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Just a Few Scraps

from Sputnik 1 by Nick Jaffe

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about

In their struggle to defend the USSR and defeat Nazi fascism the Red Army engaged 90% of Hitler’s forces and lost over 20 million soldiers and civilians. Even as the final battles of WWII in Europe were still underway, it was clear that the United States and Britain, and the USSR would soon once again be military and political enemies. In the wake of the terror bombing of German and Japanese cities by the British and U.S. bomber forces and the nuclear attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the Soviets had good reason to fear American plans for a pre-emptive attack on the USSR.

As British, U.S. and Soviet forces occupied Germany both sides placed a very high importance on obtaining German rocket technology and know-how. The German rocketry program was the most advanced in the world. Most of the German engineering leadership chose to surrender to the Americans and they brought with them much of the infrastructure of the A-4 (V2) program and many leading German engineers went on to play central roles in the U.S. space program. At the rocket plant at Nordhausen, amidst the corpses of hundreds of murdered slave laborers, American forces recovered parts to construct over 100 A-4 rockets. These were promptly shipped to the U.S.

By the time Soviet forces occupied the area they found little of military or scientific value and only captured a small number of mid-level engineers. (Siddiqi, Sputnik and the Soviet Space Challenge, p. 24). A group of Soviet engineers, including future Chief Designer Sergey Korolev, were sent to Germany in the months after the war to find out what they could about the German's A-4 rocket. They spent many months picking through the wreckage of assembly and launch sites. There was a terrible bitterness among the Soviet engineers born of the fact that in spite of the terrible sacrifices the USSR had made to defeat Nazism, when it came to this critical defense technology they found themselves left with just a few scraps.

Pictured above is a chamber in the Nordhausen underground rocket assembly complex.

credits

from Sputnik 1, released October 15, 2010
Composed, performed, recorded and mixed by Nick Jaffe. Mastered by Jason Ward at Chicago Mastering.

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Nick Jaffe Chicago, Illinois

Just Nick (Nick Jaffe) is a musician, recording engineer, teacher and editor. Nick plays guitar and occasionally other things, with a wide variety of projects and artists. He has performed with Common, Dwele, Estelle and Bilal and has done music for film and advertisingl. His solo work is available here. ... more

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