"A Look Back at Crossbow" is a 10-minute short documentary. It was made in 1965 in connection with MGM's feature film of the same year "Operation Crossbow." That film about World War II was made in England and had a cast of notable actors of the day. The story is fictitious but the operation, many of the events and some of the people were real.
Operation Crossbow was the later code name for the two-year Allied effort to stop the German rocket and long-range bombing projects. It began in early 1943 when aerial photos showed a German V-2 rocket site in northern France.
After the war, and through the 1950s, there was a general sense in the U.S. – and perhaps much of the world – that the Germans were generally superior in the fields of science and engineering. I grew up with that notion. I served in the U.S. Army in Germany during the Cold War. After WW II, the Germans continued to excel in cameras, tape recorders, other electronic production and automobiles. But, with the passage of time and greater awareness of that history, we today know more about the seeming German prowess in the sciences.
This short film, "Looking Back," was an early documentary that helps correct such misconceptions. It shows that most of the technology and development in the German rocket program had been pioneered almost two decades before by an American scientist. Robert H. Goddard (1882-1945) launched the world's first liquid-fueled rocket in March 1926. He and his team had launched 34 rockets from then until 1941. Today, Goddard is recognized as the father of modern rocketry and a pioneer of the space age. How ironic that when he died in 1945, many still doubted and dismissed him and his work. He was working with grant monies and obtained more than 200 patents. But much of his work took place during the depression. And, no one – the U.S. government included, seemed interested in all the possibilities that Goddard had envisioned from rocket science and achievements.
This short documentary has some early film clips of Goddard's first attempts to launch rockets. One can see these today on YouTube. The film notes that Germany collected all of the Goddard research achievements for a mere 10 cents per copy from the U.S. Patent Office. And, Adolf Hitler had his Nazi regime embark on a huge R&D program for weapons superiority shortly after he came to power in 1932. This interesting short film is a bonus on my DVD of the feature film.
An interesting side note is that when Goddard launched the first liquid- fueled rocket in 1926, the man who would become the chief scientist of the Nazi rocket programs was 14 years old. Werner von Braun had become fascinated with the prospects of space travel and was just "launching" into serious study of physics and mathematics. Von Braun used much of Goddard's work in the building of Germany's V-2 rocket. Von Braun became the scientific head of the Pennemünde rocket center. He was both a Nazi and member of the SS. And, he was arrested by the Gestapo and jailed for two weeks until Albert Speer got Hitler to release him for his critical work on the rocket program. At the end of the war, he led several of his top scientists to surrender to the U.S. Von Braun later headed the U.S. Army's Redstone missile arsenal. And, after NASA was created in 1957, Von Braun became the first director of the Marshall Space Flight Center when it opened in 1960. In 1971, when Von Braun was assigned to NASA in Washington, D.C., I attended a glowing talk he gave about the future of space travel and exploration. I was able to meet Von Braun, the father of space travel, before he died of cancer just a few years later.