Author Archive: Glenn Reynolds

November 15, 2026

LIFE IN THE 21ST CENTURY:

UPDATE: They hate him because they hate excellence, and they hate things and people they can’t control.

UPDATE (From Ed):

Posted at 1:44 pm by Glenn Reynolds on Nov 15th, 2026

NEWS FROM 1945: NASA’s moon rocket was built under a former Nazi scientist who developed Hitler’s V-2 missiles. Once the rockets are up, who cares where they come down? That’s not my department, says Wernher von Braun.. (Says Tom Lehrer.)

Of course, I remember Freeman Dyson saying that the V-2 was seriously damaging to the Germans. It cost more to build than a bomber, was less accurate, and unlike a bomber wasn’t good for more than one mission.

UPDATE (From Ed): In his 2017 book The Second World Wars, Victor Davis Hanson wrote:

The comparison with traditional bombers was instructive. Just four or five large Allied bombing raids late in the war (500 planes carrying 4,000 pounds of ordnance each) delivered as much explosive as all of the V-2 launches combined. Yet both V-weapons proved evolutionary in a way that piston- and propeller-driven bombers did not. The V-weapons were respectively the antecedents of the late twentieth-century cruise missile and Cold War intercontinental ballistic rocket. Given the programs’ huge research and development budgets and their lack of precision targeting and relatively small payloads, what supported the use of at least the V-1 flying bomb (but not the far more expensive V-2 rocket) was its psychological effect upon the Allies in late 1944, when they were confident of victory. The vengeance weapons were launched at a time when Germany was short of trained pilots and the fuel to train them, and they were the only viable mechanisms for both delivering ordnance over enemy targets and diverting Allied raids away from German cities.

Nevertheless, frightening though the V-weapons were, had Hitler earlier invested commensurate resources in a long-range strategic bomber, he would have had far more chance of causing havoc over Britain. Alternatively, the postwar US Strategic Bombing Survey estimated that the huge resources devoted to the V-weapons program could have produced an additional twenty-four thousand fighters. German sources put the costs of the programs somewhat higher, and suggest that just for the full investment and production costs of making, for example, five thousand V-2s at twenty thousand man-hours per rocket, the Luftwaffe might have instead built well over twenty-five thousand additional Fw 190 top fighters—a figure greater than the twenty thousand 190s that were built—and that might have changed the air war over Germany, had the planes been supplied with good pilots and adequate fuel.

The German Supreme Command of the Armed Forces (OKW) was originally not told of the extent of the V-weapon programs. But even when later briefed on both the V-1 and V-2 programs, it seemed, quite understandably, underwhelmed, concluding that “the quantity of explosive which can be delivered daily is less than that which could be dropped in a major air attack.” Alternatively, had Hitler canceled the V-2 program and used its resources to focus solely on the V-1s, he might have produced well over a hundred thousand more such cruise missiles, with a far greater likelihood of inciting terror among the British population. The misplacement of resources into the V-2 program, as in a litany of other grandiose German projects, proved a disaster of enormous proportions for the Wehrmacht that even today is not fully appreciated.

A presenter in this 2023 Imperial War Museum video on the V-2 adds, “The V2 project had become central to the Nazi regime and the SS mobilized thousands of concentration camp prisoners to build the factory and the rockets. These prisoners face terrible conditions in which their guards neglect was matched only by their brutality. In all some 60,000 people were deported to the concentration camps, [and] at least twenty thousand died. The V2 killed thousands of people in London,  Paris, Brussels, Antwerp, and elsewhere. But many more people died making these weapons.  When we look at the V2 we should remember that its technological achievement was built on the slaughter and cruelty of the Nazi regime.”

Posted at 1:14 pm by Glenn Reynolds on Nov 15th, 2026

A FRIEND COMMENTS THAT HE IS A LITERAL BOND VILLAIN.

Posted at 9:50 am by Glenn Reynolds on Nov 15th, 2026

November 14, 2026

OPEN THREAD: Party on.

Posted at 9:30 pm by Glenn Reynolds on Nov 14th, 2026
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