by Robert Stone
Undaunted, the society’s team exploited their available resources: youthful enthusiasm, free time, and a smattering of knowledge in a variety of professional disciplines. One member was an expert on turbine engineering; another was a chemist; a third an accountant. There was an interior designer, who envisioned the spacecraft’s living quarters. Not one was a full-fledged scientist, but several had some engineering experience. Clarke oversaw the necessary higher math and the astronomical calculations.
Once a week the society’s “technical committee” gathered in the evening to dissect details of the proposed two-week lunar mission, with a brief break for fish and chips from the local pub. For their launch system, they decided to use a series of six solid-fuel stages of diminishing size, which were designed to fire in sequence. The committee had ruled out using liquid propellants, having assumed that moving the fuel through a series of mechanical pumps would be nearly impossible in such a massive vehicle.
When the project was completed, the results were published in the January 1939 issue of their newsletter, the Journal of the British Interplanetary Society. The entire print run for that issue filled two cardboard boxes, which Clarke retrieved from the printer and walked back to his flat. But their modest journal generated publicity that reverberated around the world. Initally Clarke and other society members were interviewed by London newspapers and on BBC radio. Next, the Journal received attention in the prestigious science magazine Nature, which summarily dismissed the moon ship as pure fantasy. The scientific community thought it necessary to silence these starry-eyed young troublemakers before someone took them seriously.
Undismayed, Clarke and his companions returned every instance of public criticism with pointed and sarcastic rebuttals—whenever the publications deigned to give them space to reply. The criticism from the scientific establishment inspired the creation of the first of Clarke’s Three Laws: “When a distinguished but elderly scientist states that something is possible, he is almost certainly right. When he states that something is impossible, he is very probably wrong.”
News about the society’s rocket ship spread internationally. In the United States, Time magazine reported on the controversy, and English-language newspapers as far away as India included it in their world-news summary. The society’s journal noted with pride that one account “stole half the photo-news page of a national Sunday newspaper from Herr Hitler.” During the flurry of publicity surrounding their moon rocket, Clarke and Bill Temple met one foreign-language journalist who made an enduring impression. Early in the interview, Temple began to wonder whether the tall quiet-voiced German might be a Nazi spy, especially when he showed particular interest in their collection of clippings about rockets as weapons. Clarke and Temple agreed that in this instance it was probably wise to avoid impressing their visitor with their knowledge of astronautics. Instead, they pretended to be merely a couple of harmless science-fiction fanboys.
The best-informed members in both the American and British rocket societies continued to assume that all rocket-related research and development in Germany had come to an abrupt end following the rise of the Nazis. Living in the United States, Willy Ley had heard nothing from his homeland to make him believe otherwise. The Third Reich appeared more concerned with rearming its land army and rebuilding its air force than with funding scientific rocket research, which few believed had any practical application as a weapon of war. Ley logically assumed that transporting a small explosive payload via a rocket would be a waste of money, and he was certain that other military strategists would agree. Meanwhile, he hoped he might eventually find a full-time position with an American company interested in developing rockets for scientific purposes. He continued to advocate for space travel, writing articles on a variety of scientific subjects for popular magazines in the hope that an informed public in the United States would avoid being seduced by the pseudoscientific and mystical fads that had become popular in Germany recently.
While on a trip to Los Angeles, Ley was delighted to reestablish contact with Frau im Mond’s creator. Fritz Lang’s sudden departure from Germany had come shortly after Hitler’s propaganda minister, Joseph Goebbels, banned his latest film, in which Lang had put the words of the Nazis in the mouth of an evil criminal mastermind. Lang was now working for MGM, where he had directed his first American film, Fury, starring Spencer Tracy and Sylvia Sidney. It was a provocative thriller that addressed the scourge of lynchings in the United States, though told through the eyes of an innocently accused white man. In it, Lang depicted American vigilante mob justice with visual comparisons to what he had witnessed in Nazi Germany.
Sitting on a veranda under a starry California sky, Lang and Ley discussed the impending war in Europe and mused about travel to the Moon and the planets. However, if they had wanted to revisit their earlier cinematic collaboration, finding a copy of Frau im Mond would have been impossible. Hitler’s Gestapo had confiscated every exhibition print a few years earlier. The film had disappeared.
Not long after the Third Reich’s invasion of Poland in September 1939, Britain entered the war against Germany, forcing Clarke and Bill Temple to vacate their Bloomsbury flat and shut down the British Interplanetary Society’s headquarters. Should the British forces in Western Europe fail to prevent France from falling, Germany’s Luftwaffe bombers were expected to appear in the skies over the heart of London within days. Londoners with the opportunity to do so sought out alternative lodging with friends and relatives in the city’s less vulnerable outskirts or moved to the countryside. When Clarke and Temple locked their door, they left behind Clarke’s almost-complete run of American science-fiction magazines, a collection numbering in the hundreds that had taken him nearly a decade to assemble. He would never see them again.
The worst of the Blitz didn’t come to London until the fall of 1940, when the city was bombed continuously for nearly two months. Arthur Clarke saw none of it; now working for the Ministry of Food, he had been relocated to a seaside resort in North Wales. Sometime in the early spring of the next year, their Bloomsbury flat took a direct hit, destroying everything except the outside walls.
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CLARKE SPENT THE early months of the war processing paperwork that documented the precise location of each ton of imported British tea. His position in the civil service gave him a temporary deferment from military conscription, but by the end of the year, service in one of the armed forces was unavoidable. He joined the RAF in the hope that he might be able to acquire a valuable education in the fundamentals of celestial navigation, but instead he was assigned to a technical unit devoted to a new utilization of radar to assist aircraft during poor-visibility landings. It was Clarke’s first opportunity to collaborate with another group of trained scientists, a team from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology that had worked on the invention’s development.
Corporal Clarke was then assigned to an RAF training center in Wiltshire, not far from Stonehenge, where he taught night classes on the fundamentals of radar. However, the subject of the corporal’s classroom lectures frequently turned to astronautics, prompting his students to nickname him “Spaceship Clarke.” During a lecture a student might mischievously ask the instructor how a rocket functions in space, setting off a long discussion about multi-stage rockets and reaching the Moon, complete with diagrams and basic calculations. During his off hours he wrote technical articles for journals such as Electronic Engineering. His career as a published science-fiction author was yet to come, though just prior to joining the RAF he had completed the preliminary draft of his first novel, Against the Fall of Night.
As the Allied forces closed in on Germany in late 1944, Clarke and a group of the most active members of the British Interplanetary Society met in a London restaurant one evening. Val Cleaver, a society officer who worked in British aviation, told the diners details about his recent business trip to the United States. While visiting New
York, Cleaver had met with Willy Ley and discussed recent reports of a large German rocket weapon that was said to have hit targets in Antwerp and London. Ley had heard reports that it was a frightening and more sophisticated successor to the V-1, a low-flying cruise missile that had appeared in the skies of southern England that summer, sometimes arriving in waves of more than one hundred missiles a day. Ley dismissed the jet-powered V-1 as a crude and inaccurate weapon of little military value, assuring his British guest that the reports of a bigger, high-altitude rocket bomb were nothing more than desperate Nazi propaganda. Cleaver, who had already seen classified U.K. military-intelligence reports detailing the existence of the big rocket, cautioned his friend, “If I were you, I wouldn’t be quite so sure.”
Laughter was heard around the dinner table after Cleaver recalled his words of caution. But no sooner had the amusement subsided than the gathering was interrupted by the sound of a huge crash outside the restaurant. “The building shook slightly,” Clarke recalled. “We heard that curious, unmistakable rumble of an explosion climbing backwards up the sky, from an object that had arrived faster than the sound of its own passage.” The abrupt intrusion had been the British Interplanetary Society’s introduction to the deadly V-2 rocket, the world’s first operational ballistic missile.
A German V-2 rocket containing a small explosive warhead is readied for launch during the final months of World War II. More than three thousand V-2s were fired against Allied targets in England and Belgium, but as a strategic military weapon of destruction it was largely ineffective.
Should Ley have needed any further persuasion about Germany’s new rocket weapon, a copy of Life magazine published a few weeks later would have been sufficient. A double-page spread provided a detailed and fairly accurate cutaway diagram of the V-2 and a graphic illustration presenting its trajectory from launch to impact. Life also reproduced military photographs that pictured recovered rocket engines. It described the V-2 as a “spectacular weapon” but judged it “a military flop.” Despite its impressive engineering, the new weapon was an ineffective boondoggle. As Ley had predicted, the V-2’s destructive power was limited by its small payload capacity. In fact, fewer military and civilian casualties resulted from V-2 attacks than the total number of slave laborers killed due to the harsh conditions surrounding the weapons’ assembly. But decisively, when the German high command chose to fund the V-2 by diverting funding earmarked for fighter-jet aircraft, they ceded the airspace to Allied bombers, thus hastening their own defeat.
Ley published an article about the V-2 in an American magazine just as Allied forces entered Germany. In it he speculated that the large new rockets were the work of Hermann Oberth and thought it unlikely that either Oberth or his associates would survive to tell the story of the V-2’s birth. “Those who knew the full story are dead already,” he stated. “Those that are still alive will die before the war is over.” But far more important to Ley was its legacy: The V-2 had provided undeniable proof that it was possible to launch a large, fully operational guided missile.
Parts of a V-2 confiscated by the Allies were shipped to the United States, where Robert Goddard examined them at the Naval Experiment Station in Annapolis, Maryland. Goddard found the design of the V-2’s gyroscopically controlled stabilizing vanes, its fuel-injecting turbopumps, and its combustion chamber remarkably similar to features he had used on the rockets he developed and launched in Roswell, New Mexico. In the mid-1930s, when Goddard had been conducting his research far from the eyes of the press and curiosity seekers, both Hitler’s military intelligence organization—the Abwehr—and Soviet espionage officials had dispatched spies to gather information about Goddard’s progress. But despite Goddard’s suspicions that the V-2’s design had been stolen from his work, the technology for both rockets evolved along independent parallel tracks, with the Germans already ahead of Goddard by the early 1930s. A few days after Goddard scrutinized the confiscated V-2, Germany fell to the Allies and the war in Europe ended. Already ill with cancer, Goddard would die at age sixty-two four months later. His death came on the same week that the United States dropped two atomic bombs on Japan, ending the war in the Pacific.
In the wake of the German surrender, the United States’s joint chiefs of staff immediately approved an unprecedented new program intended to achieve a strategic military advantage over future adversaries by obtaining proprietary access to the Third Reich’s advanced weapons technology. Not only were physical weapons and plans to be seized, but the United States’s wartime intelligence agency, the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), sought to find the brainpower behind them as well.
The plan progressed so rapidly that the first group of German scientists and engineers arrived on American soil before President Truman became aware of the program’s existence. It began as Operation Overcast, an initiative focused on taking possession of Nazi scientific knowledge and technology for use in the war against Japan. However, after the Japanese surrender, the larger program was renamed Operation Paperclip and included many more former Third Reich engineers, technicians, and scientists. The code name arose from the Office of Strategic Services’ use of paperclips to mark the intelligence files of scientists and engineers selected for inclusion in the program.
Willy Ley assumed his unique knowledge of rocket science and his experience working with Hermann Oberth would help him obtain a financially secure job with either the United States government or an American corporation expanding into rocket development. But in the eyes of the American military, Ley was an outsider. He learned from contacts in the U.S. government that many of the German engineers who had designed the V-2 had survived the war and had been brought to the United States to work with the War Department. It was cruelly ironic. Ley had left Germany out of conscience, while those who had chosen to remain and build rockets for Hitler were accorded special attention and employed by the U.S. government. Many of Ley’s associates from the Verein für Raumschiffahrt who had worked on the V-2 would be among those leading the effort to make human space travel a reality. But Ley would not be among them.
From an American military officer, Ley learned that the Nazis’ director of the V-2 program had not been Hermann Oberth, as he had assumed. Its manager was Wernher von Braun, who as a bright eighteen-year-old aristocrat and part-time student had been personally introduced to Oberth and the Verein für Raumschiffahrt in 1930 by Ley. When recalling von Braun’s persuasion skills, Ley wrote his friend science-fiction author Robert Heinlein, “I only hope that the U.S. Army will not suddenly find him ‘charming’ in addition to being useful.”
In the waning days of the Third Reich, von Braun and his top associates had considered their options. Soviet forces were approaching from the east and the American Army from the west; their capture was inevitable. They knew their unique technical knowledge would give them leverage when negotiating terms of surrender. When von Braun polled his group, the consensus was to surrender to the Americans, and after hiding for a few days in a remote area of the Bavarian Alps, they made furtive contact with a U.S. infantry division. By the time the Soviet Army arrived at von Braun’s rocket development and testing area at Peenemünde on the Baltic Sea, nearly every one of the top scientists and engineers had already surrendered to the American forces.
Von Braun and more than one hundred other members of his German rocket-development team arrived quietly in the United States a few months after the end of the war in Europe. For decades, significant details about how they and other German scientists were vetted and cleared for entry were shrouded in secrecy. But it is undeniable that the United States government concealed the fact that it gave preferential treatment to some German scientists and engineers who had been Nazi Party members or suspected of complicity in war crimes.
The first public news of Operation Paperclip came in an understated press release issued by the War Department on October 1, 1945. It announced that a carefully selected number of “out
standing German scientists” would be brought to the United States to impart technical knowledge vital to the nation’s security. The one-page release said that they would be in the United States on a temporary basis and all had made the journey voluntarily. Not long after, The New York Times revealed the “entire German staff at the [Peenemünde] rocket-weapon base, about ninety men,” had arrived in the United States. In actuality, during the war as many as twelve thousand had been employed at Peenemünde, but only the top echelon—around one hundred fifty rocket scientists and engineers—had traveled to the United States to work with von Braun.
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THE WAR DEPARTMENT and the Office of Strategic Services considered the German scientists and engineers such valuable assets that it was deemed far more important that the United States government gain access to their expertise and knowledge than worry about the controversial—and highly classified—details contained in their wartime files. Stalin’s encroachment into Eastern Europe had already prompted fears of a protracted conflict with the Soviet Union. And during the immediate post-war years, Americans suspected of having communist sympathies were deemed a far greater threat to the nation than someone with a past association with the defeated Third Reich.
A few years earlier, David Lasser’s tenure as the president of the Workers Alliance of America had ended when members of the Communist Party asserted domination over its leadership. Lasser was a socialist but opposed communism, and he chose to resign from the alliance in protest. President Franklin Roosevelt subsequently asked him to form an organization that would train the unemployed so that they could transition into the workforce. But his nomination ran into trouble when reactionary members of Congress discovered Lasser’s name on a list of suspected leftists. While sitting in the gallery above the United States House of Representatives, Lasser listened as a Texas congressman with a reputation for grandstanding and publicly exposing the identities of political subversives attacked his reputation. He ridiculed the author of The Conquest of Space on the House floor as “a crackpot with mental delusions that we can travel to the Moon!” The House exploded in laughter and Lasser’s nomination died in the midst of the uproar.