Aircraft as Fighter Robots.

A Spanish-language survey of the German guided missiles of World War II by Ricardo V. Dyrgalla (1910–1970), a Polish aeronautical engineer and glider pilot. He fought in the Polish Air Force in 1939, escaped to France and then Britain, and flew Spitfire photographic-reconnaissance missions with the RAF. After the war he stayed on, joining the Rocket Propulsion Group at the Royal Aircraft Establishment, Farnborough, which studied captured German weapons, including the V-2 and the Enzian missile. In 1946 he was recruited to Argentina and joined the Instituto Aerotécnico in Córdoba, where he wrote this book from the manuals and notes he had brought with him. There he headed the special projects division that redesigned the Enzian as the AM-1 Tábano and built Argentina’s first rocket engine; the project was cancelled in 1951.

His prologue says the great powers were in a clandestine race to build guided projectiles, as carriers of atomic bombs or as “robot” interceptors. The first chapter argues that the bomb will be delivered by V-2 type rockets with television homing and that the only defence will be equally fast guided interceptors, and it surveys guidance, fuzing and booster launch.

Later chapters cover aerodynamics; individual weapons with specifications and line drawings (Enzian, Wasserfall, the winged A-9 and A-10 versions of the V-2, Rheinbote, Rheintochter, Schmetterling, X-4, Hecht, Feuerlilie, Henschel Hs 293, 294 and 298, Blohm & Voss Bv 246, Natter, and British and American projects such as Bat, Gorgon, Gargoyle, Roc and the Northrop flying wing); rocket motors (Walter HWK 109-509, BMW acid system); and fuels, with appendices including a table of German propellant code names and a large folding cutaway of the V-2. A passage on peaceful uses looks ahead to multi-stage rockets and interplanetary flight and cites the British Interplanetary Society and the American Rocket Society.

His later work is in the Catalog D card for El Primer Motor-Cohete Argentino (1958). Dyrgalla’s life is told in Pablo de León’s Historia de la Actividad Espacial en la Argentina, Tomo 1 (Reference Shelf).