Though Eugen S?nger (1905–1964) never brought his antipodal bomber to the level of completion described in this novel, he and his project were real, with research on his Silbervogel (or Silverbird) carried out in a lab in the small village of Trauen-Fassberg. As the war began, S?nger renamed his project Raketenbomber in an ultimately unsuccessful attempt to prevent funds from being redirected into the Luftwaffe’s V-1/V-2 program, and to his rival at Peenemünde, Wernher von Braun. After moving to Egypt in 1961, S?nger spent the last three years of his life helping President Gamal Abdel Nasser to develop missiles capable of striking other countries and especially Israel. Some of S?nger’s junior rocket scientists continued to develop his space plane designs in the United States after the war, evolving S?nger’s actual engines into the Bell X-1 rocket-plane (the first vehicle to break the sound barrier, with Chuck Yeager at the controls) and the X-15, which, beginning in 1959, became an actual space plane, piloted by, among others, Neil Armstrong, and reaching an altitude of one hundred miles. The X-1 and the X-15 were both launched from beneath airplanes, although a monorail launch system did make an imaginary appearance (based on S?nger’s World War II designs) as one of the Academy Award–winning special effects in George Pal’s 1951 film, When World’s Collide. The aluminum oxide powder used in this novel for the Silverbirds’ solid boosters was based on actual laboratory derivatives of the German passenger airship LZ 129 Hindenburg’s doped resin and aluminum powder skin. Aluminum, in essence, is among the most powerful nonnuclear rocket fuels ever invented, though it happened by accident. More than a half century after the Hindenburg demonstrated so spectacularly how aluminum, oxygen, and hydrogen can work together (water thrown on burning aluminum enhances the reaction by becoming hydrogen and oxygen), a revised version of the accidental formula powered the space shuttle’s two strap-on solid rocket boosters; and it could indeed be said, then, that the post-X-15 generation of space planes flew on Hindenburg skin.
Kimura’s mentor, Shiro Ishii, actually existed. He was Japan’s answer to Germany’s Dr. Mengele, Auschwitz’s “Angel of Death.” The camp known as Unit 731, and the events that took place there under Dr. Ishii, are exactly as described. After surrendering to American forces, Ishii and several of his bioweapons scientists bargained (with the aid of General MacArthur) for immunity from war crimes prosecution. They did so by helping jump-start a U.S. bioweapons program that lasted until the Nixon administration ordered its shutdown. In later life, Dr. Ishii served on the Japanese Olympic Committee and, according to his daughter, built and operated clinics devoted to the treatment and curing of childhood diseases—usually at no charge to their parents. On his deathbed in 1959, he called for a priest and converted to Catholicism, apparently based on the belief that if one repented during the Church’s last rites, all sins would be forgiven.
Flugkapit?n Hanna Reitsch (1912–1979) did indeed exist and did indeed propose and get an endorsement for what our character Voorhees called a suicide squadron. Reitsch joined as one of the squadron’s first volunteers while Heinrich Himmler (Reichsführer of the dreaded SS) suggested recruiting war-wounded soldiers or condemned criminals to pilot the jet-powered dive-bombs. Though von Braun had been developing increasingly sophisticated guidance systems, S?nger agreed with Reitsch that a human being was the most accurate guidance system that could be acquired, and the only one that had already been mass-produced with unskilled labor. In 1943, Reitsch and engineer Otto Skorzeny demonstrated that they could convert a Vengeance-1 “buzz bomb” (V-1) into a piloted bomb in only five days. The first three test versions were to be landed on sledlike skis, so the craft (and the pilots) could be reused; but of those first three test pilots, only Reitsch survived the landings.