Wernher wasn’t particularly intimidated by this turn of events, as he knew the importance of the rocket program, and he knew that he was the only person who could deliver the weapons that both the Army and the SS desperately wanted. His confidence was apparently justified. Speer recovered and returned to work, and Wernher was released from custody and told that it had all been a misunderstanding. When he returned to the office, Wernher was just as paranoid about security, just as obsessed with design enhancements, and just as blunt with his staff as he exhorted them to work harder and faster and longer.
As the Mittelwerk factory neared completion, with proper utilities and air conditioning, off-duty laborers were housed at the newly established Dora Concentration Camp and no longer sleeping wherever they could find an open space. These improvements made Wernher’s visits relatively pleasant. The scrawny zebras still labored under the stern gazes of their supervisors, but the stench of sewage no longer fouled the air, and there were fewer corpses stacked by the entrance. After four trips in March, he made four more in April, the last one extending into May for an important meeting. At that meeting, held on 2 May 1944, Wernher discussed the major production and quality control problems with Albin Sawitski, General Dornberger, Dora Commandant Otto Förschner, Ernst Steinhoff (a former Peenemünder now a director at the Mittelwerk), George Rickhey (the general manager), SS-General Kammler, Arthur Rudolph, and representatives from major subcontractors. Wernher reviewed the failure rate they were experiencing during testing. Although he had originally estimated that a ratio of one German contract worker for every ten slave laborers would both save money and ensure quality, the results simply hadn’t been up to expectations. The production work was simply too difficult for unskilled prison laborers to master. Even skilled German laborers had trouble. The ratio of managers to prisoners, currently 1:4, might need to be 1:2. Sawatski suggested that the SS scour the prison camps and provide them with an additional 1,800 laborers to improve the civilian:slave ratio and to replace those who had died over the previous winter. This proposal got Kammler’s full support. Something certainly needed to be done quickly to get V-2 production to the levels that they had optimistically projected years earlier.
However, to be of use on the production line, the additional laborers had to possess mechanical and technical skills. There was a general consensus that Wernher, who had highlighted the issue, would be in the best position to select the additional skilled laborers. They would have to come from the Buchenwald Concentraiton Camp (Konzentration Lager Buchenwald, population roughly 64,000), as the skilled labor pool at the nearby Dora Concentration Camp (population approximately 12,000) was very limited. Wernher had put this on his task list, but as of 12 June he hadn’t made the necessary arrangements.
14 The Schutzstaffel was a Nazi paramilitary organization that began as Hitler’s personal guard.
15 Albert Speer was an architect who’d been appointed the Minister of Armaments and War Production after his predecessor, Fritz Todt, a civil engineer, was killed in a plane crash. Todt had been a one-star general (Generalmajor) and Speer was a two-star general (Generalleutnant), but both preferred suits and lapel pins to uniforms. Speer was one of Wernher’s staunchest advocates, and Speer’s Ministry provided funding for his programs. Speer felt that he and Wernher were intellectual cousins, and they certainly dressed alike.
16 All SS ranks will be shown in this format because unlike the equivalent Army ranks, they were awarded without comparable military training.
17 Dornberger was a Generalmajor, the German equivalent of a US Brigadier General (one-star).
18 It crashed in the English countryside, well short of London.
19 The technicians referred to the rocket as the A-4, but the public and the Nazi propaganda machine called it the V-2. Because the latter name is best know, the rocket will be called the A-4 until mass production efforts started at Peenemünde (June 1943), unless there is a particular need to revert to the technical designation.
20 Fort Eustis microfilm collection, Roll 41/732, National Air and Space Museum (NASM), Chantilly, Virginia
21 In combat, the guidance system on the V-2 performed poorly, although the rocket team never knew just how inaccurate it was. Schröder probably felt vindicated when he learned those details after the war.
22 Fort Eustis microfilm collection, Roll 28/694/a, NASM, Chantilly, Virginia
23 Sigismund joined the Nazi party in October 1937 and Wernher in November 1937. Magnus had joined in 1933 at age 13, as a member of the Hitler Youth.
24 “Niederschrift uber die dienstreise vom 2.-5.5.42 nach Friederichshafen” RH8/v.1959, BA/MA
25 The Luftwaffe had already requested 500 slave laborers for work on the V-1 and jet engine assembly lines. They had arrived with their SS guards in May and were put to work in Peenemünde-West.
26 Missiles for the Fatherland, p152 (for complete citation, see Appendix 7).
27 A state-funded, privately operated company called Mittelwerk, GmbH (Gesellschaft mit beschränkter Haftung, the designation of a private company) was established on 21 September 1943, and contracted to produce 12,000 rockets, paid for in advance. This funded the construction work.
28 There were many similarities between Speer and von Braun. Both had attended school in Weimar, and both were extremely smart and politically astute. Speer has been described as a mediocre architect whose main talent was in planning and organization. Dornberger made similar comments about Wernher after the war.
29 He was placed in an SS hospital, and there were rumors that the attending physician was orchestrating his demise. He made a swift recovery following the arrival of his personal physician.
30 Over time Wernher would tell the tale, often with great embellishment, as proof that he wasn’t a “real Nazi.”
CHAPTER 5
Evasion and Capture
12-16 JUNE 1944: CHAUVINCOURT, IN OCCUPIED FRANCE
ON THE MORNING OF 13 June 1944, Fred awakened, tired and sore, in a small, dark bedroom. The windows were shuttered and the curtains drawn, but there was enough light for him to see his watch. It was late morning. He carefully sat up and swung his legs over the side of the bed, pain flashing from his left leg. He discovered he had a headache, and gingerly touched the heavy bandage that wrapped across his forehead. He knew he wasn’t thinking clearly because he felt confused and anxious, and his memories of the preceding day were a jumble. He lay back down, closed his eyes, and tried to make sense of them. He remembered a line from Alice in Wonderland, one of his favorite childhood stories: “Begin at the beginning, and go on till you come to the end: then stop.”
He could remember the mission through the point where things started going very wrong. He knew he had been hit by flak, had passed out after leaving the plane, and been knocked out in a hard landing. The next thing he remembered was waking up with his flight gear and shoes already off and his uniform pants around his ankles. As he struggled to sit up, he could see that the left leg of his long johns was saturated with blood. Two men were standing over him. The older man was in his 40s and the younger in his 20s. The younger man had Fred’s leathers, flight boots, bunny suit, and coveralls in his arms, but appeared to be waiting for further instructions.
The older man, short and slender, with dark hair and a narrow face, introduced himself as Paul Stinkelbout, a local farmer. Paul’s father was French, but his mother was English, and he had spent time with his English grandparents. As a result, Paul spoke reasonable English. Although married to an Italian woman, Paul was unsympathetic to the Germans and was sympathetic to the French Resistance. The younger, taller man, Henri Brown, was a friend of Paul’s. Henri’s father was Victor Brown, and the Brown family were active members of the local resistance network, part of the FFI (French Forces of the Interior).
Paul helped Fred out of his uniform shirt. Before giving it to Henri for disposal, Fred carefully removed his aerial gunner wings and clipped them to his dog tags for safekeeping. Henri moved off into the fo
rest to bury Fred’s flight gear. He returned to do the same to the parachute and harness. Paul’s immediate concern was to get Fred out of sight before any German patrols arrived on the scene. Fred couldn’t stand unassisted. There was a deep gash along the inside of the knee and punctures through the meat of the calf, but the left ankle was the main problem. It had swollen prodigiously and turned an angry purple.
So with Fred’s weight on his right shoulder, Paul half-carried, half-walked him over to a small mule-drawn water cart that stood by the edge of the field. As Fred clung to the edge of the cart for support, Paul opened the lid and boosted Fred up to the top. Rolling over the lip, Fred fell into the nearly empty tank, landing on his back with a thud. Paul closed the lid. When Henri returned from the woods, the two men led the cart over the rugged, unpaved road. Inside the water cart, the ride was bouncy, damp, and uncomfortable. Fred’s injuries were throbbing, and the jolting and bouncing weren’t helping a bit. His face felt wet, and with his left hand, he could feel a jagged tear in his scalp. Although the darkness was nearly complete, he wiped what he assumed was blood out of his left eye. He carefully checked his neck, chest, and abdomen, and was relieved to find nothing amiss (he had heard about men having mortal wounds but being unaware of them). His left ankle, calf, and knee were throbbing. He knew how he’d hurt his ankle, but his memories of the flak injuries were hazy, and he had no clear idea of how bad those wounds were. With no way for him to assess any of his injuries while inside the water carrier, he tried to relax and await developments.
After an interminable period (probably less than 30 minutes), the water cart jolted to a halt. They were at the Brown’s farmhouse in Chauvincourt, a small village roughly three miles south of the town of Etrepagny, and 30 miles southeast of the city of Rouen.
When the cart stopped, Paul climbed up and lifted the lid, as if checking the water level. He explained that Victor Brown, Henri’s father, was the resistance leader for the Chauvincourt-Provement area. Paul couldn’t hide Fred at his small farmhouse, but Victor would be able to shelter him and get word to the local resistance chief, Captain Max Raulin in Hacqueville. With luck, Captain Raulin would be able to organize a way for Fred to rejoin the Allies, something that had been done many times in the course of the German occupation.
Paul and Henri left Fred in the cart while they went inside and explained the situation to Victor and Henriette, his wife. The Browns had three children. Henri, 20, and his sister Eda, 22, were well aware of their father’s “other job,” but Bernard, who was only seven, was kept in the dark because he was a chatterbox and Victor worried about his ability to keep secrets.
When Paul returned, the water cart was moved into the barn. With a struggle and some painful wriggling, Fred was soon out of the water tank, but Paul explained that he had to stay in the barn until after dark. There was too great a risk of his being seen by a German patrol or a collaborationist neighbor. Paul then introduced Fred to Victor, Henriette, and Eda before he took his mule and water cart back to the field.
The Browns spoke little English — Eda knew a few words from a high school class, and that was about it — but they let Fred know that they were going to tend to his wounds. Victor cut away the left leg of Fred’s long johns to view the damage there. When the area had been rinsed and wiped, Fred could see that he had a deep cut on the inside of his left knee, and roughly eight inches below the knee, he had a ragged hole right through the calf muscle. Victor looked somewhat relieved that nothing appeared to be trapped within the leg. Henriette and Eda carefully cleaned and bandaged Fred’s leg wounds and wrapped his ankle, before cleaning and bandaging his head wound. Henriette had brought a set of clean clothes (Fred was about Henri’s size) and the women left the barn while Victor and Henri helped Fred out of his trashed long johns and into his new clothes. When buttoning the shirt, Fred made sure that his dog tags and wings were completely covered.
As darkness fell, and Bernard was tucked into bed, Fred was assisted across the yard, up the stairs, and into a small room on the second floor. It was at the back of the house, with windows that opened overlooking the walled back yard where Eda had earlier hung clothes on a line. His bureau had a small towel, a hand basin, a pitcher of water, and a wooden bucket to serve as a toilet. He would be confined to the room during the day with closed window shutters, to avoid alerting outsiders to the presence of a guest. He would be fed in his room, and allowed outside into the courtyard only after dark, and only if his mobility improved.
It was his first day in France, and he would be spending it in a darkened room. His only identification as an American airman were his dog tags and his gunnery wings. His best guess was that he had come down about 100 miles from Allied lines. If those troops managed to break free, they could be in Chauvincourt within a few days. In that case, all he had to do was avoid being spotted by the Germans and wait for Allied troops to arrive. He hoped it would happen soon.
As the day slowly passed, Fred thought about the guys at the 385th, and wondered how the rest of the Jackson crew had made out. Were they OK? Were they hiding somewhere, as he was, or were they POWs? Perhaps Victor would be able to tell him over the next couple of days.
But Victor had heard nothing about the other men in Fred’s aircrew. He did caution Fred that the odds of successfully evading capture were long.31 The FFI had to contend with German military and SS patrols, the Vichy government’s secret police, corrupted regional policemen, the intelligence agents of the Gestapo, the SD (the SS Secret Police), the Abwehr (Army Intelligence), and a network of paid informers and German sympathizers. Fred had been briefed on his probable fate in the event he was captured while evading. The official protocol was that downed airmen were the responsibility of the Luftwaffe, which operated POW camps called stalag lufts. The German Army collected captured soldiers and held them in POW camps called stalags. The SS and associated agencies (the Gestapo, the SD, the SiPo, and others all answering to Himmler)32 focused on finding spies and saboteurs, who were often executed on the spot.33
What Fred didn’t know was that after the US entered the war in late 1941, the German attitude toward Allied combatants had become increasingly severe. Hitler was incensed by the bombing of German cities without regard for the resulting civilian casualties — somehow the fact that since 1935 he had funded projects intended to carpet bomb London with exploding rockets did nothing to reduce his sense of outrage. A series of secret decrees were subsequently issued by the Führer, Martin Bormann (head of the Party Chancellery), and Reichsführer Heinrich Himmler (head of the Nazi party and the SS). Allied airmen, even when in uniform, were to be considered terrorfliegers (terror fliers) and war criminals. As such, they were not to be protected from retribution by civilians or from summary execution by German military or paramilitary (SS) forces. When captured alive, airmen were to be transferred to Luftwaffe POW camps only if it could be proven that they had not bombed or strafed civilians, trains carrying civilians, or German flight crews hanging from parachutes. Lacking such determination, the captives would be subject to civilian “lynch law” or given to one of Himmler’s groups to deal with. Local police were specifically prohibited from interfering with these events.
Fred spent three boring days with the Brown family, sheltered in the upstairs bedroom. Over this period, arrangements were made to transfer him to the local FFI (Forces Françaises de l’Interior) headquarters in Hacqueville, roughly seven miles away. On 15 June 1944, with Henri on one side and Eda on the other, Fred was assisted over a half-mile of dirt trail to an intersection where he could be picked up by a car. The car was driven by a veterinarian, Dr. Maurice Daviaud (because veterinarians were important to the health of the local livestock, the German military issued them driving passes). Fred was quickly but carefully assisted into the trunk of Dr. Daviaud’s car, and transported as cargo. Fred found himself once again placing his fate in unfamiliar hands, hiding alone and uncomfortable in the dark while a complete stranger took him who knows where. He was already tired of
life on the run, and there was no end in sight.
JUNE-JULY 1944
OFFICIAL REPORTS
The Germans kept careful records of their successful downing of Allied aircraft, and within 24 hours there was a German military file on the Jackson crew. The file was nearly complete, since most of the crew was accounted for. As was standard practice, it would be updated as additional information became available.
On the American side, a small storm of paperwork was generated when the Jackson crew failed to return from the 12 June mission. The leaders of the Lead, High, and Low Groups prepared after-mission reports, and the High Group report noted the loss of Jackson’s plane. In addition, all arriving air crews were debriefed and asked about sightings of downed aircraft. The sightings were combined with the bomber group’s Missing Air Crew Report (MACR) and a map showing the approximate location of the crash, and the packet forwarded to the 8th Air Force command headquarters in High Wycombe, England.
After a delay for processing, the information was relayed to the US, and on 30 June 1944, Fred’s sister Lucille received a telegram notifying her that her brother was Missing in Action (MIA). This was followed by a letter from the station chaplain at the 385th. Although written on 21 June 1944, the letter did not arrive until after Lucille had received the telegram from the War Office. Shorty thereafter, Lucille received a letter from the War Department confirming the information reported by telegram. After this brief flurry of unwelcome news, Fred’s family and friends entered a period of limbo, hoping for the best but fearing the worst. They were not alone — in the August 9th edition of the Brooklyn Daily Eagle, Fred’s name was one of 22 former Brooklyn residents listed as Missing in Action.
17 JUNE TO 5 AUGUST 1944: HACQUEVILLE AND THE RAULINS
Betrayed: Secrecy, Lies, and Consequences Page 8