Years ago I read that the germans modified a V-2 rocket, and added a man-carrying capsule on the top…supposedly a piloted flight was made in 1943! Anybody ever heard of this? Were any of these flights actually recorded? 
Sounds unlikely to me. Can you remember where you heard it?
Perhaps you mean this 1946 proposal.
Yes, but they used a disc-shaped antigravity craft. 
http://www.naziufos.com/dischi/saucers1-ie.htm
http://www.cufon.org/comics/1990/Luftwaffe1946TechMan01.htm
http://sfstation.members.easyspace.com/omegadiskus3.jpg
http://www.luft46.com/dsart/ds500.html
http://sfstation.members.easyspace.com/haunebuboot.jpg
http://www.luft46.com/vaart/duvtol.jpg
Maybe you read Thomas Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow all the way to the end once.
There appear to have been proposals broadly along such lines. An obvious guess is that people have confused these ideas on paper - which I have also read about elsewhere - with an implemented programme.
Thomas Pynchon’s (rather excellent) novel Gravity’s Rainbow plays around with the idea of a manned V2 being built during the war, along with much else. But that’s not a cite.
And ElvisL1ves beats me to the Pynchon reference while I was previewing …
There was a cover of Popular Science or some such magazine a few years ago that had the arresting image of a swastika’d aircraft bearing down on the identifiable shape of Manhattan.
Apparently, the Nazis did have plans on the drawing board to produce a manned rocket with enough thrust to escape the atmosphere. After escape, the plan was for the pilot to “skip” it like a flat rock on a pond on the surface of the atmosphere, so it would make it accross the Atlantic. The pilot would bail out in a special pod and be picked up by a U-boat.
The argument against the required expenditure to develop it was the lack of a bomb payload that made the trip worthwile. Developing an atomic bomb and an ICBM and fighting a two-front war while still allowing yourself the luxury of killing any of your scientists who were also Jewish proved to be too much even for those arrogant Nazi pricks.
Ahh, that’s some good stuff. I’ve been up at 5 AM every day for the past two weeks, and this is the first thing that’s made me smile in quite a bit.
They did, and then Hellboy had to come and clean up the mess and the save the world yet again.
Well, 1st succesful test of an A4 booster ( = V2 missile) was 3 oct 1942. Hardly time enough to develop a man-rated variant in '43, considering that the extended A4 barely got off one succesful test out of three in early '45. As mentioned above, there were designs in the drawing board for suborbital-type manned craft, but nothing ever got close to operational. See [url=“http://www.astronautix.com/lvfam/v2.htm” this page for all the variants of the A4/V2 that were programmed (and this does not even consider the Sanger).
IIRC this wasn’t for putting a man into space, but for dropping a “dirty” bomb on NY. There were 3 competing designs - one was for a manned V2 rocket - as described above.
That’s why I never bother to do it myself, Previewboy. If there were an easy way to skip the sick parts of the book and go straight to the rockets, it might have been much better.
While Germany never had a chance to get that far, though, Von Braun and crew most certainly were planning seriously how to go about the job even before the war started. They decided to come to the US instead of the UK or USSR precisely because they’d have the chance to do it here. While the V-2 itself couldn’t get more than its own small payload much over one of the several definitions of outer space, it still made sense even outside the realm of weaponry as a big step toward it. They developed that technology into the Redstone missile that put the first 2 Americans into space - look at the innards of both and you’ll see the similarities. Perhaps that makes the answer to the OP a Yes without much relaxation of the question.
Obligatory Tom Lehrer reference: “‘Vunce der rockets go up, who cares vhere dey come down? / Dat’s not my department’, says Wernher von Braun”
It’s worth noting that after the Double Cross system used turned agents to help distract the Germans from the Normandy landings, those same double agents were put to work giving the Germans false information regarding the accuracy of their V1 and V2 strikes. They first gave the Germans “corrections” which guided many weapons to unpopulated areas, then exaggerated the accuracy and effect of later shots. The Germans were therefore highly overconfident about the guidance systems of their V-weapons. As a result, piloted craft such as the Fieseler Fi-103R were likely considered unnecessary.
“Colonel, Vy haff all of our rockets gone off course?”
“HOGANNNNN…!”
Now, now. Recall that Klink never seriously thought that Hogan was behind any major sabotage of the German war machine. Klink always suspected that Hogan was up to something, but always seemed to think it was nothing more than harmless high jinks by bored prisoners.
Punishment for a prisoner found breaking the rules was appropriate for a high-spirited rogue rather than for an agent of espionage.
Is it accurate to say “them came to the US”?
I had heard that they did not want to come here, but preferred the Soviet Union. And only ended up here because US troops captured them, and transported them as semi-prisoners to US territory. In fact, groups of US troops went out specifically (but unofficially) to get them, and bring them back to US-controlled territory. Also that Wernher von Braun personally resisted so strenously that his arm was broken in the process. And pictures of him from that time do show his arm in a cast.
So anybody have the Straight Dope on this? Did the German rocket scientists come to the USA willingly or not?
Every account I’ve seen (including this one) has it that he broke the arm in a fairly routine road accident.
Can I use that as a sig?
That’s a new one to me, any chance you’re thinking of the V1s that the Germans tested with pilots onboard?