Epic Rivalry

by Von Hardesty

  The BBC interviewed many Londoners who endured the first wave of V-2 attacks. Caught unawares at ground zero, these victims displayed shock and incredulity toward the radical aerial weapon. Visual sightings came after the V-2 struck its target, rarely before; most observers spoke of a “ball of light” accompanied by a “terrible crack.” The V-2 appeared suddenly as if “out of the blue.” There was no sense of the impending danger or possibility of defensive measures. “There was no alert,” one Londoner told the BBC. “We had no warning at all. The first thing we knew was the sound of the explosion. One of the problems of this type of missile is that people do not and cannot take shelter. It might be a rocket or it might be a long-range gun. In any case, it must have traveled a terrific height into the atmosphere in order to come down as it did without us having any prior warning by sound of its approach.”7

  The deployment of Hitler’s vengeance weapons was unnerving for the Allies, coming at a time when the Allied cause appeared to be on a fast track to victory. The operational use of jets, rockets, and flying bombs was a technological tour de force for Nazi Germany in its eleventh hour, but the new weapons did not reverse the tide of war. The number of V-2s striking Allied cities was relatively low, compared to the Allied strategic bombing campaign.

  THE UNITED STATES WINS THE PRIZE

  At the time of Staver’s arrival in London in January 1945, the war in Europe had entered its final phase. The Allied armies in the west had liberated Paris and triumphed in the Battle of the Bulge. Now they were poised to continue the drive toward the Rhine and into Germany proper. In the east, the Soviets had invaded East Prussia and Czechoslovakia, setting the stage for the climactic and bloody battle for Berlin. The collapse of Nazi Germany was ratified in Berlin on May 8, 1945.

  The final months of the war placed enormous burdens on Wernher von Braun and his technical staff at Peenemünde. The situation became extremely perilous with the approach of Soviet armies advancing from the east; the top-secret Peenemünde test facility stood directly in the path of the Soviet offensive. German refugees from East Prussia and other areas in the east clogged the highways. Defeat for Nazi Germany was now only a matter of time. Facing the inevitable, von Braun called a special meeting of his most trusted staff to discuss the urgent need to evacuate Peenemünde. This would include the wholesale removal of the technical staff, selected equipment, and key documentation to a safe place beyond the grasp of the invading Red Army. Von Braun took this occasion to voice what was apparent to all—that Germany, indeed, had lost the war. Their only option was to escape from Peenemünde immediately in order to preserve the essential core of their technical work. Saving the German rocket program, even in a rump form, served another goal, one that had animated their work from the beginning—the future possibility of space exploration. Among all the options, von Braun argued for surrender to the Americans, who alone had the means to preserve and ultimately advance their work. He also raised the prospect of working on explicit peaceful uses of rocketry in the coming postwar context.

  As February approached, von Braun took the lead in planning for this extraordinary exodus from Peenemünde. The initial goal was to reach the Nordhausen area in the Harz Mountains of Thuringia, near the underground Mittelwerk V-2 factory. From this area in central Germany, the migration would continue 400 miles south to Bavaria. As a major in the SS, von Braun possessed critical links to the most powerful political and military entity within Germany. Yet this affiliation did not guarantee any measure of personal security. The SS might decide to execute the Peenemünde technical personnel as a way to deny the Allies access to the Nazi regime’s most impressive secret weaponry. SS guards, in another possibility, might retain von Braun and his staff as a prize to use in any bargaining with the Allies. SS General Hans Kammler, an ardent and ruthless Nazi military operative, played an increasingly powerful role at Peenemünde in the final months. His erratic ways posed a potential threat to the escapees. But Kammler did not act to thwart von Braun or threaten the escapees; he would disappear under mysterious circumstances in the climactic days of the war. For von Braun, the desperate plan to move to Bavaria was worth all the risks. The group and their rocket legacy had to be relocated in a locale beyond the reach of the invading Soviets.

  On February 17, after an interlude of desperate preparations, the escapees from Peenemünde departed for Bleichrode, a town near Nordhausen and their first stop on the southward journey. Their ultimate destination was Oberammergau in Bavaria. The group employed trains, trucks, and a barge; the latter was used to transport selected equipment and records. A total of 525 members of the technical staff with their families took part in the migration. Even as they departed, they could hear the roar of Russian artillery in the distance. While taking leave of Peenemünde, the evacuees used dynamite to destroy as much of the rocket installation as possible. These desperate attempts to deny the Soviets key technical equipment proved to be only a partial success. Once Peenemünde was occupied by the invading Red Army, there was a small residue of abandoned equipment to transport back to the Soviet Union.

  To smooth the passage south, von Braun cleverly forged documents and bluffed his way to safety, passing through refugee columns and a chaotic gauntlet of checkpoints set up to seize deserters. Despite anxious moments, the passage to Thuringia was a dramatic success. Along the way, however, there was one near fatal incident: Von Braun endured severe injuries in a car crash.

  While stopping at Bleichrode, the Peenemünde team took steps to hide their 14 tons of records in an abandoned mine—the invaluable paper trail of more than a decade of research and experimentation. The long journey ended on April 4, when von Braun and his colleagues reached a remote ski lodge in Bavaria. It would be here that von Braun, Dornberger, and the technical elite from Germany’s rocket program eventually surrendered to the American army.8

  At the war’s end, the Nordhausen area—the locale for the Mittelwerk factory and the hidden documents—became the main objective for an intense competition among the Allies to seize the surviving V-2 technology. The Nordhausen region in April-May 1945 mirrored all the chaos that gripped Germany in its hour of defeat. Charles Lindbergh, the famed American aviator, has left one of the most vivid accounts of the time. Lindbergh came to occupied Germany as a member of the Navy Technical Mission, which allowed him access to some of the key Nazi installations associated with advanced weaponry. He arrived in Nordhausen shortly after advance elements of the American army had secured the Mittelwerk underground factory. Traveling in a convoy of jeeps and trucks, Lindbergh’s group reached areas still tenuously under the control of remnants of the German army—in his words, “an army surrendered, but with its guns and discipline still intact.” At one crossroad, he remembered, his team confronted an entire regiment on the march—“trucks, cannon, and thousands of rifled infantrymen strung out at right angles to our line of travel. A seemingly endless column of green-clad German soldiers moving in one direction; a single American jeep rolling up against it, like a fly buzzing at the body of a serpent.”9 This was the same chaotic scene von Braun had encountered just days before Lindbergh’s arrival.

  Later, Lindbergh made a dramatic visit to the Mittelwerk factory, where he inspected an assembly line of V-2 rockets, abandoned by the Germans. He drove a jeep right into an underground factory that had been blasted out of solid rock. He observed the facility up close: “Hundreds of subassemblies of V-2s were lying on flatcars or were scattered over the ground: nose cones, cylindrical bodies, and big fuel tanks for liquid oxygen or alcohol. A number of tail sections, shining and finned, were standing on end like a village of Indian teepees…. We left our jeep and walked into a side tunnel, which contained a production line for V-2 engines. In another tunnel we saw an entire rocket assembled….

  We walked back and forth through the cross tunnels. There were miles of them, lighted, deserted, silent.”10 Even as he observed the rocket debris field at Mittelwerk, Lindbergh had no idea that the American army would soon engage in
a high-stakes gamble to retrieve this technological legacy of Nazi Germany—at the expense of the Soviet Union.

  As head of “Special Mission V-2,” Colonel Toftoy aimed to secure enough components to assemble 100 V-2 rockets. He deployed Major William Bromley, a trusted high-energy assistant, to Nordhausen to procure these components. The remains of the Nazi rocket program were to be shipped to the United States for reassembly and testing. No less important, the special mission team wanted to confiscate all relevant documents and to interview technical experts associated with Peenemünde. Toftoy and his team, however, faced a major complication associated with the execution of their search. he Nordhausen area, as all of Thuringia, had been designated to be placed under Soviet control, effective June 1, as part of the Yalta agreement dividing occupied Germany into four zones. They had to race against time to find and evacuate the V-2 hardware and records before the arrival of the Soviet army.

  Bromley faced the daunting challenge of securing the V-2 components in a relatively short time frame, since formal approval did not arrive until May 22. Never at a loss for improvisation, Bromley hired former slave laborers to assist in the top-secret operation. As the hired workers cleared the vast tunnel complex of V-2 parts, Bromley managed to secure the requisite transport—trucks and railcars—to evacuate the treasures of Mittelwerk. To achieve this end, he had to requisition trucks deep in the rear, as far away as Cherbourg, France. A steady stream of shipments eventually made their way to Antwerp, Belgium, where they were crated and loaded on awaiting Liberty ships for transport to the United States. The precious cargo from Nordhausen was destined for White Sands, New Mexico, where the army planned to reassemble and test the V-2 rockets.11

  Major Staver, also part of the Toftoy team, faced a more difficult challenge in seeking out the buried documentation for the V-2 rocket. Staver’s task was to find the abandoned mine where the documents had been hidden by the von Braun team. This was no easy task, given the chaos of the war and the general hostility of the local population. Following a tip, he was able to locate the buried documents in a mine near the small village of Dorten, 30 miles outside Nordhausen. On May 26, on the eve of the Soviet arrival in Nordhausen, Staver managed to requisition six large trucks to remove the documents to the American zone.

  THE SOVIETS MAKE THEIR MOVE

  The Soviet Union had been aware of the V-2 missile technology during the war. At the closing of the war, however, the Soviets possessed only an incomplete picture of this advanced rocket technology; obtaining it was a priority. However, rocketry was just one part of a concerted campaign to confiscate a vast array of industrial and scientific treasures in occupied Germany. Once the Soviets began an intense campaign to seek out remnants of the V-2 technology, they were frustrated to learn that the Americans had already removed much of the most important finds—both hardware and human expertise.

  Boris Chertok, a specialist in rocket control, guidance, and communications systems who worked at NII-1 (Scientific Research Institute—No. 1) of the People’s Commissariat of the Aircraft Industry, has provided one of the best firsthand accounts of how the Soviets sought out the vestiges of the German rocket program. In his lively memoir, titled Rakety i lyudi (“rockets and people”), Chertok reveals the slow and often chaotic Soviet response to the trophy hunt for the V-2 rocket.12 The occupation of Germany created great confusion on the Soviet side, because a variety of Soviet industries, along with a range of military departments, participated in the quest for useful trophies to take home. Chertok had been associated with the Soviet aviation industry as an engineer, and initially his bosses were more interested in Nazi Germany’s advanced jet engine technology, which offered an obvious avenue for modernization. By contrast, the rocketry of Nazi Germany—if stunning and unique—appeared more futuristic, even impractical to some military planners. And, no less important, there was a dilemma over who should assume control of the secret V-2 spoils. In the absence of an existing missile program, it became quickly apparent that a new governmental entity would be required to oversee the development of Germany’s advanced rocket technology.

  Chertok had first learned of the V-2 missile in 1944, when the Soviets invaded Poland and recovered remnants of the new rocket from an abandoned German rocket test site. Collaboration with British intelligence quickly revealed the capabilities of the secret weapon. Chertok’s own NII-1 research institute had collected data from Poland. By 1945, Chertok and others were arguing that a systematic search be conducted for the V-2 rocket, in the hope of gaining first access to this futuristic technology.

  Those in charge of the aviation industry, however, did not share Chertok’s sense of urgency; for them, the main task at hand was the collection of advanced German machine tools and jet engines. As an engineer, Chertok took a professional interest in German advances in guidance technology, rocket engines, and radio-control techniques. He, too, marveled at the ability of the Germans to create a powerful liquid-propellant rocket engine, one that could perform at supersonic speeds and be adapted as a missile to bomb Allied targets.13 As the war drew to a close, Chertok realized how critical it would be for the Soviet Union, in his words, “to get to the front and be the first to seize the intellectual war spoils of rocket technology.”14

  Chertok flew to war-ravaged Germany in late April 1945, as part of a group led by General Nikolai Petrov, one of several groups seeking Nazi Germany’s technological trophies. After the war, on June 1, 1945, Chertok made his first visit to Peenemünde. He recorded in his memoir that he had been drawn to the test site by “engineering curiosity” and “a sense of duty to our country.” Flying over the area, he was struck by the sheer beauty of the Baltic coast and the outward appearance of Peenemünde as a resort. On closer examination, he observed the desolation of the former German rocket facility, the destroyed buildings, laboratories, test stands, and factory complexes. The Germans had systematically dismantled the facility in advance of the Soviet occupation, even down to the removal of machine tools and equipment. Still intact, though, were the bunkers, the excellent roads, and the elaborate network of power and signal cables—appearing now as the skeletal remains of Peenemünde. Prior to their evacuation, the Germans had done an effective job of denying the Soviet conquerors the treasures of Peenemünde.15

  Later, on July 14, Chertok arrived with his team in Nordhausen. On this trip Chertok inspected the center of V-2 production at the Mittelwerk facility. He noted that the city, in the immediate aftermath of the war, revealed the devastation of Allied bombing. He visited Camp Dora, which had been the home for the thousands of slave laborers who worked on the Mittelwerk assembly lines. At this juncture, Chertok noted, the notorious death camp had been cleared, with the dead buried and the survivors offered food and shelter. One former prisoner at the camp delighted Chertok with the offer of a gyroscope from a V-2 rocket, an artifact he had hidden and concealed over many months. Once Chertok reached the underground Mittelwerk, he saw that the Americans had been efficient in removing the most valuable partially assembled V-2s and a huge amount of rocket components. A local German engineer, who had worked at the factory, informed Chertok that the assembly lines had functioned up to the last days of the war, producing 35 missiles a day. He said the Americans had taken away the bulk of the rockets, but he still believed the Russians could sift through the debris and reconstruct as many as 20 missiles. This was the Soviets’ consolation prize.16

  In time, Chertok took up residence with his team in the Villa Frank, a former mansion of a wealthy family in nearby Bleichrode, where von Braun had temporarily lived in the final days of the war. Chertok was overwhelmed with the luxury of this house: its large rooms, marble staircase, gilt-framed pictures, and sumptuous appointments. Chertok and his small group worked diligently to reconstruct the flight-control system for the V-2 rocket. To achieve this end, they organized the Institut Rabe (an acronym for Raketenbau und Entwicklung Bleichrode, “missile construction and development in Bleichrode”).17 The organization aimed to coordin
ate the research and mobilize German technicians to provide needed expertise. Chertok even made an abortive effort to lure Wernher von Braun to the Soviet side. One successful step, however, was the establishment of a research outpost at Lehesten, where a test stand for the V-2 rocket engine had survived intact. Here the Soviets set up a program of research on propulsion technology. Valentin Glushko, destined to become a major figure in the Soviet space program, led the team at Lehesten, a project that would remain in Germany until January 1947.

  How the Soviets organized their rocket program was a complicated affair, especially in the immediate aftermath of World War II. Chertok’s Institut Rabe was co-opted in August 1945 by the chief artillery directorate. Later, General Lev M. Gaidukov, who had overseen the development of the Soviet Katushka battlefield artillery rockets, organized an interagency commission to deal with the V-2 technology. There was no small amount of bickering and confusion in this process. One key goal for the Russians was to seek out ways to put the V-2 rocket back into production and to recruit former German technicians to assist in the studying of advanced weaponry. The Soviet campaign to exploit fully the vestiges of advanced German weaponry, particularly the V-2, was not always a well-ordered endeavor. More than one organization took shape to coordinate the process of collection, research, and testing. Given the resulting overlap, Stalin created a “Special Committee No. 2” in May 1946 to oversee a coherent program of research on rocketry.18 This organization would organize the production of Soviet missiles in the postwar years, making the V-2 the baseline technology. As a consequence, Stalin ordered the rocket program distributed among various industrial sectors with a special governmental committee to oversee the research and development work. From the midst of this organizational change, Dmitriy Ustinov, the Minister of Armaments, soon emerged as the leader of the Soviet Union’s ballistic missile and space programs.19