Tag: rf/HOB

When designer and technologist Matt Jones joined the similarly skilled Jack Schulze and Matt Webb in their company, they resolved to change the company’s name to reflect this new partnership, and asked me if I had any ideas for a name. I suggested the British Experimental Rocket Group, which would shorten to BERG.

I still have a white lab coat embroidered with the BERG logo and my surname. They only made two of the personalised white coats. William Gibson has the other one.

Professor Bernard Quatermass is the director of the British Experimental Rocket Group. A dream of a British space programme that survived the Ministry of Supply’s failure to pay for the future.

An unproduced prequel to the sequence would have seen Quatermass travelling to 1930s Nazi Germany and meeting Wernher von Braun, thereby setting the young Quatermass on his path towards the British Experimental Rocket Group and a life of horror.

Hanna Reitsch died in 1979, the year of the final QUATERMASS, of a heart attack, just as Quatermass himself expires. A British test pilot who knew her, Eric Brown, believed she’d finally taken the suicide pill Hitler gave her. No post-mortem was performed.

Eric Brown was the only Allied pilot to test-fly a Komet with the rocket motor on. “I remember watching the ground crew very carefully before take-off, wondering if they thought they were waving goodbye to me forever or whether they thought this thing was going to return. The noise it made was absolutely thunderous.”

A fluent speaker of German, he also conducted technical interviews with Wernher von Braun before the Nuremberg trials.

During an interview in the 1970s, Hanna Reitsch said, “I asked Hermann Göring one day, “What is this I am hearing that Germany is killing Jews?” Göring responded angrily, ‘A totally outrageous lie made up by the British and American press. It will be used as a rope to hang us someday if we lose the war.'”

In QUATERMASS AND THE PIT, military advisor Colonel Breen insists over and over again that the bone-filled spaceship in the mud is a failed wartime German propaganda exercise.

Hanna Reitsch set a few dozen records, was the world’s first female helicopter pilot, the only woman to have ever flown a rocket plane (even if you don’t count the converted V-1, she flew the bizarre Messerschmitt Me 163 Komet, which could move at 700 mph), and was one of the last people to see Hitler alive. He gave her a suicide pill.

Not having taken it, her main criticism of Hitler following his death and her capture was that he was incompetent.

She went on to spend time in India, the US (she met JFK at the White House) and Ghana, where she became very close with Kwame Nkrumah.

There was a piloted V-1, called a Reichenberg. Pilot Hanna Reitsch won an Iron Cross for figuring out how to land it without dying. Which is weird, really, as she intended for pilots to use them as suicide bombs. She pitched the idea, helpfully named “Operation Suicide,” to Hitler in 1944.

Details are confused on this. At one point, the idea was that the Reichenberg would be launched off the wing of a heavy plane, the pilot would aim the thing, set the target, and bail out. But Operation Suicide required them to stay in the plane. It remains unclear why they would need a procedure to land the Reichenberg after Reitsch and her team took the undercarriage off the thing.

It is said that up to a third of central London was destroyed during the Blitz (1940-41), over a million houses turned into ruins. The Blitz was conducted by German bomber planes. Where I live in south east England, you can see, all over the place, the remains of gun emplacements where the British would attempt to shoot the Germans out of the sky before they reached London.

The V-1 and V-2 rocket bombs came in 1944. Up to a hundred V-1s a day were launched at south-east England at their peak.