22. The Weird Plan to Blast NYC With Nazi Submarine Rockets
During WWII, Nazi scientists had a weird and alarming talent for thinking outside the box and coming up with lethal technological innovations. More alarming yet was their ability to quickly transform their sinister brainstorms into practical designs, then rush them through production and get them into the hands of the German military. Fortunately, Hitler’s scientists fell short when it came to WWII’s greatest technological innovation of all: the atomic bomb.
That was good news, because the technological innovations that Nazi scientists actually came up with gave Germany’s enemies more than enough to worry about. They included the Vergeltungswaffe (“Vengeance Weapons”), such as the V-1 Flying Bomb, the world’s first cruise missile, and the V-2, the first ballistic missile. They struck fear into the hearts of the civilian populations they were deployed against. Vengeance weapons terrorized and killed thousands of Londoners, and if German military planners had had their way, they would have done the same to New Yorkers.
