Nonetheless, the V-weapon bombardment of London and the South East demoralised  public and politicians alike. The blitz spirit was a memory. With the Allies ashore and victory in sight this was an ordeal too many. "[People] hated it," observed H.E. Bates. "The edges of their nerves were rubbed raw by it."

 So too were moral sensibilities. Churchill was driven to raise the possibility of "drenching" German population centres with poison gas and even anthrax, a move that would have caused problems for the shaping of the Allied "good war" narrative.  In the end, the V-weapons were defeated by a combination of fighters, anti-aircraft artillery and the capture of the launching sites. The "wonderweapons" had achieved little more than killing nearly 9,000 civilians. 

As Campbell points out, however, the pioneering rocket science involved "jolted human history into a direction in which it is still travelling". After the war the chief Nazi rocketeer Wernher von Braun was snaffled by the Americans and became a national hero in the US after the launching of the Explorer satellite in 1958. A biopic was made called I Aim at the Stars. The multiple ironies were summed up in Mort Sahl's brilliant gag. A better title, he suggested, was  "I Aim at the Stars, but Sometimes I Hit London."