A Fiery Peace in a Cold War

by Neil Sheehan

  The problem was that for every equal or superior whose admiration Hall aroused, he raised the hackles of others. He was the classic smart aleck with a chip on his shoulder, the wise guy who could not resist preening his cleverness, or needlessly pushing too far a confrontation with a more senior officer, as he had with the incompetent colonel over the repair of the B-17. He could be vindictive too. Hall did not turn in the Ford station wagon he had managed to acquire for the mobile repair team job, as he should have done. Instead, he held on to it as a personal vehicle. A motor pool officer demanded that Hall hand it over for general service use. Hall refused. He finally turned in the station wagon, but only after pouring enough of the solvent carbon tetra-chloride into the gas tank to ruin the engine.

  After another contribution to the Allied war effort in organizing the last-minute assembly of scores of gliders to ferry airborne troops behind German lines in Normandy on D-Day, Hall found the inspiration for his life’s work amidst the ruins of the Third Reich. Hap Arnold would have approved, as he had a distant if unknowing hand in Hall finding his métier. In addition to recruiting Theodore von Kármán for the major expedition to glean the best of German technology, which resulted in Toward New Horizons, Arnold had also ordered the formation in England of a small air technical intelligence team called the Directorate of Technical Services. The team was a joint venture with the RAF, about a dozen American engineers and a handful of British. Operating first in England and France, the team then followed the Allied armies into Germany, garnering whatever it might discover as they advanced. Hall was assigned to it and charged with gathering intelligence on all sources of aerial propulsion, from ordinary reciprocating engines to jets, ramjets, and rocket engines. While still in London, where the team was put together, Hall had collected pieces of the V-1 ramjet cruise missiles, dubbed buzz bombs by the Londoners, and the V-2 ballistic missiles the Nazis were launching against the British capital, to see what clues these shards might provide. He had, in fact, nearly been killed by a V-2. One evening, just as he was closing the blackout curtain in the room where he was sleeping, a five-story structure across the street was suddenly lifted into the air before disintegrating and crashing into rubble. The V-2 apparently penetrated right down through the building and then the 1,650 pounds of high explosive in the warhead detonated, lofting it upward.

  In his unpublished autobiography and in an interview, Hall claimed he was sent on a secret mission to the Satan’s lair where the V-1s and V-2s were being manufactured. It was a bombproof factory tunneled into a mountainside in a lonely valley of the Hartz Mountains, near Nordhausen in north-central Germany, by slave laborers. Thousands died blasting and burrowing out the chambers and thousands more were then worked to death running the factory around the clock. The place bore the banal name of Mittelwerk (Central Factory). His orders, which he said he successfully carried out, were to arrange for U.S. Army trucks to remove several samples of both V-1s and V-2s for shipment back to the United States and to sabotage the plant by destroying the master drawings and data settings for the machines. The purpose of the sabotage was to prevent the Soviets, in whose preagreed occupation zone the Mittelwerk would lie, from using the plant to manufacture any of the rockets or the jet engines that were also being produced there.

  Hall did get to Germany and was later awarded a Bronze Star for his intelligence work there, but whether he ever reached the V-2 factory is unclear, as details of his account are contradicted by other known historical facts. Ed Hall’s ego was sufficiently large to make him prone to elaborating the facts in his favor or even wish-thinking something out of whole cloth. As the Air Force’s foremost rocketeer, which he was subsequently to become, he certainly would have wanted others to believe that he had gone to the home of the V-2. What is clear is that its creation inspired him to devote his life to rocketry.

  Back in the United States in the late summer of 1946, with Edith and their first and hard-born child, David, Hall was ordered to the Air Development Center at Wright. He hoped he was being sent there with an assignment to design and develop rocket engines. To his chagrin, he was instead designated chief propulsion officer in the Technical Intelligence Department (later renamed the Air Technical Intelligence Center), tasked, as he had been in London, with gathering information on all new means of aerial propulsion being devised at home and abroad. While a handful of far-seeing air warriors like Hap Arnold had been impressed by the potential the V-2 heralded, most American airmen had regarded it as an expensive curiosity. Given its limited range of 180 to 220 miles and lack of accuracy, it might unnerve the citizens of London with its random death dealing, but it could accomplish no military purpose. To alleviate his frustration with intelligence work, Hall wrote a series of papers arguing that this dismissal was premature and a serious error. Rocket-propelled missiles possessed, he pointed out, the possibility of infinite range. When rocket engines were built with enough power to hurl a warhead into space with extreme velocity, as they someday would be, and guidance systems of high accuracy were also devised, targets anywhere on earth could be destroyed.

  In the fall of 1947, Hall thought he had escaped the intelligence types. He and the family moved out to Pasadena after the newly independent U.S. Air Force approved his request for a year’s grant to obtain a master’s degree in aeronautical engineering at Caltech, concentrating on jet propulsion systems, as there were no courses on rocket engines available at the time. Hall was not only to be the Air Force’s leading rocket specialist, he was also to be a self-taught one. He would have stayed another two years at Caltech to gain a Ph.D., but Air Technical Intelligence needs stymied him once more. He was dispatched to England to determine whether jet engines a British firm had been allowed to sell the Soviets for their new MiG-15 fighters could be altered for high-altitude performance. Unfortunately, Hall discovered, they could be. On May 22, 1950, just a month and three days before the outbreak of the Korean War, he was at last given the opportunity to demonstrate what he was really capable of achieving. He was transferred back to the Air Development Center and assigned to the Power Plant Laboratory as assistant chief of the nonrotating engine branch, i.e., ramjets and rockets.

  While all aspects of rocketry fascinated Hall, the straight-to-the-point logic of his mind led him to focus on first things first—the engine. The most powerful created up to that time was the V-2 engine, with its 56,000 pounds of thrust. North American Aviation in Los Angeles was one of the few aircraft firms with the foresight to get into the rocket business after the Second World War, soon establishing a separate rocket division, appropriately called Rocketdyne, at Canoga Park north of Burbank. With funding from the Air Development Center, it built several copies of the V-2’s power plant. About half blew up on test firing. It was decided that the German engine was seriously defective and, in any case, greatly underpowered for Air Force purposes. Hall arranged funding for a new and bigger engine fabricated to his design ideas and those the North American engineers contributed.

  Rocket engines in this early period were notoriously fickle devices, even when put together with care. What occurs within a rocket engine, as soon as the ignition button is pushed, is a controlled explosion, and “controlled” is a hoped-for attribute. Because the chain reaction is so volatile, a minor malfunction or small design flaw in the engine is enough to send the explosion out of control with an enormous flash and bang that blasts engine and rocket into bits. To improve reliability, Hall therefore pestered Rocketdyne to adopt strict quality control of components and uniform procedures when testing the engines by bolting and clamping them to concrete stands for static firings. The result of his initiative was an engine of 75,000 pounds thrust, an improvement but neither reliable nor potent enough for what Hall had in mind. Hall regarded the engine as a way station, but it did not go to waste. Wernher von Braun showed up at Hall’s laboratory one day and asked if he could have the few test engines North American had produced for a new missile he and his team were putting together at the Army’s Redstone Ar
senal near Huntsville, Alabama. Hall consented readily and had von Braun sign the appropriate transfer form. Hall’s beginning venture in rocket enginery thus ended up as the power plant for Redstone, a 200-mile-range tactical missile, an upgraded V-2, which von Braun launched for the Army in 1953.

  Hall meanwhile pressed on with the single-mindedness and ruthless determination so characteristic of the man. When his goals were endangered, scruples that might have deterred others aroused no hesitation in Hall. Rather, he displayed at such moments the ultimate and imaginative form of gall known as chutzpah in Yiddish. After the budget for his rocket engine program was initially “decimated” in mid-1950 by the more immediate needs of the Korean War, he wrote in his unpublished autobiography, he decided to fake an intelligence report of a monster Soviet rocket engine to frighten the Air Force into leaving his money alone. He approached a friend who was an officer in Technical Intelligence, explained how desperate his plight was, and asked the friend to help him pull off the con. He would provide a design, he said, drawn in what was known of Russian style, of an engine rated at one hundred metric tons (220,500 pounds) of thrust. The friend was then to slip it into intelligence channels as a genuine report picked up in the Soviet Union. The man refused to be part of such a hoax. Submitting fraudulent reports is a serious offense under military law.

  If caught, Hall and his friend could both be court-martialed and dismissed from the service. Hall pestered the friend for weeks, pleading that the trick was the only way to save his endeavors. The man finally relented and a drawing of Hall’s bogus Soviet whopper engine was duly submitted. The report caused a sensation at the Air Development Center. A special briefing was laid on and ranking officers invited. Hall cannily stayed away. As he recounted in his autobiography, early that evening, right after the briefing, the chief of the Power Plant Laboratory, where Hall worked, a senior colonel, “entered my office and castigated me for failing to press hard enough to retain my budget for large rocket development. The program was saved!”

  Faking the report of the Soviet engine was not the only confidence game Hall played. The budget funds he drew on for his rocket engine advancement program were designated for a project he was supposed to further, the development of the Navaho intercontinental cruise missile. It was one of the three strategic missiles the Tea Pot Committee was to examine. A big multiengine rocket booster putting out more than 400,000 pounds of thrust, and weighing 300,000 pounds, was planned to lift the Navaho to the point fifteen miles in the air where the twin ramjet engines were supposed to kick in and propel the missile 6,330 miles to its target. Hall had no faith in the Navaho. He regarded ramjet engines as more difficult to fabricate and less reliable than rockets. He was also convinced that the Navaho’s inertial guidance system would not prove sufficiently accurate to carry the missile to its target over the relatively long flight time. His game was to use the requirement for adequate engines for the Navaho booster as a cover to acquire a rocket engine for an intercontinental ballistic missile. He believed that an ICBM’s much shorter flight time over the same distance, about half an hour, would allow for correspondingly more accurate guidance, particularly given the advances then occurring in guidance technology. (And Hall was proven correct where Navaho was concerned. Despite the later availability, thanks to Hall, of rocket engines of sufficient power, the Air Force could never get the contraption to fly properly and it was finally canceled in 1957.)

  At the Air Development Center, Hall was in a milieu where he could shine and where his talents were appreciated. His colleagues were other engineers caught up like himself in the exploration of uncharted technology that could enhance the reach and power of the U.S. Air Force. His difficult personality made enemies, of course, as it always did. But there were others who saw beyond his flaws to the imaginative and insightful cast of his mind and admired and befriended him. One was Major Sidney Greene, a fellow New Yorker, although Brooklyn-born, and like Hall a graduate of the Townsend Harris competitive-entrance high school and the City College of New York. Greene had been forced to take his B.S. at CCNY in premedical studies, because his mother had been intent on him becoming a doctor. But after spending the Second World War in the Army Air Forces, mostly as a communications officer, he had set out on his own road. He discovered that he liked military life, applied for and received a Regular commission, and obtained a B.S. in electrical engineering from the Air Force Institute of Technology (a larger and more advanced postwar version of the Engineering School Schriever had attended at Wright in 1940). He followed it up with a master’s in the subject through university extension courses. By 1952, Greene was in charge of the New Developments Office at the Air Development Center. He had a myriad of study projects on his agenda, from a reconnaissance satellite, for which the Air Force as yet had no rocket to launch it into space, to a radar decoy for the B-52 named Green Quail. Everything was on paper; no prototypes had been produced.

  One of the studies in Greene’s cupboard was Atlas, still in its original monster missile incarnation to carry a huge fission warhead, which the Air Force had revived the previous year by granting a new study contract to Convair. The funds for the Convair study were channeled through Greene’s office. Hall learned this and approached Greene with a proposition. “Look, let’s not throw away more money on paper. What we need is a rocket engine. Why don’t we take $2 million, you transfer it over to me, and we will modify the Navaho booster.” Hall explained that he would use the $2 million to get North American’s Rocketdyne to build a prototype with enough thrust to give them a real ballistic missile engine. Greene knew Hall well by this time. He was subsequently to work under Hall at Schriever’s Western Development Division. He understood all of Hall’s kinks. He also regarded Hall, he was to remark years later, as “one of our geniuses.” The proposition made eminent sense to him. “Great idea,” Greene said, “I’ll give you the money.” After Greene’s immediate superior, a colonel, also assented, he let Hall have the funds. The action was legal, but they were supposed to clear a transfer involving this much money with the commander of the center, Major General Albert Boyd, whom Greene remembered as a tough-minded, grim-looking man who had been a famous test pilot in his younger years. Convair apparently complained over the shortfall of $2 million in revenue it had expected to receive and Secretary Talbott wrote to Boyd demanding an explanation. Greene and his boss were summoned to the general’s office. Greene thought Boyd “was going to rip me apart.” He and his superior explained why they had made the transfer. The general focused his gaze on the apprehensive Greene. “If I were in your place, I would have done the same thing,” Boyd said to Greene’s surprise. “Get out. I’ll take care of it.”

  Combining their talents, Hall and the Rocketdyne engineers produced a prototype engine that generated an unprecedented 120,000 pounds of thrust. Hall then had an insight that further enhanced the engine’s force. It came to him from his research into liquid rocket fuels. The traditional liquid rocket fuel, the one used in the V-2 engine and in the two more powerful ones for which Hall had since been responsible, was alcohol and liquid oxygen. The two substances were mixed as they flowed into the combustion chamber of the engine, the liquid oxygen serving as a burning agent to draw maximum energy from the alcohol while it was being consumed at an extremely high temperature. Hall soon realized from his research that a hydrocarbon fuel would release considerably more energy than alcohol when burned. He experimented until he hit on what seemed to be the optimal substance. It was a refined petroleum much like the Pearl Oil kerosene that John D. Rockefeller had grown wealthy selling to millions of Chinese. (In one of the early twentieth century’s more memorable marketing ploys, Rockefeller had thoughtfully provided, free of charge, the kerosene lamps in which to burn it.) Hall gave an appropriately terse military designation to his variation, RP-1, for Rocket Propellant-1. Adjustments had to be made to the engine to burn the hydrocarbon fuel, but when the RP-1 was substituted for the alcohol, Hall got an increase in thrust from 120,000 to 135,000 p
ounds, a remarkable accomplishment for the time. Hall’s initiative also led North American to construct bigger concrete stands, called “hard stands,” for static testing of large rocket engines at Santa Susana in Southern California.

  As Ed Hall drove out to Inglewood from Ohio that August of 1954 with Edith and David and their second son, Jonathan, to join the Schoolhouse Gang, he was bringing Schriever a jump start for the entire enterprise. The hurdle of a suitable engine had not yet been fully overcome. They would need one generating 150,000 pounds of thrust to lift the Atlas ICBM they were to design. Developing and perfecting this still more powerful engine would require time and trial and error and heartache. But Ed Hall had already brought them a long way toward attaining that without which they could never reach into the sky.

  39.

  A PROBLEM WITH TOMMY POWER

  Until three days before the Los Angeles meeting of the new Von Neumann Committee on July 20–21, 1954, Bennie did not realize how much peril he was in over the decision to abandon the prime contractor system and use the Ramo-Wooldridge organization for engineering and technical expertise. He had assumed that Power, as head of the Air Research and Development Command, supported him and the ICBM program as he and Gardner and von Neumann and the rest of their associates had conceived it. In a meeting with Power at ARDC headquarters in Baltimore on the afternoon of July 17, he was stunned to learn otherwise: Power privately frowned on virtually everything that was being done and let Bennie know it in direct and brutal fashion. Schriever was so upset by what he heard that he wrote out an account of the meeting, something he rarely did because he was so busy, and placed it among the pages of the sparsely noted diary he kept each day on the long, lined yellow paper of legal pads.