by Sam Kean
Eventually Wick tired of the interview and asked Berg to leave. But on his way out the door, the catcher managed to filch the postcard from Wick’s desk. That night he translated it from German to English and photographed it for intelligence officials. He then dropped by the physicist’s office the next day and slipped it back into place. Wick never suspected a thing. He’d let his guard down, assuming that a lunkhead athlete could never put one over on a brilliant scholar like him. Sometimes you have to play a fool to catch a fool.
Heisenberg’s postcard contained one line of real emotion—“The time in which one could think calmly on physics is so far away that it seems as if ages had passed.” Otherwise it simply related what he’d been doing for the past few months, which was mostly dodging disasters. He mentioned the fire at his in-laws’ home in Berlin and the bombing of his own home in Leipzig months later. As a result he’d moved his family to a cabin in the Bavarian Alps, and visited them as often as he could. This news probably seemed mundane to Heisenberg while he was writing it, but thanks to these unguarded words, OSS now knew of one place to look for him.
The postcard also mentioned Heisenberg’s research. His lab in Leipzig had been leveled by bombs, he reported, while “the Berlin institute still stands.” But recent intelligence reports had hinted that Heisenberg was actually shifting his lab south of Berlin, beyond the reach of American bombing raids. Berg questioned Wick on this point, and Wick conceded that Heisenberg was moving to a wooded region. He declined to say more, but this tidbit narrowed the search area substantially.
When Berg relayed the results of this interview, including the postcard, OSS was ecstatic; Wild Bill Donovan personally congratulated him. Depending on whom you asked, the catcher was either a lunkhead or a diva—but he’d delivered when it mattered.
CHAPTER 43
Aphrodite vs. Anvil
Because the Busy Lizzie V-3 gun was not yet ready by D-Day, the defense of the Reich fell to another weapon, the V-1 rocket. Hours after the invasion in Normandy began, the German high command in Berlin cabled a code phrase—“junk room”—to several units of soldiers stationed at sites across northern France. Nazi engineers toiled for days without sleep to prep the launch equipment, and the first V-1 slammed into Kent, near London, at 4:18 a.m. on June 13, 1944. Hundreds more rockets—each one long and finned, like an airborne shark—quickly followed.
The barrage had two main effects. First, it hindered the Allied military. At one point 40 percent of all bombing raids originating from Great Britain were devoted to attacking V-1 launch sites. Reconnaissance efforts were equally intense, with the Allies snapping more than a million photographs of them. Both these activities drained resources from other operations. Rocket attacks also sowed chaos in southern England by taking out factories, power plants, water mains, roads, and transport centers. Supply chains were seriously disrupted, and the Allied armies struggled to make headway against the Germans on the mainland as a consequence. A full month and a half after D-Day, they’d advanced just twenty-five miles inland from Omaha Beach—at a cost of 100,000 casualties.
Second, the missiles terrorized civilians. Because the Germans couldn’t really aim V-1s, no one knew where they’d land. That fact, coupled with their speed (close to 400 miles per hour), made them virtually impossible to defend against. The British tried floating barrage balloons in their paths, which sometimes triggered them to explode early, and daredevil pilots learned to knock them off course by edging up to them—sometimes within six inches—and dipping their wings up and down to create turbulence. But these measures couldn’t stop more than a handful of rockets, and millions of people went to bed every night fearing that the next one would have their name on it. The barrage got so bad—2,700 people died within the first two weeks—that a drunken Winston Churchill ordered the army to launch poison gas against German civilians in retaliation. Churchill’s cabinet demurred, and the British government suppressed the incident for years. Instead, it began encouraging Londoners to move to the countryside. More than 1.5 million eventually fled.
Overall, there was a real fear that the German rocket attacks would reverse the tide of the war and drive the Allies off the continent for good. And the really scary thing was that worse weapons were on the way. So far, Germany had launched only V-1s, which were relatively small. Meanwhile, the giant concrete bunkers in northern France were still under construction, and whatever weapons they portended would surely be worse—especially if (rumors continued to swirl) the new rockets were nuclear. Because the bunkers were located in Calais, a good hundred miles northeast of where the Allied armies were pinned down, there was no hope of attacking them on the ground, either.
All this merely ratcheted up the pressure on the Allies to knock out the bunkers before they became operational. With conventional bombs proving impotent, the one real hope lay with the American military’s plan to load war-weary planes with explosives and slam them into the sites using remote control.
Farsighted aviators had been tinkering with remote-control planes—drones, in effect—since the days of the Wright brothers, but electronic systems in the early 1900s couldn’t send and receive signals over the necessary distances. During the war, the army in particular struggled with these limitations. Their Project Aphrodite drones could obey only three commands (left, right, dive), and those only haltingly.
By mid-1944, however, the navy’s Project Anvil had achieved a breakthrough, thanks in part to an irascible thirty-five-year-old engineer in southeast Pennsylvania named Wilfred “Bud” Willy. A new radio-based system that he helped design could handle up to ten commands, allowing the mother plane to steer the baby with far greater precision. The mother could vary the baby’s speed, for instance, and detonate the explosives remotely; it could even turn the baby’s heater on and off. No one had ever seen such sophisticated drones.
The only hitch in Willy’s design was the remote-detonation circuits. For some odd reason they kept popping on during test flights; had these been real missions, with real explosives, the babies would have blown prematurely. After weeks of scratching their heads, Willy’s team finally chalked the problem up to, essentially, boogie-woogie. Because the mother ship had to fly three vertical miles above the baby, the baby needed pretty sensitive radio detectors. Sensitive enough that they appeared to be picking up stray signals from pop music and news radio stations in nearby Philadelphia, which were flipping the circuits on willy-nilly. Willy’s team never quite resolved the problem, but they consoled themselves that stray radio signals would be less of an issue over the English Channel.
Meanwhile, both the navy and army were recruiting pilots in England for the mission, including Joe Kennedy. Although Joe and his crewmates had long ago flown enough missions for an honorable discharge, he talked his men into staying on through D-Day, hoping for another shot at glory. After D-Day, however, pilots hunting U-boats in the Bay of Biscay were reduced to a mere support role, and his crewmates said adieu. The only silver lining to being abandoned was that it freed up Joe for other work, and when officers at his base began recruiting pilots for another blatantly unsafe mission, he volunteered. For security reasons the recruiters couldn’t tell him what the mission actually involved, but Joe didn’t care. The word “dangerous” was enough for him.
The pilots of the new Special Attack Unit No. 1 were briefed on the mission in late June—brief being the operative word. A tight-lipped officer told them they’d be taking off in planes loaded with napalm, pointing them at France, then jumping out before they exploded. Any questions? Uh, a few. The officer refused to say more, though, and quickly dismissed the men. Still, the flyboys didn’t let the danger dampen their spirits. Whenever a new pilot reported for duty with the army group, the others would call out, “Hey, fellows, another nut’s arrived,” and they’d all laugh. The navy group was giddy, too, especially Joe—he couldn’t wait to read the headlines about himself back in Boston.
As training got under way, however, that enthusiasm gave way to fr
ustration. The British military was understandably jumpy about having planes loaded with explosives sitting around at air bases, so base commanders kept tossing these hot potatoes around, forcing the Americans to transfer to other sites. Obviously the crews couldn’t fly planes full of napalm around, so each time a transfer order came, they had to unload all the crates of explosives, fly the planes empty, and ship the crates ahead via trucks—a gigantic pain in the neck. Settling into the new base was never fun, either, since they invariably got dumped in some shithole. Probably the most miserable site was Woodbridge, in extreme southern England; it served as the emergency landing strip for any planes that suffered damage in France. If you’d lost an engine and could barely steer; if you were hemorrhaging gasoline by the gallon; if the pilot and copilot had both been shot and some poor radioman was behind the stick now, flying for his life—well, you said a Hail Mary and steered for Woodbridge, where spectacular fireballs were a regular feature of life.
After several transfers, the Aphrodite and Anvil crews ended up at an unused base in rural England where a farmer actually raised beets and turnips inside the triangle of runways. The place was also infested with rats, which nipped the pilots as they slept in their barracks. They tried shooting them at first, but the bullet holes they left in the wall only let in more cold and damp, so they gave up. Most navy pilots preferred the company of rats over army pilots anyway, and vice versa. Being in different branches of the service, the two groups had a natural antipathy for each other, and their isolation on the base only exacerbated the rivalry.
The pilots’ biggest frustration, though, was the weather. The crews for the baby ships needed practice setting up the remote-control system in midair, and the crews for the mother ship needed practice flying the drones. But to hold practice flights, they also needed CAVU conditions—ceiling and visibility unlimited, with zero cloud cover up to 20,000 feet. Otherwise the mothers couldn’t see the babies from so far above, much less steer them. In other words, they needed just the sort of gorgeous, sunny days that southern England almost never has. Whole weeks would pass with no action as gray clouds squatted above them. And oftentimes, even when the forecast did look promising, Kennedy and the other pilots would go through all the work and stress of prepping their planes only to have the flight scrubbed at the last second. Any measly bank of clouds rolling through spelled doom.
Officers tried to keep morale high by putting the pilots on triple rations, with extra candy and cigarettes. As a special treat, Winston Churchill also graced them with a visit. Churchill even tried, in his mischievous way, to squeeze his spherical bulk through one of the tiny emergency hatches in a baby plane to get a look at the explosives. Oddly, he was wearing golf shoes with metal spikes that day, and an army major suddenly realized that a stray footstep might puncture a cable and short-circuit the electronics inside, with fatal results. So the major ran up and grabbed Churchill by the most obvious target that presented itself—his generous bum—and yelled, “Mr. Prime Minister, you can’t get into that airplane with those spikes.” Churchill turned to see who’d goosed him and said, “Oh I can’t, can’t I?” Everyone tensed. But the major’s courage amused Churchill, who conceded, “Very well, then. Just show me where to put my foot and I’ll climb out.”
Candy and visits from Churchill could soothe the pilots only so much, though. The weather continued to torment them, and they eventually began taking out their frustrations in boneheaded ways. One pastime involved playing bloody knuckles with their foreheads, butting each other like goats until someone cried uncle. They also went for joyrides in jeeps and deliberately crashed them into trees, bailing out at the last second. Ha ha.
Kennedy didn’t participate in these hijinks, but if anything he was mired in an even deeper funk than the other pilots. For one thing, there were dire tidings from France. After weeks of little to no progress in Normandy, General George S. Patton’s army suddenly engineered a breakout in early August. His troops began steamrolling the Germans there and liberating huge swaths of land. Most of the world cheered, but Joe despaired over the news. If Patton liberated France too quickly, how would he win any glory for himself?
Even worse, the navy mission ran into unexpected delays. To get their fancy remote-control planes to England, Bud Willy’s team in Pennsylvania had to hopscotch across the Atlantic Ocean. Unfortunately, bad weather and a lack of deicing equipment had delayed them in Iceland for three weeks; Joe and other navy pilots had fallen behind on their training as a result. So when the weather in southern England finally cleared for a few days on August 4 and mission commanders began scheduling the first real attack runs, the army’s Aphrodite crews—despite inferior technology—got first crack at the bunkers in northern France. Kennedy was furious. Those army chumps were going to blow up all the targets and leave him with nothing.
He needn’t have worried. Project Aphrodite was an unmitigated disaster. Of the six army bombers that participated in the mission—including Taint a Bird, The Careful Virgin, and Quarterback—three nearly blew up right after takeoff: one ran into a field of barrage balloons, one took friendly fire from local antiaircraft units, and one stumbled into an outgoing raid and almost collided midair with another plane. Things only got worse from there. The mother ships lost track of one baby midflight, and another one veered off course toward London. Two babies eventually plunged into the sea and another exploded prematurely over English soil, killing eighty cows in a pasture. Three planes did make it across the Channel, only to have their remote-control switches fail, which sent them sailing over their targets. In the end only one plane-bomb hit something worth damaging, albeit not a bunker. After this baby missed its target, the mother ship decided to swing it around toward a German antiaircraft unit, whose gunners were no doubt licking their chops at this fat, easy mark. They opened fire, and ended up killing themselves in a gigantic greenish-yellow fireball.
Missing the bunkers was bad enough, but the Aphrodite crews also suffered an appalling number of casualties. One pilot died after jumping out and finding that his parachute wouldn’t open. Several others nearly died because of similar malfunctions, including one man who had to tear his pack open mid-plummet and cast his parachute out by hand. Even when the parachutes worked, the men suffered sprained ankles, smashed teeth, and lacerations; one had his arm torn off at the shoulder. Not surprisingly, a furious army general grounded the Aphrodite mission on August 6. “This whole project,” he fumed, “is put together with baling wire, chicken guts, and ignorance.”
Joe Kennedy was delighted. The army’s failure would only enhance his magnificence in comparison, and when Project Anvil got the go-ahead to fly a few days later, he jockeyed to be the first pilot up. Indeed, some historians suspect that Joe put the screws to his superiors, threatening to destroy their careers through his powerful father if he didn’t get the initial mission. You thought Hitler had a temper? He got the nod.
For their part, the surviving army pilots were glad to be done with the fiasco, and after being grounded, they proceeded to get stinking drunk. During their bender, one of them saw Kennedy strut into the bar on base, and slurred, “If my old man was an ambassador, I’d get my ass transferred out of this outfit.” Joe just laughed.
CHAPTER 44
Valkyrie
Werner Heisenberg had a rocky summer in 1944. He and Kurt Diebner continued to spat over access to uranium and heavy water. He could barely find time to work anyway, since the process of moving his lab south to the Black Forest region was taking longer than expected. The war was going terribly for Germany, too, and what he heard behind closed doors was even more troubling. One of Göring’s top officers visited him in Berlin in July to ask about rumors that the Allies planned to drop atomic bombs on Dresden in six weeks. Heisenberg thought this unlikely but worried nonetheless.
On a personal level, Heisenberg was also feeling lonely and isolated in Berlin. He’d stashed his family in their dilapidated cabin in the Bavarian Alps and rarely saw them. He’d lost touch wit
h the international scientific community as well. Hardly any letters got through anymore, and although he’d recently visited Copenhagen and Krakow and Budapest to give “cultural lectures,” the scientists there remained unaccountably hostile when he showed up with his Nazi handlers.
About the only thing Heisenberg had to look forward to that summer was the Wednesday Club. This collection of twenty or so German aristocrats (diplomats, finance ministers, prominent professors) had been meeting every other Wednesday in Berlin since 1863 for dinner and an informal lecture; afterward they got drunk and sang songs from their schooldays. In short, it was an old boys’ club, just what the laddish Heisenberg needed sometimes to revive his spirits.
To his and everyone else’s surprise, however, the club had matured during the war and become something nobler—an outlet for people’s frustrations with the regime. They could unburden themselves with impunity there, and by 1944 meetings had shaded into subversive territory, with mocking denunciations of that “schimpanski” Hitler and his minions. Some of the bolder members even spoke of deposing Hitler, and a few of them sounded Heisenberg out on the idea. He didn’t take them seriously, of course, but he found such talk heartening. These were reasonable people, people who loved Germany and despised Hitler just like he did—people who understood that simultaneously wanting Germany to win the war and yet the Nazis to somehow lose the war wasn’t muddleheaded nonsense, but the only sensible way to think.
Between the move south and his research on Uranium Machines, Heisenberg didn’t have much time to attend the Wednesday Club during the first six months of 1944. So he was very much looking forward to the July 12 meeting, which he was hosting at his institute. He prepared a lecture on nuclear reactions inside stars, and picked fresh raspberries from the institute’s garden for that evening’s dessert. And for once during the war, everything went as well as he’d hoped. The lecture was a hit, and it inspired an interesting discussion afterward about the military and political consequences of nuclear energy. Then he and his fraternal brothers drank some lovely wine, and everyone had a grand time singing and shouting and popping off about the schimpanskis in Berlin.