Red Moon Rising

by Matthew Brzezinski

  When Germany’s leading scientists began arriving under military escort at Fort Bliss in the fall of 1945, it is not difficult to imagine the culture shock they must have experienced. Brown dusty plains stretched to the east as far as the eye could see. The desert was unbroken save for the occasional tumbleweed, buzzard, and cactus, and it baked at over a hundred degrees for most of the year. To the west rose the jagged red peaks of the Sangre de Cristo, or Christ’s Blood, Mountains. To the south ran the Rio Grande and the squalid pueblos of Mexico. At night, an impregnable blackness descended over the land, Stuhlinger recalled. And during the day, the hot Texas sky broiled a deep blue completely alien to any European.

  “To my continental eyes,” von Braun later confessed, “the sight was overwhelming and grandiose, but at the same time I felt in my heart that I would find it very difficult ever to develop a genuine emotional attachment to such a merciless landscape.”

  Fort Bliss, an old cavalry outpost built around the rough adobe walls of a border citadel, offered little respite from the inhospitable terrain. Low, ramshackle “rat shack” two-story barracks, made mostly of plywood, sat on the sand. A half-empty hospital building dominated the grounds, along with a few disused hangars and single-story structures connected by gravel pathways. Chain-link fences cut off the German compound from the rest of the base.

  Fort Bliss was a far cry from the resplendent accommodations von Braun had grown accustomed to in his German headquarters on the island of Peenemünde, where the sand was confined to pleasant beaches, his sailboat and personal Messerschmitt plane were always at the ready, and the maître d’ at the research center’s four-star Schwabes Hotel stocked the wine cellar with the finest vintages seized from France. The restaurant’s embossed china, fine silverware, and elaborate dining protocols had astounded the Soviets when they occupied Peenemünde. “A line of waiters in black suits, white shirts, and bow-ties marched in solemn procession around the table,” Boris Chertok recalled. “In this process, the first waiter ladled soup, the second placed a potato, the third showered the plates with greens, the fourth drizzled on a piquant gravy, and finally the fifth trickled about 30 grams of alcohol into one of the numerous goblets… a scene that to us was familiar only from movies.” The quality of the ingredients, alas, had deteriorated by the time the Red Army arrived. “I served the best wines,” the maître d’hôtel had apologized to his new Communist customers. But when “von Braun evacuated Peenemünde, they took all the food and wine stores with them.”

  At Fort Bliss, snakes slithered around the cinder-block footings of the mess hall, where cooks in greasy T-shirts slopped something called grub on tin trays. (Complaints about American cuisine figured prominently in the first published press reports revealing Germans in El Paso. The scathing comments of Walther Riedel, von Braun’s chief design engineer, earned him a subheading in a December 1946 article: “German Scientist Says American Cooking Tasteless; Dislikes Rubberized Chicken.”) The revelation that von Braun’s team was in the country in turn prompted impassioned complaints. On December 30, 1946, Albert Einstein and the Federation of American Scientists wrote to President Truman, arguing, “We hold these individuals to be potentially dangerous carriers of racial and religious hatred. Their former eminence as Nazi party members and supporters raises the issue of their fitness to become American citizens and hold key positions in American industrial, scientific and educational institutions.” Representative John Dingell, a Democrat from Michigan (whose son holds his congressional seat today), went even further: “I never thought we were so poor mentally in this country that we have to import those Nazi killers.”

  For von Braun, Einstein’s rebuke must have particularly stung. As a teenager in Germany, he had worshiped the theoretical physicist and had written to him, showing his own mathematical equations for spaceflight. Einstein had responded encouragingly, saying that von Braun would make a fine engineer. Now the Nobel laureate was questioning whether von Braun was even fit to be a citizen, much less a scientist.

  American citizenship, though, was still far down the pike for von Braun and his German compatriots. As wards of the army, von Braun’s group was confined to a six-acre section of the base, kept isolated from other Fort Bliss personnel, and allowed no contact with the local population. “Daily life was quite regulated due to security requirements,” recalled Colonel William Winterstein, one of von Braun’s early military minders. “The dread that any of the German team may become involved in a public disturbance or accident hung over our heads at all times during those days before it was announced officially that they were in the United States.”

  Eventually, the restrictions were loosened. In 1947, the thirty-five-year-old von Braun was allowed to return briefly to Germany—accompanied by armed guards—to marry his seventeen-and-a-half-year-old cousin, Maria. At Fort Bliss, security also gradually eased. Once a month, and then once a week, the Germans were bused to El Paso in escorted groups of four to spend a leisurely Saturday afternoon. They were issued IDs that read: “SPECIAL WAR DEPARTMENT EMPLOYEE. In the event that this card is presented off a military reservation to civilian authorities… it is requested that this office be notified immediately… and the bearer of this card NOT be interrogated.” The message was clear; the Germans were the property of the U.S. Army. And only under the supervision of armed MPs could they catch a screening of Zorro at the Palace Theatre, go shopping at the Popular Dry Goods Company Department Store, have lunch at the Hotel Cortez, or drink a beer at the Acme Saloon beneath sepia-toned photos of old gunslingers. The outlaw spirit of Wyatt Earp was very much alive in El Paso in the 1940s, and the place still had the rough-and-tumble feel of a frontier town. The streets were dusty and only partly paved. Pickup trucks and the occasional horse-drawn cart plied North Mesa Avenue. Pioneer Plaza swarmed with itinerant farmhands and migrant workers from Mexico. And the Parlor House bar district saw its fair share of fistfights between roughnecks and ranchers, freewheeling businessmen and fire-breathing preachers, who served notice on sinners from tow-away churches in mobile homes.

  Wernher von Braun was not a natural fit in this mix. Born to an aristocratic family in 1912, he had been raised on estates in Silesia and East Prussia and in the family residence in Berlin. His father had served as a minister in the government that Hitler toppled. His mother, the Baroness Emmy von Quistorp, was of Swedish noble lineage, spoke six languages, and had been raised in England as a Renaissance woman with interests in astronomy and classical music. She passed her passion for astral and orchestral movements on to her son, who by the age of six had composed his first piano concerto and received his first telescope. In Peenemünde, which von Braun had selected as a research center based on the baroness’s recommendation, he pursued his love of music, playing cello in a string quartet of rocket scientists. His group had had its own private chamber in the Officers’ Club, Stuhlinger remembered: “His cello was accompanied by Rudolf Hermann’s and Heinrich Ramm’s violins, and by Gerhard Reisig’s viola, when the four of them played works by Mozart, Haydn, and Schubert.”

  At Fort Bliss, the Officers’ Club was off-limits to the Germans. They had to build their own clubhouse in a storage shed, stocking it with homemade furniture and a bar they cobbled together from spare planks. Sometimes von Braun’s brother Magnus, who had been a supervisor at Mittelwerk, played the accordion. At other times, after a few rounds of tequila, when the monotony, seclusion, and language lessons got to them, they crept through a hole in the fence to look at the stars in the desert sky. “Prisoners of peace” was how they referred to themselves. But at least they were out of reach of the prosecutors and the war crimes tribunals in Europe that were meting out justice for the slaughter of slave laborers at Mittelwerk, among a host of other Nazi atrocities.

  A year, and then two, passed aimlessly. Resources at Fort Bliss were as rare as rain. Only $47 million had been allocated in 1947 for total U.S. missile development, and that left precious little for the Germans. Fort Bliss’s miserly quartermaster tu
rned down a request by von Braun’s brother for linoleum to cover the cracks between boards in the wood floor of the hut where delicate gyroscopes were assembled. He also denied a requisition for a high-speed drill. “Frankly, we were disappointed,” von Braun recalled years later. “At Peenemünde we had been coddled. Here you were counting pennies… and everyone wanted military expenditures curtailed.”

  Von Braun bubbled with ideas for new rockets. But his every proposal was shot down. Nor was anyone particularly interested in his ideas for space travel either. He sent a manuscript on exploring Mars to eighteen publishers in New York, and eighteen rejection letters wended their way back to the Fort Bliss postmaster. Adding insult to injury, von Braun now had to report to a twenty-six-year-old major whose sole technical background was an undergraduate engineering degree. When von Braun was twenty-six, thousands of engineers had answered to him. His loyal Germans still insisted on calling him Herr Professor out of respect. But his pimply new American boss, Major Jim Hamill, addressed him as Wernher and didn’t even bother to respond to most of his plaintive memos requesting more materials. Just tinker with your old V-2s was the standing order from Colonel Toftoy in Washington. “We’ll put you on ice,” Stuhlinger recalled Hamill saying. “We may need you later on.”

  The U.S. government had gone through a great deal of trouble to ensure that no other power acquired the services of Nazi Germany’s rocket elite. Retaining “control of German individuals who might contribute to the revival of German war potential in foreign countries,” as a State Department memo inelegantly put it, had been the primary justification for the 1947 decision to make von Braun’s temporary stay in America more permanent. Even if the United States didn’t need him right now, Washington wanted to make certain no one else got his expertise. Due to their “threat to world security,” the Germans couldn’t be repatriated. To a frustrated von Braun, it seemed that the United States had dumped him and his team in deepest Texas and forgotten all about them. “We were distrusted aliens living in what for us was a desolate region of a foreign land,” he recalled. “Nobody seemed much interested in work that smelled of weapons.”

  • • •

  Von Braun might have languished indefinitely under the hot Texas sun if not for the actions of two men: Senator Joseph McCarthy of Wisconsin and North Korea’s Communist leader, Kim II Sung.

  McCarthy’s Red-baiting reign of terror—when everyone from J. Robert Oppenheimer to what seemed like half of Hollywood was accused of Communist sympathies—inadvertently helped to rehabilitate von Braun. The only skeletons in his closet were Nazi skeletons, and the Reich was yesterday’s enemy. Berlin was no longer the seat of evil. The divided city had been transformed into a symbol of freedom by the massive airlift orchestrated by Symington and LeMay in 1948, when three hundred thousand sorties were flown, delivering food and medicine during Stalin’s yearlong siege of West Berlin. The cold war by then had begun in earnest, and a new adversary had replaced fascism as an ideological threat to the American way of life.

  The threat was magnified a thousandfold the following year, when Moscow detonated its first atomic bomb. The era, grumbled LeMay, “when we might have completely destroyed Russia and not even skinned our elbows doing it” was over. A few months later, the revolutionary cancer spread to China, further whipping up domestic paranoia in the United States. Suddenly, any American who had ever attended a Marxist meeting in the 1930s, or dated someone who had, was potentially a security risk. Immigrant scientists, with their top-secret clearances and Eastern European backgrounds, were especially vulnerable. After Mao’s victory, the blacklist was expanded to include Chinese-born American researchers. Tsien Hsue-shen, one of the founders of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory at Caltech and a pioneer in the field of American rocketry, was arrested and deported to China. (Documents would later reveal that he had been innocent of the spying charges, prompting one military historian to call the affair the “greatest act of stupidity of the McCarthyist period…. China now has nuclear missiles capable of hitting the United States in large part because of Tsien.”)

  Von Braun, however, was above reproach. For five years the FBI and army intelligence had monitored his every move, read his correspondence, and listened to his telephone conversations. Nothing more untoward than the suspect sale of some undeclared silver by his brother Magnus had ever been uncovered. By the summer of 1950, the political climate had changed sufficiently enough for von Braun to come out of purgatory. What’s more, his services were finally needed again. On the night of June 25, 1950, Kim II Sung’s North Korean forces crossed the thirty-eighth parallel, threatening to overrun South Korea. This time President Truman decided to draw the line. Three weeks later von Braun received his first meaningful commission, the Redstone.

  With the assignment came a change of address and a new lease on life for von Braun and his team. Compared to Fort Bliss, Huntsville seemed idyllic. The historic hamlet was home to fifteen thousand genteel southerners, and its proud Civil War heritage was etched in the Confederate Monument that crowned the town square. White clapboard church spires dominated the skyline, and the sidewalks were trimmed with white picket fences and immaculately groomed lawns. White was the dominant color in Huntsville, as it was in all of Madison County, Alabama, and throughout the entire Jim Crow South. But the civil rights movement was beginning to take root in 1950, and this worried some of the town’s newest German residents. “We had some concerns here,” Wernher Dahm recalled. “Not so much about segregation… as about open strife.”

  Huntsville wasn’t perfect. But after wandering in the desert for five years, von Braun and his crew had finally found a home. They now had regular salaries, as opposed to the six dollars a day they had received during their first days in Texas, and they had complete freedom of movement. Their legal status had been “normalized,” thanks to some creative immigration paperwork, and they would be eligible for U.S. citizenship in a few years. Meanwhile, they could buy cars, houses, motorboats, and televisions; in short, they could enjoy all the material benefits of the American dream.

  Life was looking up for von Braun. He bought a fashionable new rambler on a large hilly lot on McClung Street just outside Huntsville’s historic city center. His wife, Maria, gave birth to two daughters, Margrit and Iris. The Redstone performed flawlessly during its 1953 tests, and Walt Disney came calling the following year with an intriguing television offer.

  Disney was putting together a weekly television program to promote the new theme park he was building on 160 acres of orange groves in Anaheim, California. The show, like the amusement park, would be called Disneyland, and each week would feature a theme from one of the park’s four attractions: Fantasyland, Adventureland, Frontierland, and Tomorrowland. The fledgling ABC network was backing the venture with $4.5 million in loan guarantees to Disney personally. No one else had wanted to put up the money, not even Disney’s brother Roy, who ran the business side of the animation studio. But Walt Disney had run the numbers. Americans had given birth in droves after the war, and their children were now clamoring for entertainment. The country’s Gross Domestic Product had almost doubled over the past decade, thanks in part to the industrial ramp-up for war production and America’s subsequent competitive advantage over the decimated European economies. The boom had even trickled down to minimum-wage earners, whose hourly pay in 1954 had just been increased from seventy cents to a dollar, giving consumers at the bottom of the scale a little extra to spend on vacations. That year, for the first time in history, airlines had supplanted both rail and ships as the primary mode of transcontinental and transatlantic traffic, making travel less time-consuming. And the explosion of cars on American roads made it more affordable for the masses. For Disney, it all added up to one thing: a tourism boom. All he needed were telegenic hosts for his Sunday night Disneyland infomercials on ABC. The actor Ronald Reagan would handle the grand opening. Was the handsome von Braun interested in hosting the “Man in Space” segments of the Tomorrowland programs?
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  It was thus from the odd pairing of Mickey Mouse and a former SS major with a Teutonic Texas twang that most Americans first heard of the futuristic concept of an earth-orbiting satellite. Disney himself introduced the inaugural Tomorrowland program on March 9, 1955. “In our modern world,” he declared, “everywhere we look we see the influence science has on our daily lives. Discoveries that were miracles a few short years ago are accepted as commonplace today. Many of the things that seem impossible now will become realities tomorrow.” The Milky Way briefly replaced Disney on the screen. “One of man’s oldest dreams has been the desire to travel in space. Until recently this seemed to be an impossibility. But new discoveries have brought us on the threshold of a new frontier.”

  The show attracted 42 million viewers and made von Braun a star. With his youthful good looks, broad shoulders, and perfect blend of boyish enthusiasm and European erudition, von Braun quickly became America’s space prophet, a televangelist leading audiences on the scientific conquest of distant planets. The country was enthralled by the endless possibilities unleashed by jet travel and the splitting of the atom. Modernism swept architecture, automobile, and furniture design, where styles were sharp, angular, and edgy. Engine Charlie’s General Motors incorporated the fast, futuristic themes in its famous Motorama car shows, which featured Delta-wing designs, high fins, and space-bubble taillights. Cool, crisp colors announced the new era: pale greens, baby blues, pastel yellows, and deep, pile-rug whites. Earth tones were out; glass and stainless steel were in. At the movies, aliens reigned as Invaders from Mars and War of the Worlds dominated the box office. In fashion, the look was tapered, sleek, and hurried. In music, the new sound was rushed, the rapid-fire rhythm of rock and roll. Speed was the essence of the jet age, and it found expression even in the national diet. In 1955, the entrepreneur Ray Kroc franchised his first two McDonald’s restaurants. He called them fast-food outlets.