Of course the Saturn V was used and astronauts onboard. However, Saturn V was planned to transport major modules to the earth orbit - it was much too weak to transport major objects to the moon orbit. According to Werhner Braun, the biggest obstacle in moon flights is the enormous size of the rocket ... it will take long time to construct such. The moon capsule and landing systems with extensive cosmic radiation protection will weight a hundred tons. Think how big is the rocket transporting the space shuttle to a very low earth orbit - you must put many of such together to escape the earth gravity (the real planetary satellites are very small - only few tens of kilograms - and whenever you get out from the earth gravity you can travel for free to planets e.g. exploiting their gravitation).

The Apollo astronauts were in a program serving military industry. The biggest problem in USA those times was that Soviets launhed several satellites every day and USA did not have resources to develop space science and satellites. USA was extremely worried that Soviets use space as place for resting nuclear bombs which could then be dropped to USA whenever required. Thus the money was used to military but a different - more popular story was told to people (this has long time been a tradition in USA ... people are fooled to pay to military).

There are hundreds of catastrophic errors in the Apollo material ... major traps. Like they had sun and earth rises (different altitudes) in pictures ... a problem is that there are no such events in moon in this timeframe. Missing stars, extra light sources, curious g-forces, film operating in extreme cold/heat, etc. They took only one picture from the earth - and it was originally taken by a geostationary weather satellite. In some moon pictures you can see that the earth was added to the original photo by copy/pasting a square area with earth - if you manipulate the picture with your image processing software by adding luminosity etc., you can see the square easily. In many videos which were taken on the way to moon you can see bright light from the windows ... this is earth from low altitude orbit (so Armstrong was really telling a big lie when saying in a video that they are close to moon - earth shining behind the window).

I understood the fake moon landing when reading scientific geophysical articles about cosmic radiation - they mentioned that a human being has tried to go close to the van Allen Belts about 500 km from earth surface but the radiation problem interrupted the attempt. Then they wrote that no man has ever gone beyond that. Solar radiation in moon is intolerable and even with new protection technology man cannot walk on the moon surface. Several scientists just ignored even the possibility of moon walks.