NAZI SECRET WEAPONS
Attack on America
German aircraft designers did conceive a number of other unorthodox flying machines. The Focke-Wulf Triebflugel, a vertical takeoff and landing aircraft, had a trio of wings that rotated around the fuselage, driven by small rocket engines or a fuselage-mounted takeoff booster. Once the wings were spinning, the aircraft would have been powered by ramjets, which only operate at high speeds. Envisioned as a high-speed fighter-interceptor, the Triebflugel hadn’t progressed beyond wind-tunnel tests when the war ended. Frustrated by the imprecision of their missiles, which lacked guidance systems, the Germans also developed the Fi 103R-4, code-named Reichenberg, a piloted version of the V-1 flying bomb, presumably for kamikaze-style pinpoint attacks on targets such as Buckingham Palace. At war’s end, Allied troops also found drawings of a non-suicidal variation of that idea called the Silent Dart, a glider designed to be released from a larger aircraft. The pilot would dive toward the target, release a 1,000-kilogram bomb, and inflate a huge balloon that—at least in theory—would lift the glider above the blast so that it could float to safety.
Both Hitler and Hermann Goring, head of the Luftwaffe, were obsessed with finding a way to attack the United States, which was out of the reach of existing Nazi bombers. They dispatched Willy Messerschmitt, Reimar and Walter Horten and other top German aircraft designers on a quest to build an “America Bomber” capable of crossing the Atlantic. To that end, the Hortens came up with the Ho 18 intercontinental bomber, a larger version of their Ho 229 flying wing, powered by six turbojet engines and designed to race across the Atlantic at supersonic speeds. The war ended before they could build a prototype.
 Another, even more outré contender for the same mission was Eugen Sänger’s Silbervogel (“Silverbird”), a design for a rocket-powered suborbital bomber. After being launched from a rail track by a rocket-powered sled, the Silbervogel would have fired its own rocket engine and climbed into the upper atmosphere. It then would have descended until it hit a layer of denser air about 25 miles up, and ricocheted back up from that layer—“like a flat stone skipping across a lake,” as Myhra explains. It would have bounced in this fashion across the Atlantic to attack New York, and then continued westward until it finally landed in Japanese-controlled territory in the Pacific. “It was a good concept,” Myhra says. “The big hang-up was that he needed a huge, specialized rocket motor, which would have taken more years of research and development. They didn’t have that much time.”
The Germans also aimed to attack the United States from offshore. According to James Duffy’s 2004 book Target America: Hitler’s Plan to Attack the United States, Bodo Lafferentz, a Nazi official who also had a hand in developing the Volkswagen (“people’s car”), concocted a secret plan to put V-2 missiles inside giant waterproof canisters and have U-Boats tow them to U.S. coastal waters. There, the canisters would be pointed skyward and opened, turning them into launch pads for missiles aimed at U.S. cities. The Germans actually began to build the canisters at a Baltic shipyard, but before they could be completed, the Russians captured the site in April 1945.
 Of the German secret weapons projects whose existence is documented, many never got past the drawing board—often for good reason. One such project was the solar mirror gun, devised by German scientists at a research center in Hillersleben, which would have been several miles long and mounted on an orbiting space station 5,100 miles up. According to a 1945 Time magazine report, the scientists, when questioned about the project by skeptical Allied officers, coolly assured them that it could have been accomplished—that is, within 50 to 100 years.
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