Chasing the Moon

by Robert Stone

  After the A-4’s successful first flight, a number of guidance-system design problems remained unresolved and months of work lay ahead before the weapon could be deployed in the war. Some weeks later, von Braun and Dornberger were summoned to meet with Hitler to explain the production delays. They showed him a film of the first successful test. When the screening ended and the lights went up, Hitler displayed a sudden new enthusiasm for the A-4 program and talked of it as the superweapon he had been hoping for. Hitler immediately approved further research funding and conferred a professorship on von Braun—“the youngest professor in Germany”—and promoted Dornberger to major general.

  The British had become aware of the activity at Peenemünde, however, and on the night of August 17–18, 1943, nearly six hundred RAF bombers dropped hundreds of tons of explosives on the facility. Almost seven hundred people were killed in the raid, most of them foreign prisoners who had been forced to work on the assembly of the early rockets. As a result of the raid, production for both the V-2 and the less complicated V-1 cruise missile was relocated to a distant underground facility. Development and testing of the V-2 missile continued at Peenemünde, but with a smaller workforce.

  A crucial part of the story remained untold, however. The new hidden underground production facility was, in fact, built as part of the Dora-Mittelbau concentration camp in the Harz Mountains, more than three hundred miles southwest of Peenemünde. During the final two years of the war, thousands of slave laborers from the Soviet Union, Poland, and France were worked to death at Dora-Mittelbau while building thousands of rockets. A few grim details about the rocket-making facility appeared in American newspapers around V-E Day, but otherwise the full story detailing the extent of the horrors surrounding the V-2’s production went unreported in the United States for decades.

  Despite holding a high position in the Third Reich, von Braun had been in serious danger. He told Ley how he had run afoul of Heinrich Himmler’s SS, which had been competing with the Army for control of the rocket program. After frankly admitting to Himmler that he preferred working under General Dornberger, von Braun was arrested by the SS. For two weeks he was held under suspicion of being a defeatist, a communist sympathizer, and a potential defector. His file even contained a report that during a private conversation he had confessed that if given a choice he would prefer to design spaceships instead of weapons, a comment that was considered dangerously anti-militarist. His release came only after General Dornberger made a personal appeal to Hitler’s minister of armaments and war production, Albert Speer, who, in turn, conveyed it to Hitler.

  Wernher von Braun photographed in the early 1950s holding a model of the V-2 rocket.

  As Allied forces moved toward Berlin and the first V-2s began hitting targets in London and Antwerp in late 1944, slave laborers in Dora-Mittelbau’s massive tunnel facilities were assembling as many as six hundred V-2 rockets a month. But by March of the following year, the Russian Army was approaching Peenemünde, and von Braun and five hundred engineers and scientists fled south to the Bavarian mountains. Hiding in an alpine hotel, von Braun and Dornberger plotted their surrender to the Allies.

  Two days before von Braun told his story to Ley, his picture had appeared in The New York Times in an article about the Operation Paperclip scientists. The Times reported that the technical knowledge of these “former pets of Hitler” would save American taxpayers an estimated 750 million dollars in research-and-development costs. Someone unimpressed by America’s new German brain trust was Ley’s friend, science-fiction author Robert Heinlein, who was disgusted when he learned that Ley had been “fraternizing with a Nazi.” Heinlein wrote to a mutual friend in the Navy that by spending the evening with von Braun, Ley had displayed careless expediency. As a result, Heinlein decided to withdraw his support for Ley’s efforts to find a government job.

  Culturally, the new global superpower that had welcomed von Braun and the Operation Paperclip engineers still suffered from a pervasive inferiority complex. The superiority of the European tradition in the arts and sciences went largely unquestioned. To the citizens of a nation still less than two hundred years old, Wernher von Braun personified a cultured, well-mannered, soft-spoken European aristocrat, much like the characters played by Cary Grant, George Sanders, Claude Rains, or Paul Henreid in Hollywood movies. Typical of his upbringing, Von Braun was an accomplished musician who could play the “Moonlight Sonata” from memory. He was perfectly cast for the role he was to play in post-war America.

  In Washington, America’s Joint Intelligence Objectives Agency carefully sanitized the troublesome personal histories of von Braun and other Operation Paperclip engineers, much as Hollywood publicists fictionalized the biographies of actors under the studio system. Von Braun arrived in the United States aware that his wartime management experience guaranteed him a position of importance—a position that until very recently had allowed him to be indifferent to the struggles of others or the ethical repercussions of his personal actions. Unlike most of his fellow space visionaries, von Braun was driven less by a personal desire to make a better tomorrow than by a personal ambition to accomplish something that no one had done previously.

  Early in his career, von Braun realized that to achieve his goals, he had to become a persuasive salesman. He learned how to convince the key decision makers that his vision would confer to those in power precisely what he had deduced they most desired. To generals and dictators, he offered a promise of military superiority and national prestige; to those worried about threats from outside enemies, he promised security; to those searching for a sense of purpose and meaning, he promised a unique adventure and the fulfillment of our human destiny. Along with his persuasive salesmanship, he cultivated a rare talent to inspire others to do their best and to instill in them a sense of loyalty and dedication that seldom wavered.

  It was while quartered with the other German rocket engineers at the Army’s Fort Bliss in El Paso, Texas, that von Braun made a personal choice to become an evangelical Christian. His decision followed a visit to a modest white-framed church situated on a parched Texas lot, where, he later said, he came to realize for the first time that religion wasn’t something inherited like an heirloom but a personal commitment requiring effort and discipline. Von Braun’s conversion may have served to compartmentalize his European past from what lay ahead, as did his decision, at nearly the same time, to wed his eighteen-year-old cousin and bring her to Texas as part of his new life.

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  THE U.S. ARMY had shipped hundreds of crates containing the components for scores of confiscated German V-2s to the United States. Von Braun and his team restored their mechanisms and successfully launched them from a test range at White Sands, New Mexico, sending some as high as one hundred miles above the Earth. Later flights tried out a two-stage launch vehicle, with a second, smaller research rocket positioned on the nose of the modified V-2. After climbing to a height of twenty miles, the smaller rocket separated from the V-2 and, using its own engine, achieved a velocity greater than five times the speed of sound and ascending nearly two hundred fifty miles above the Earth.

  But within the offices of the Pentagon, there was little interest in large rockets like the V-2, as either an offensive or defensive weapon. Its performance during World War II had proven the V-2 more effective as a weapon of psychological terror than destructive power. Von Braun’s work at White Sands had yielded interesting scientific information, but how it might be applied to Defense Department concerns was unclear.

  The Cold War had become the dominant concern of those overseeing America’s defense planning, and space research had no role in it. Nevertheless, von Braun tried to think of ways in which he might persuade military decision makers to fund his space-flight research and development. He sought out the physicists at the national laboratory in Los Alamos, New Mexico, who had developed the atomic bomb, with a proposal to mar
ry an atomic warhead with one of his ballistic missiles: the genesis of the intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM). But in the 1940s it was still assumed that conventional bomber aircraft were the most practical and effective way to deliver a heavy nuclear weapon to a target. Von Braun also outlined plans for a large orbiting military space station, which he argued could serve as a bombing platform capable of targeting any location on the globe and a unique surveillance outpost. It was an idea that he continued to refine and lobby for throughout the 1950s.

  But his third and most ambitious idea to stimulate space funding didn’t depend on government defense strategies at all. Recalling how reading science fiction had fired his youthful imagination, von Braun decided to engage a new generation of space dreamers by writing a novel about the first voyage to Mars. Unfortunately for von Braun, the publishers who read the manuscript found his dialogue wooden and faulted the lack of a romantic subplot. When writing his manuscript, von Braun had emphasized the story’s technical accuracy; entertaining his reader was of secondary concern. In all, eighteen American publishing houses rejected it.

  Four years after Arthur Clarke and the other officers of the British Interplanetary Society narrowly avoided being killed by the V-2 explosion, Clarke thought it time to exploit the experience to their advantage. He sent a letter to von Braun, offering him an honorary society membership. Von Braun graciously accepted, replying, “Despite the grief the work of me and my associates brought to the British people, [your invitation] is the most encouraging proof that the noble enthusiasm in the future of rocketry is stronger than national sentiments.” An exchange soon followed, in which von Braun sent Clarke some scientific details about the recent White Sands tests and Clarke invited von Braun to deliver a paper at an upcoming British Interplanetary Society conference in London.

  In the immediate post-war years, von Braun’s U.S. Army minders kept him on a short leash. It was a time of heightened fear about Soviet spies operating within the United States, and the Army considered him a valuable asset. During his brief return to Germany to get married, the Army had von Braun under constant watch to prevent a Soviet kidnap attempt. But the Army had other worries as well. Von Braun gave a well-received speech to the El Paso Rotary Club in January 1947, but not long after, reports appeared in newspapers that revealed that some Operation Paperclip engineers had to be sent back to Germany after troublesome details about their Nazi past had come to light. Most press accounts stressed the Germans’ eagerness to work for the United States—their anti-communist sympathies were often cited—and indicated their hope to become American citizens. Nevertheless, the same month that von Braun addressed the El Paso Rotary, the president of the American and World Federations for Polish Jews said, “It is a sad reflection and insult to the consciousness of humanity [to welcome] these evil representatives of Nazi science…to this country with open arms.” For the next two years, von Braun maintained a modest public profile.

  After the Germans had concluded their work with the refurbished V-2s at White Sands, the Army had few new projects to keep them occupied. There was scant military funding for additional rocket research, and their quarters at Fort Bliss were needed to house the Cold War’s growing roster of soldiers. The Army had to find a new permanent home for its restless and underutilized rocket specialists. In 1950, at the urging of Senator John Sparkman of Alabama, the Department of Defense moved the Army’s Rocket Branch of the Ordnance Department’s Research and Development Division to the recently shuttered Redstone Arsenal in Huntsville, Alabama. It was here, near the Tennessee River, that the Fort Bliss rocket men relocated to buildings constructed a decade earlier for the manufacture and storage of chemical weapons and munitions. New signs announced the facility as the Army’s Ordnance Guided Missile Center. The thirty-five-thousand-acre site on which Redstone Arsenal had been built had already witnessed a great deal of history.

  The fertile soil on the southern dip of the Tennessee River Valley had been home to Creek, Cherokee, and Chickasaw tribes prior to the arrival of the Euro-Americans, who forcibly removed all the native peoples during the 1830s and 1940s. For a few years before the Civil War, slaves worked the land’s large cotton plantations; however, during Reconstruction the land was subdivided into small tenant farms, many cultivated by the families of the recently freed. But after seven decades, the tenant farmers were forced to relocate when the Huntsville Arsenal and the Redstone Ordnance Plant were built on the land during World War II.

  The German engineers who arrived in 1950 found the green landscape surrounding the Tennessee River a welcome change. After sandy and dry El Paso, Huntsville was somewhat reminiscent of Silesia, von Braun thought. When the engineers arrived, Huntsville’s population was only sixteen thousand, reflecting a post-war decline following the closing of the chemical-weapons facility.

  Huntsville’s flagging economy began to rebound once the Army’s new Ordnance Guided Missile Center was established at Redstone Arsenal. The city’s new citizens brought a bit of European culture to northern Alabama, and local grocery stores began selling sauerkraut. Huntsville took on the air of a New England college town, albeit with a Dixie flavor: It founded a symphony orchestra, a ballet, and a Broadway Theater League and opened a newly expanded public library.

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  ONE OF THE most popular books in the new Huntsville library’s collection was Ley and Bonestell’s The Conquest of Space. In New York, the Hayden Planetarium created a popular show based on the book, which subsequently traveled to other cities. As a result of this collaboration, Willy Ley had become friendly with the planetarium’s chairman. In the course of a lunch conversation, Ley asked his friend why it was that the British Interplanetary Society could schedule annual conferences about human spaceflight but no such event had ever been planned in the United States.

  Without much further discussion the Hayden’s chairman simply responded: “Willy, go ahead; the planetarium is yours.”

  That seemingly minor exchange set in motion a sequence of events that would alter American attitudes toward space travel during the coming decade and turn von Braun into a celebrity of the early television era.

  Less than six months after the Hayden Planetarium’s chairman gave his consent, Ley had assembled a roster of speakers for the First Annual Symposium on Space Travel, held, symbolically, on Columbus Day 1951. He conceived it as an event that would generate media interest and public awareness. Invitations were sent to every print and TV outlet with an office in the New York City area, including foreign publications. Among the two hundred attendees who heard talks on space medicine, space law, and upper-atmosphere science were two journalists from Collier’s magazine.

  Collier’s assistant editor Cornelius Ryan was unimpressed with the report he received about the Hayden Planetarium conference from the two staffers who had attended. The Irish-born former war correspondent had little patience for all the recent talk about human space travel, believing the subject was more appropriate for children’s television than for a serious magazine. However, at the insistence of the managing editor, Ryan reluctantly attended a conference on space medicine in San Antonio. Collier’s also dispatched Conquest of Space artist Chesley Bonestell to sit in as well. After the first full day of presentations, Ryan was left confused and unimpressed.

  Over cocktails, Ryan began a conversation with a tall handsome man also attending the conference. Grasping his highball glass, Ryan confessed, “They’ve sent me down here to find out what serious scientists think about the possibilities of flight into outer space.” As he gestured around the room he admitted, “I don’t know what all these people are talking about. All I could find out so far is that a lot of people get up to the rostrum and cover a blackboard with mysterious signs!” He said Collier’s was considering publishing a major cover story about space exploration, but he doubted readers would find anything presented at this conference of much interest.

 
His companion introduced himself as Wernher von Braun, and as he attempted to help Ryan understand the day’s presentations, he motioned for two others to join them. One was Fred Whipple, chairman of the Harvard University astronomy department, and the other was Joseph Kaplan, a scientist specializing in the study of the upper atmosphere. Over a lengthy dinner that lasted until nearly midnight, von Braun, Whipple, and Kaplan passionately took turns explaining why they believed humanity’s destiny lay in space.

  The latest recipient of the von Braun charm offensive returned to New York a true believer. He convinced the magazine’s managing editor that a unique Collier’s-branded space symposium would generate publicity for the magazine and attract advertising dollars away from the emerging threat of television. Ryan insisted that von Braun should serve as Collier’s key expert, with additional articles written by other specialists from the New York and San Antonio conferences.

  At that moment, von Braun and his engineers were spearheading the creation of the Redstone rocket, the Army’s first short-range ballistic missile. The Redstone was a bigger but less streamlined variation on the V-2, designed to carry a payload of nearly seven thousand pounds. Its rapid development was part of a newly unfolding rocket rivalry between two different branches of the armed services. At nearly the same time that the Army decided to develop the Redstone, consultants for the U.S. Air Force began work on their own intercontinental-ballistic-missile development program, which would eventually reach fruition with the Atlas. Though designed to deliver munitions, both the Redstone and Atlas would become far better known to the general public a decade later for their role as the vehicles that transported the first Americans into space.