. What interest do you have in this that you wanted to talk to me? That's next time on the man who Calculated Death, an original series from Discount Sushi, a novel. The show is written, reported and produced by me, Suzanne Rico. And if you're enjoying it, please rate and review wherever you get your podcasts. For more information, including family photos, videos and archival material, go to the man who Calculated Death. Dot com. Thanks so much for listening.