World Battlefronts: Rocket or Racket?

From Switzerland last week came some fancy rocket talk. According to this tale:

The Nazis' secret weapon is a huge gun which fires massive air bombs (about 40 ft. long, 4 ft. thick), each one twice the length and thickness of a submarine's torpedo. Five or seven rocket installations in the tail keep the projectile going, outer rockets firing in pairs after a large central one has burned out. It is guided to its target by radio, and causes a tremendous explosion when it hits. The rocket gun even has a name: Urania.

Scare Stuff? Snorted Dr. Alfred Stettbacher, a Swiss explosives expert: No rocket could be fired 120 miles today (shortest distance to London from the Continent: 90 miles); the rockets the Germans are using from planes against Allied bombers are actually 22-lb. projectiles with a range of about a mile and a quarter. "Secret weapons and rocket shells," he added, "are nothing but a nerve war to scare credulous laymen."

Real Stuff. Two facts emerged: 1) the German people have been led to believe implicitly in a secret weapon of vast power; 2) the Germans have built emplacements and installations for some kind of unorthodox weapon along the so-called Invasion Coast of France, and Allied planes are continuously bombing the emplacements.

A reasonable guess may be that Germany has developed a rocket launcher—perhaps something like an enlarged version of the U.S. Army's tank-busting bazooka—and hopes to use it, not for any futuristic terror bombing of London, but for a rapid-fire barrage of explosive projectiles against Allied invasion craft in the Channel.