Race to the Moon: America’s Duel with the Soviets

Race to the Moon traces the story of how America got to the moon before Communist Russia. The book opens with an appeal by President John F. Kennedy for winning the space race, then flashes back to World War II and traces the history of rocket development by the Germans, who were 25 years ahead of all other nations in rocket R&D. The book tells of feuds among Nazi leaders about who should control the rocket programme, the struggles of German space scientists to persuade Nazi leadership to invest in rocket research, and, finally, the hundreds of individual espionage efforts that went into smuggling information about this new technology out of the Reich and into the hands of British Intelligence. Breuer tells of how young US army officers discovered an underground cache of long-range rockets toward the end of the war and managed to sneak them to America. These same young Americans (and others) mounted a Germany-wide search for rocket scientists, and managed to locate 200 of them, offer them contracts, and bring them and their families to the United States under top-secret security. These German scientists, headed by 31-year-old Wernher von Braun, led America’s rocket research and development during the Cold War and finally took NASA to a triumphant moon landing.