[Silverleaf]

My dear friend Petre, hearing his voice calms my jangled nerves and I think of how far we've come...

We grew up in the same neighborhood and both had a fascination for rocketry and the sea. My father worked with Johannes Winkler, a member of the Verein fur Raumschiffahrt - Society for Space Travel (VfR) which included other members with names like Valier, Hohmann, Oberth, Esnault-Pelterie and Rynin. These were the luminaries of early rocketry research in Germany in 1927. In 1931 at the ripe age of 17, Petre and I started helping Winkler with work on his HW-1 (Huckel-Winkler I), which had a central combustion chamber surrounded by three cylindrical tanks, one containing liquid oxygen, the second containing pressurized liquid methane and the third pressurized nitrogen gas. In retrospect, shaped liked a triangular prism, it looked nothing like the V2 would.

On March 14, 1931 Johannes recorded the following:

"By 4:45 pm, everything was ready for me to throw the ignition switch. It was an exalting and blissful moment when the apparatus rose from the launching table and climbed up with a rumbling, metallic hiss. Its motion was very steady. At a certain height, the apparatus turned over further further into the horizontal, then maintained this direction for some time and finally landed at a distance of nearly 200 meters from the launching point".

For Petre and I, it was exhilarating to watch German technology perform what we thought was the first rocket flight in history. Later we learned that Goddard had flown rockets in 1926 with great success.

***

As we were helping clean up the remains of the debris, Petre caught my arm and pointed to the river. There a barge was creeping along carrying an old submarine. Without a glance back we scurried down to the water's edge to see her up close.

"Ahoy, where's she going?" Petre yelled. "Up for repairs lads, she's still got life just needs a little TLC". The old sailor winked at us. I whistled and admired her lines. Painted on the side was U162. When she had drifted out of sight round the bend we headed back to our task, distracted throughout we finished with a bit of yelling from Winkler.

Later that night as we sat on the dock with our feet in the river, Petre looked at me and said "Someday I'll be on one of those boats, under the water slipping silently through the night. Just think of it, noone to tell you where to go, what to do and you can disappear whenever you like". "Aye my friend, would be a great life". I dreamt that night of visiting strange lands and being admired by everyone when we pulled into port.

Little did I know...