![]() The General Electric Company was responsible for preparing rockets at White Sands under the Army’s Hermes program, which, following the discovery of the German rocket program in 1943, was initiated to develop guided missiles. But they weren’t put in charge of the V-2 launches. The von Braun group was housed at Fort Bliss outside El Paso, just across the Texas line. A group of about 125, led by Wernher von Braun, had been imported under Project Paperclip, which aimed to transfer German technological knowledge to the U.S. Army Ordnance teams evacuated components for a hundred V-2s and shipped them off to the Southwest desert to gain experience operating the world’s first ballistic missile.Īssisting in the first American launch were some of the very German rocket engineers who had designed the rocket used to kill people in Paris, London and Antwerp. After the war was over, and before the Soviets could move into their designated occupation zone, U.S. The guidance system failed, a fin came off, and the rocket-after reaching an altitude of only 3.4 miles-crashed in the desert.Īlmost exactly one year earlier, American troops had overrun the underground Mittelwerk V-weapons production plant in central Germany, in the process liberating several hundred very sick concentration camp prisoners in the adjacent camp and in the nearby city of Nordhausen. ![]() ![]() Army’s new White Sands Proving Ground in south-central New Mexico. At 2:47 on the afternoon of Tuesday, April 16, 1946, a captured Nazi V-2 missile ascended from the U.S. ![]()
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