On October 3, 1942, an A4 rocket left Test Stand VII at Peenemunde on the Baltic coast, climbed to about 84.5 kilometres and came down roughly 147 kilometres away in the sea. Nothing built by anyone had been that high. The rocket was 14 metres long, weighed about 12.5 tonnes at launch, burned liquid oxygen with 75 per cent ethanol, and ran its engine for about 65 seconds.
Wernher von Braun had been working on liquid-fuelled rockets since 1930, first at the army proving ground at Kummersdorf and then from 1937 at Peenemunde, where the army gave him a site on the island of Usedom and a budget that reached about 550 million Reichsmarks by 1944. The A4 was a weapon from the start, which is why the army paid for it and why it was given the name Vergeltungswaffe 2 in 1944.
Getting it to fly took years of failure. Engines exploded on the stand. The early airframes tumbled. The team worked through several guidance systems before settling on a gyroscopic autopilot driving graphite vanes in the exhaust, and even after the October flight the rockets stayed unreliable in a way that only partly improved: roughly a third of those fired operationally failed in flight or on the pad.
The missile entered service in September 1944, and about 3,000 were launched, mostly at London, Antwerp and Liege. It arrived at supersonic speed with no warning. No defence was possible. It killed about 9,000 civilians. More people died making it than were killed by it. Roughly 20,000 forced labourers, most of them from the Mittelbau-Dora camp, died in the tunnels where production was moved in 1944.
Both sides took the technology home. von Braun and about 1,600 of his team went to the United States under Operation Paperclip, and the A4 became the basis of the Redstone and Jupiter missiles. The Soviet Union took the plant, the drawings and a number of engineers. The R-7 that put Sputnik in orbit in 1957 and Gagarin in space in 1961 descends from the same design line.