When Field Marshal Erwin Rommel, the legendary "Desert Fox", came to German-occupied France in late 1943 to assume command of Wehrmacht beach defenses along the northern French coast, he did so amidst an unshakable fear the Allies might use rockets to smash the concrete bunkers which the Germans had built to protect their coastal artillery positions. The field marshal would have been struck blind with panic, then, had he known about the extent to which U.S. and British engineers had improved both the range and the destructive capabilities of Allied surface-to-surface rockets. The rocket designs that just a few years earlier had seemed revolutionary were now as archaic as a slingshot. In the deserts of the American Southwest, the Welsh countryside of Britain, the Australian Outback, and the Canadian Rockies a new generation of strategic ballistic rockets was undergoing its first series of field tests; soon it would be possible(at least in theory) to hit targets in Germany directly from the continental United States.

And as if the destructive potential of Allied strategic rockets wasn't deadly enough in the first place, an even more lethal element was waiting to be added into the mix. A sub-section of the American rocket development program was busy at work searching for a means of blending the known power of long-range missiles with the then-untapped potential destructive force of the atomic bomb. They weren't the first to consider such an idea-- the Germans had been flirting with it from the earliest days of the V-weapons project --but they were measurably closer to achieving it than their Nazi counterparts. While the materials necessary to achieve a practical atomic weapons capability were becoming increasingly scarce for the Third Reich's scientists and engineers, American missile researchers were being given a cornucopia of new resources to work with in their own efforts. Indeed, in some instances it felt like there was more material to be used by the U.S. rocket program than there were people to use it.

While the invention of a long-range ballistic missile with an atomic warhead would have to wait until after Nazi Germany's final defeat, the knowledge gained in the effort to develop such a weapon would turn out to have far-reaching benefits for Allied strategic planners when the moment came for a final reckoning with Japan-- and also for those in the science community who were already starting to look ahead to the postwar world.

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The first confirmed kill of an enemy aircraft by an air-to-air rocket in the history of warfare was recorded on March 28th, 1944 by a MiG-3 pilot over Leningrad(now St. Petersburg) during a German bombing raid on the newly liberated city. The plane shot down was a Heinkel He- 111 bomber which crashed and burned when its right engine was hit by a Krasnyy Oktyabr("Red October") 12-pound air-to-air rocket; according to official Soviet air force records the engine literally disintegrated on impact. Four of the Heinkel's five-man flight crew perished in the fire that swept through the plane after the rocket struck; the lone crewman who managed to escape the doomed bomber was lynched by Soviet civilians the minute his parachute touched the ground. The pilot of the MiG plane which fired the fatal rocket that shot down the Heinkel was awarded the Order of Lenin and personally congratulated by Stalin on his incredible historic feat.

While not quite the feat of dead-eye marksmanship Kremlin propaganda made it out to be(in fact, it took five tries to score the hit that took down the He-111), that first kill did in fact prove to be the beginning of a new era in aerial warfare. Three days after the He-111 shootdown the first U.S. air combat kill by rocket was notched by an F6F Hellcat pilot when he took out a Japanese Mitsubishi G4M bomber that was attempting to raid an Allied munitions dump in New Guinea. The G4M, hit dead center by two Conestoga 9-pound air-to-air rockets, disintegrated in a sudden burst of flame and debris. Gone with it were the last shreds of doubt regarding the usefulness of rockets as an air-to-air combat weapon.

Seeing the handwriting on the wall, Japanese and German technicians began working feverishly to try to accelerate the development of their own countries' air-to-air rocket systems, but they were hopelessly behind the curve. The first prototype of a German air-to-air rocket wasn't even test- fired until early May of 1944, less than a month before D-Day. By then the tide of the war was turning irrevocably against Germany; with the Soviets having prevailed at the Battle of Kursk and Anglo-American troops steadily pushing their way up the Italian peninsula, the Nazis were largely on the defensive and the question seemed to be less if the Third Reich would fall than when and how it would do so or who would administer the lethal blow. But in one respect, German air-to-air rocket developers were somewhat more fortunate than their Japanese brethren: no German pilots ever died as the result of a failed test. The first Japanese air-to-air rocket test firing, conducted in mid-May of 1944, ended in disaster when the aircraft carrying out the test exploded in midair after one of the rockets malfunctioned and prematurely detonated.

For Mussolini the window of opportunity for even starting to get into the rocket development race had already long ago slammed shut. For all the rhetoric about a "Pact of Steel" between Rome and Berlin, the hard fact of the matter was that the Nazis had never totally trusted the Duce; they had been reluctant to share the secrets of their rocket research with him, and even when they did share their knowledge with him, he hadn't known what to do with it. His top military advisors were still debating about the merits and dangers of rockets as a weapon when he was overthrown in July of 1943, and the RSI puppet state founded in German-occupied northern Italy after Mussolini's rescue by the SS lacked the resources to pursue even the most rudimentary research into rocket technology. In Allied-controlled southern Italy, on the other hand, the Badoglio government received substantial aid from Britain and the United States in setting up a crash rocket program in the spring of 1944; by the time the D-Day invasion was launched Badoglio's army had successfully test-fired a half-dozen medium range rockets and two types of air-to-air rocket were in service with the Italian air force.

D-Day itself saw the Allied air forces utilize rocket technology in lethally effective ways from the minute the first troops started hitting the beaches. The massive concrete coastal gun emplacements the Nazis had installed on the beaches were sitting ducks for American and British air- to-ground rockets, while most of the few Luftwaffe fighters that dared to venture near the Allied landing zones were shot down by air-to-air rockets before the German pilots even had time to blink. As the Anglo-American and Free French armies advanced further into the French interior, they did so with Allied rocket fire backing them up every step of the way; the Germans found it embarrassing-- and ironic --to have the same technology that they had pioneered to help them win the war now being used to push them towards final defeat.

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The shock of the Normandy invasion had barely started to wear off for the Germans when the Red Army launched Operation Bagration, a multi- front offensive with the tactical objective of pushing the Nazis out of the Soviet Union once and for all and the strategic aim of securing some bridgeheads for the eventual Soviet invasion of the Third Reich. Though the Nazis' V-weapons launch sites on the Eastern Front weren't explicitly mentioned in Stalin's order to start the campaign, every Red Army soldier and officer understood the elimination of these launch sites was a major priority; the Red Air Force for its part did everything it could to speed up that elimination, bombing V-1 and V-2 bases at every opportunity.

The final V-1 strike on Moscow of the Second World War took place on June 28th, 1944, six days after Operation Bagration began; the final V-2 attack was conducted three weeks later. These strikes accomplished very little other than to reinforce Soviet hatred of the Nazis and give the impression to the rest of the Allied world that the Third Reich was on its last legs. And in truth the German war machine had been seriously weakened by Hitler's fanatic obsession with developing "wonder weapons" at the expense of production of the more basic types of armaments needed to successfully prosecute a war.

This had not been the final outcome Hitler had envisioned when he first conceived the idea of the V-weapons program. He'd been convinced the V-1 and V-2 would make him the undisputed master of all Europe, and in their planned successor the V-3 he saw the perfect tool with which to subjugate the United States. Instead, the Allies were using rockets to smash the Third Reich to pieces; the Soviets in particular were getting ready to inflict on Berlin the same level of devastation that the Nazis had wreaked on Moscow. In a top secret meeting of his war council on July 28th, 1944 Stalin issued a directive authorizing the Red Army to begin rocket attacks on German cities as soon as its artillery units were within firing range. At the top of the list of cities which were to be leveled by Soviet rocketeers was Berlin-- and the rocket units were eagerly looking forward to carrying out their orders. The Third Reich was about to get a copious and brutal dose of the same medicine it had once administered to Moscow and London...

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