Shoot for the Moon

by James Donovan

  But if prestige was a politician’s word, it was also a politician’s worry. The average American was more concerned about survival than prestige, and Johnson’s statements hit a nerve. Clearly the United States was no longer safe from nuclear attacks. What was next? Soviet military bases on the moon or orbiting the Earth? A 1956 article in Collier’s magazine had vividly suggested just that, with color illustrations of New York City being firebombed from above. Yes, that might be next, and it seemed even more likely after the Soviets launched Sputnik 2 just thirty-two days after its predecessor. That satellite carried a small mongrel dog named Laika into space, though she died from overheating after only a few hours in orbit. (At the time, the Soviets claimed that she survived for a week; the truth would not be revealed for decades.) Sputnik 2’s 1,121-pound payload—heavier than a Soviet nuclear warhead—made it abundantly clear that the Soviets could now reach America with an A-bomb. And there was only one reason to send a dog into orbit around the Earth. It was just a matter of time before there were Russians in space—and that meant right above America.

  After a few more weeks of teeth-gnashing by Democrats in DC and nonstop fear-stoking by the press—“Why is the U.S. still lagging in a race that may decide whether freedom has any future?” asked Time magazine—even those Americans initially unimpressed by Sputnik were whipped into near hysteria. The United States trailed the leader in a race that could end in the destruction of the American way of life…or destruction, period. Paranoia increased; not surprisingly, UFO sightings quadrupled immediately after Sputnik. Martians? Russians? Both were postulated.

  How could these primitive Cossacks have accomplished such a thing? Much ink was spilled and time spent lamenting how soft America had become in the little more than a decade since the end of World War II. While op-ed writers bemoaned an “education gap,” and a government report showed that Soviet children took far more science and math in high school than the fun-loving, sock-hopping American kids, who were getting dumber every day, it was clear that Soviet triumphs would continue. All this self-recrimination would result in the National Defense Education Act, signed into law by Eisenhower in September 1958, which was designed to kick-start the U.S. educational system with grants, low-interest loans, and the like. Eisenhower, in a press conference a few days after Sputnik 1 launched, insisted that it wasn’t the Russians who had built the satellite—it was “all of the German scientists” they had captured at the end of the war.

  This could not have been further from the truth. Almost all the top German rocket scientists and engineers had been captured and co-opted not by the Soviets but by the United States under the auspices of a secret project, and they had been living in America since 1945. Their leader, Wernher von Braun, was a handsome, charming ex-SS officer who had been the chief architect of an ambitious rocket program that had killed thousands during the war—and who now spread the gospel of space exploration to Americans in Walt Disney TV specials.

  This group of so-called Nazi scientists—a misnomer, since less than half of them had been members of the Nazi Party and all but a few were engineers and technicians, not scientists—were capable enough; their forty-six-foot-long V-2 rocket, a tremendous feat of science and engineering, had been the first man-made object to enter space. The trouble was, its creators had been virtually handcuffed by their American superiors for almost a decade, despite the best efforts of their persuasive director, and relegated to low-priority upper-atmosphere experiments, since the military saw long-distance bombers, not rockets, as superior weapons. Von Braun had striven for permission to construct a satellite and launch it before the Soviets did their own, and he had grandiose plans for an orbiting space platform that would work as either a refueling stop halfway to the moon or a battle station from which to rain down nuclear missiles. The satellite project was denied due to budget restrictions, and the space-platform idea wasn’t even considered. In the late 1940s, anybody who talked of going anywhere in space was considered a crackpot. Von Braun was determined to change that thinking, but it wouldn’t happen overnight.

  Wernher was born into German nobility (which accounted for the von in his name) in 1912; his father served as minister of agriculture during the Weimar Republic of the 1920s, and his mother could trace her ancestry to medieval kings in four countries. Von Braun began dreaming of traveling to other heavenly bodies during his pampered childhood. His mother, an amateur astronomer, gave him a telescope for his confirmation instead of his first pair of long pants, which was the standard gift for Lutheran boys, and he devoured the space-travel novels of H. G. Wells and Jules Verne. In his teens he became familiar with the writings of the great early theoreticians of rocketry—an obscure Russian schoolteacher, Konstantin Tsiolkovsky; the German mathematician Hermann Oberth; and the American physicist and inventor Robert Goddard—and graduated from fireworks to his own inventions and plans, not only for rockets, but for spaceships and their pilots. At sixteen, he organized an astronomy club at school and managed to acquire funds to buy a good-size refractor telescope. A German spaceflight movement was growing in the 1920s, and von Braun became a part of it. He was soon working with Oberth and other leading figures in German rocketry. By the time he entered university, the tall, blue-eyed, dark-haired young man was a science and math prodigy committed to a career in rockets and determined to pursue his dream of journeying to the moon and the planets.

  He graduated at twenty from the Berlin Institute of Technology with a degree in mechanical engineering and began postgraduate work in physics at the University of Berlin, but his studies were curtailed by larger forces. In the summer of 1932, some months before the Nazi Party came to power, the German army was casting about for some sort of long-range weaponry not banned by the 1919 Treaty of Versailles, which had severely restricted the country’s war-making abilities. They were not unaware of the destructive potential of a large, long-range rocket and asked von Braun to participate in secret research for military applications. He was initially impressed with the Nazis’ leader, Adolf Hitler, because of his nationalist ideas and his “astounding intellectual capabilities.” Above all, von Braun was an opportunist, and the idea of war seemed highly unlikely at the time. The army did not share his dream of spaceflight, but if they could help him build rockets, he would build rockets for them—a tempting prospect, considering the cost of the rockets he envisioned, and somewhat inevitable, since civilian rocket activity was soon banned. He accepted the offer and became the army’s top civilian specialist at their new (and only) rocket station, an artillery range hidden in a pine forest near Kummersdorf, sixty miles south of Berlin. His laboratory was half a concrete pit, his staff a single mechanic. But he continued his studies, and by the end of 1934, he was awarded a doctorate in physics in aerospace engineering, though his full dissertation was kept classified by the army. By that time, his group, which had grown to include several men who would work closely with him over the next decade and beyond, had successfully launched two small liquid-fueled rockets. The director of the program was only twenty-two.

  Over the next several years, his greatest talent would emerge—the managing of massive engineering projects. Few visionaries could mesh their dreams with the practical realities of administration on a grand scale; von Braun had a genius for it. His blend of charisma, enthusiasm, and knowledge inspired loyalty and hard work, and he became a superb leader of a large group of scientists, engineers, and technicians. In 1937 he was made technical director of the German army’s long-range ballistic missile program after it moved to Peenemünde, a facility on an island off the coast of northern Germany. Three years later, with World War II in full swing, he led a staff of more than a thousand. In the spring of 1940, he was pressured by Reichsführer Heinrich Himmler to join the SS, the elite paramilitary organization in charge of enforcing Nazi racial policies and, by extension, policing and intelligence. After some deliberation, von Braun joined, since not doing so might have damaged his career and his rocket work; he was given the rank of lieuten
ant. He participated in very few SS activities besides the monthly meetings, and even those he attended only half the time.

  By 1942, the Peenemünde team had developed the world’s first long-range guided ballistic missile, the forty-six-foot A-4 (soon renamed the V-2, the V for vengeance). It was a monster of a rocket, unlike anything ever seen before, and a huge leap forward in technology, from its powerful engine to its advanced guidance system. The V-2 could carry a 2,200-pound payload of explosives two hundred miles and do it fairly accurately, or at least it could toward the end of the war, after its guidance system was improved. The missile reached a speed of thirty-five hundred miles an hour, making it virtually impossible to shoot down—when it didn’t explode during liftoff.

  But all of that was still in the future. In October 1942, von Braun and his colleagues were under extreme pressure. The first two launch attempts had failed, and if the third wasn’t successful, the program would likely be shut down and its members shipped to combat zones—probably the Russian front, a virtual death sentence. On October 3, a black-and-white A-4 sat on a simple five-foot-high frame, frost from its super-chilled liquid-oxygen propellant coating the hull. The firing command was given, a switch was thrown, and as hundreds of tense spectators watched, the rocket lifted off the stand with a deafening roar, slowly at first and then gaining speed, finally reaching fifty miles beyond the stratosphere into the mesosphere. Von Braun and his team danced and wept for joy. It had taken almost a decade of hard work, but they had achieved their lofty goal. Even the army general overseeing the rocket development, Walter Dornberger—a short, bald engineer and former artillery officer who had fought in World War I and who, after working twelve years with von Braun, had become sympathetic to his dreams of interplanetary travel—knew what it meant to them. “This afternoon the spaceship has been born!” he said.

  For the German army, desperate for help in a losing war, the rocket’s only raison d’être was the destruction of the country’s enemies, and work continued in that direction. Hitler had been lukewarm about the technology at first, and funding for manpower and materials had been tight. By the summer of 1943, however, with the war going badly for Germany, the führer decided to give the program the highest national priority, and its budget was increased dramatically. In September 1944, hundreds of V-2 rockets, each capable of carrying a one-ton warhead, began raining down on targets in England, France, and Belgium. The V-2’s destructive effect could be significant; one November 1944 hit on London killed 160 people and injured 108. By the war’s end, V-2s would kill 2,754 British civilians and injure 6,523—though it would fail to become the supreme instrument of terror, the Wunderwaffe, or miracle weapon, that Hitler had hoped for.

  In August 1943, the Royal Air Force bombed Peenemünde and killed about five hundred civilian workers, most of them Polish and Russian prisoners of war involved in fabrication work. Only two of von Braun’s top scientists died, but the damage to the facility was extensive, and Hitler ordered production of the rocket moved to the Mittelwerk, an underground site carved out of an abandoned gypsum-mine shaft located two hundred and fifty miles south, in the Harz Mountains. Ten thousand slave laborers—again, most of them Polish and Russian prisoners, men from the nearby Dora-Mittelbau concentration camp—built the plant’s extensive series of large tunnels a mile into the hillside. Those workers and fifty thousand more endured hellish conditions and inhumane treatment to meet the factory’s target of nine hundred V-2s a month, an ambitious goal that was never quite achieved. By the time production was halted, in March 1945, twenty thousand of those workers had died as a result of starvation, disease, beatings, or execution.

  Despite his long working hours, von Braun, now tall and broad-shouldered with thick brown hair, found time for pleasure. He was given a civilian-adapted Messerschmitt for his own personal use, and on weekends he would fly it to Berlin, a hundred and sixty miles away, to visit a girlfriend—when he wasn’t romancing one of the Peenemünde secretaries. Sometimes his younger brother, Magnus, whom von Braun had hired as his assistant to keep him out of combat, would accompany him. There was the occasional bicycle ride with von Braun’s own attractive young secretary, and he was rarely alone on his sailboat in the Baltic Sea. And every so often, he and his team would let off steam at a weekend gathering.

  At one such party in March 1944, an inebriated von Braun and two colleagues discussed the fact that the war was going badly for Germany as well as their disappointment that they weren’t working on a spaceship. Von Braun’s near-constant comments to almost anyone within earshot about going to the moon finally caught up with him. A local female physician who was a spy for the Gestapo heard their remarks and reported them to the SS. Ten days later, von Braun and four others were arrested by the Gestapo on suspicion of treason and sabotage, charges that could have resulted in imprisonment or execution. The rocketeers were detained for a week, until General Dornberger, with the help of the minister of war armaments and production Albert Speer, a relatively sane Nazi despite being one of the führer’s favorites, engineered their release and the dropping of all charges; they argued that von Braun, especially, was too valuable to the war effort. Even Hitler admitted to Speer that von Braun was “indispensable.” But von Braun had gotten on the bad side of Heinrich Himmler and would never again be trusted by the SS Reichsführer or his minions. It was about then that von Braun began planning what he would do when the war was over.

  By the end of 1944, it was clear that the V-2 would not significantly alter the outcome of the war—and that outcome, von Braun knew, would not be a German victory. It was also clear that his plans for a transatlantic armed rocket able to reach New York, Washington, DC, and other cities on the U.S. mainland, part of an operation known as Projektil Amerika, would never be realized. With the Allied troops just days away from toppling the Nazi regime, von Braun had only one question: Which conquering nation was more likely to help him further his goal of space exploration—England, France, the United States, or the Soviet Union? The answer did not require long agonizing. He dismissed the first two for lacking the necessary funding, so the choice was the USSR or the United States; the U.S., with its relatively benign democracy, its booming economy, and its reputation for considerate treatment of prisoners of war, won hands down. The New World, with its siren song of freedom and a better life, had maintained a romantic hold on Germans for a century and a half—six million of them had immigrated there between 1820 and World War I—and the just-ended conflict had not squashed those dreams. Russia inspired no such imaginings. Few of the rocketeers preferred the Russians, who were rapidly advancing eastward; stories of their murder, rape, and pillage in revenge for Germany’s invasion of their country were rampant. Besides, von Braun’s country had lost two wars during his lifetime. “The next time, I wanted to be on the winning side,” he said later. He and the members of his inner circle discussed the options, and then they took a vote. All but one were in favor of the Americans. When he broached the subject with the rest of his team, most agreed, though some decided to cast their lots with the Russians.

  Early in 1945, von Braun and his staff were relocated to central Germany for their safety—or, some of them suspected, for a mass execution by the SS that would deny their valuable knowledge to the fatherland’s enemies. Von Braun oversaw the move south, but first he fabricated documents—orders to himself that he wrote on official SS stationery—and employed no small amount of subterfuge, including creating an acronym, V2BV, that he said stood for a top secret agency answerable only to Himmler himself; he had V2BV stenciled on boxes, crates, and vehicles. Thousands of personnel and tons of equipment, V-2 parts, and documents traveled by mule, horse, train, and truck convoy. Weeks later, with the technicians settled into empty factories and buildings in towns near the Mittelwerk, von Braun and a couple dozen of his closest colleagues ensconced themselves at a Bavarian Alps ski resort. After hiding the most valuable materials and papers in an abandoned gypsum mine, he began engineering the surrender of fi
ve hundred of his staff to the U.S. Army. When news of Hitler’s death on April 30 reached the area the next day, it became easier for von Braun to carry out his plans, as the SS troops guarding the missile team gradually disappeared.

  On the morning of May 2, 1945, Magnus von Braun—chosen because he spoke passable English, a language he’d learned in childhood from his British nanny—biked down a mountain road with a white handkerchief tied to the bicycle’s handlebars. When he ran into an American antitank platoon, he stopped his bike and walked it up to a private named Fred Schneikert. He told the soldier that the inventors of the V-2, including his brother Wernher von Braun, were up the mountain in a hotel, and they wanted to be taken to Ike—General Dwight Eisenhower, supreme commander of the Allied forces in Europe. “You are a nut,” the private said, but after some confusion, Magnus was sent back up the mountain to fetch the V-2 scientists. Later that afternoon, Wernher and six others drove in three cars and were escorted to U.S. Army intelligence. They were treated well and given a meal of scrambled eggs, bread and butter, and real coffee, a rarity in Germany at the time. Von Braun posed for photos with GIs and acted like a visiting dignitary. The Americanization of Wernher von Braun had begun.

  It took a few weeks before von Braun and his team came to an agreement with their American captors, but the two sides finally did. The Germans were at least twenty years ahead of the United States in the field of rocketry, and the rocketeers understood that their knowledge and their V-2 hardware and their priceless papers were valuable bargaining chips. By the terms of the Yalta Conference agreement, that part of Germany would be incorporated into the Soviet occupation zone. The Russians hadn’t arrived yet, but they would any day. Racing against the clock to beat them, the Americans absconded with about a hundred unfinished V-2s and enough parts to fill hundreds of railroad cars. They also located the mine shaft where von Braun had hidden the program’s most important plans and blueprints—fourteen tons of crates—and at the last minute they found another cache of valuable V-2 documents that Dornberger had hidden himself. The final treasures were shipped out just two days before the June 1 handover of the area to the Soviets.