Supersonic Nazi Vengeance: V2 Rocket (Part 1)
Cautionary Tales with Tim Harford
Pushkin Industries
4.7 • 6.4K Ratings
🗓️ 2 February 2024
⏱️ 39 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
At the height of World War Two, British intelligence began receiving reports that the enemy was developing a rocket weapon. The idea seemed fantastical — resources in Nazi Germany were scarce and a rocket-building program defied economic logic.
But one intelligence chief took the reports of a rocket weapon seriously and he managed to convince Winston Churchill to heed the threat too. The British Prime Minister gave the order to bomb Germany’s rocket factory to rubble, and 600 bomber planes embarked on a full-scale attempt to obliterate it.
From the air, the damage appeared devastating. The British thought they had succeeded in crushing the rocket-building program. But they were wrong.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Pushkin |
| 0:09.0 | Tim Harford here, host of the Cautionary Tales podcast, have just released a brand new two-parter on an aviation |
| 0:16.0 | catastrophe. |
| 0:17.0 | Why did the Tenerife Airport disaster happen? |
| 0:20.2 | And given that the crash took place on the ground, why didn't more people escape? |
| 0:24.7 | This astonishing, tragic, and as always instructive two-part story is available now, |
| 0:30.4 | ad free exclusively on Pushkin Plus. Sign up on the cautionary tales Apple Podcast Show |
| 0:35.5 | page or at Pushkin. F.M. slash Plus. |
| 0:41.7 | If you are a loyal Pushkin Plus subscriber, thank you so much. |
| 0:47.0 | We're really grateful for your support for the show, which helps us give you the storytelling, the acting, the research and the sound design we strive for on cautionary tales. |
| 0:57.5 | And we hope you're gripped by the two-part story of the Tenerife Air Disaster we recently released on the Pushkin Plus feed. |
| 1:05.0 | Now, if you are not a Pushkin Plus subscriber, not to worry, we know it's not for everyone and we still love you. |
| 1:15.0 | And as a token of that affection, we're releasing our epic trilogy about the V2 Rocket |
| 1:22.0 | previously only available on Pushkin Plus. |
| 1:26.2 | I first started working on this story back in the spring of 2022. |
| 1:31.3 | It was a real labour of love, initially sparked by curiosity about a strange statistic my producer Ryan |
| 1:37.7 | Dilly had told me, and then just going deeper and deeper and |
| 1:43.0 | darker and darker too. |
| 1:45.3 | There is tragedy. |
| 1:46.6 | There is moral complexity, |
| 1:48.2 | brilliance, courage, |
| 1:50.1 | pure evil. |
... |
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