Breaking the Chains of Gravity

by Amy Shira Teitel

  The wheels to import the German rocket team into the United States were in motion before May was out. The U.S. Army wanted to import at least one hundred full V-2s, parts to build more rockets, along with the scientists who had designed the missile to the United States as part of Project Hermes. The U.S. Army Ordnance’s request for V-2s reached Colonel Holger Tofty, chief of the Ordnance Technical Intelligence team in Europe. Tofty in turn assigned Majors William Bromley and James Hamill the task of recovering and moving as much material related to the V-2 program as they could out of Germany as quickly as possible. Time was fast becoming a factor. June 1 was the date when the postwar occupation of Germany would take effect, and the V-2 factory sites at Nordhausen and Mittelwerk were in the Soviet zone. Bromley and Hamill had just days to visit these sites and recover anything of value. The two men hurriedly pressed beyond the imaginary demarcation lines toward the abandoned rocket sites. They recovered and packed up as much material as they could find, filling abandoned railway cars with stray pieces of hardware and loose documents. With no complete V-2 anywhere and no obvious parts lying around, they grabbed anything that looked rocket related and added it to their bounty.

  The first train of recovered materials left Nordhausen for Antwerp some three hundred miles to the east on May 22. Another fully loaded forty-car train left the site every day for the next nine days, the last one leaving at nine-thirty in the evening on May 31, just hours before the Soviets were scheduled to move into the area. While Bromley and Hamill were busy at Nordhausen, another stroke of good news reached the American Army. Ordnance officer Major Robert Staver had learned of the trove of V-2 documents hidden in the mine in the Harz Mountains. Determined to recover this material as well, Staver attached himself to Tofty’s group and started combing the area. He eventually found the dynamited entrance to the mine, and by the end of May managed to dig out and recover the full fourteen tons of documents. Days after the last documents were removed from their hiding spot, the British started setting up roadblocks in the area. The site was now a British occupation zone.

  As May turned into June, von Braun was again stuck in a holding pattern. American forces were busy evacuating documents and materials from the V-2 program, but nothing was being done with the scientists. As far as he could tell, they were no closer to moving to America while what remained of their A-4 project was already on its way overseas.

  On Sunday, June 17, von Braun was suddenly told to pack his bags; he was leaving Garmisch-Partenkirchen for Nordhausen. As soon as he arrived, he and his guard joined a team from General Electric and Project Hermes. They began a furious search through the region gathering engineers from the V-2 project. In just four days, they collected a train full of rocket engineers and moved them west toward the nearby villages Witzenhausen and Eschwege, which lay just within the American occupation zone. The scientists were safe from the Soviets, but there were still no formal orders to transport them to America. That order would have to come from Washington.

  While they waited safely within the American occupation zone, von Braun started preparing. Even though he didn’t have a contract from the American government, he remained convinced that the United States would be where he would be free to pursue rocketry with an eye toward spaceflight. He couldn’t promise the same for his men. He wanted to bring at least 520 Peenemünde personnel with different areas of expertise with him to America, but that turned out to be an unrealistic number. He was told he could bring no more than 350. In drawing up his preliminary list, von Braun realized that every single member of his team and their families had a German identity to contend with as well. Most were card-carrying Nazis and many, like von Braun, had joined the SS for various reasons. For the moment the Allies hadn’t connected the rocket men with the slave labor used to build the V-2s; they saw the concentration camps as the product of the SS and the scientists as technical experts employed by the state. But the longer he stayed in Germany, the more likely it was that the Americans would start to see von Braun and his colleagues as perpetrators of crimes against humanity. The sooner he could get overseas the better, but his wait seemed to be lengthening.

  The Soviets were also seeking the Peenemünde team and took advantage of the Germans’ lengthy wait. They broadcast messages by radio and even over loudspeakers attempting to court the scientists, luring them to the Soviet Union with promises of a fast return to rocket work and housing for their families. The calls worked to some degree, a handful of Germans choosing to go east, hoping to stay in or at least close to their homeland. The Soviets were also seeking to court Eugen Sänger and Irene Bredt into moving east instead of west. Neither was on the early draft of von Braun’s list of engineers to export to America, nor were they highly sought after by the Americans. Stalin, however, was seized by the idea of a precision bombing system that could destroy an American city within an hour or so of launching. He had read their 1944 report on the antipodal bomber and so desperately wanted the couple working for him that he mounted a significant effort to kidnap the two. The effort was in vain. Sänger and Bredt had quickly fled to France after the war’s end in Europe.

  Finally, at the end of July, the joint chiefs of staff in Washington finally agreed to bring 350 German scientists into the United States under Operation Overcast. Von Braun’s excitement at the high number was dashed when he realized this figure covered all branches of the American military, not just the U.S. Army. He, working with Tofty, had a limit of one hundred men. Von Braun protested, and his final list was accepted with 124 names. Notable by his absence was Dornberger.

  On September 12, Wernher von Braun climbed into a jeep and set off with a small convoy that included six other rocket men and an escort of army and GE personnel. They drove from Witzenhausen to Frankfurt for a medical exam before traveling to Paris. Not long after arriving at Versailles at five o’clock in the morning, von Braun made his move official, signing his first contract with the U.S. War Department. It was a six-month contract with the option to renew for another six months, paying 31,200 marks a year to his account in Germany. On the surface, Operation Overcast made it look like the Germans would be in the United States temporarily, but von Braun had every intention of making the move permanent.

  Late in the afternoon of September 18, von Braun was one of seventeen Germans who boarded a C-54 transport aircraft. They took off from Paris around nine o’clock in the evening, stopped in the Azores to refuel, then landed in New Castle, Delaware, at two o’clock in the morning on September 20. From there von Braun flew on a C-47 to Boston, then took a ferry ride to Fort Strong, a fortified island in Boston Harbor where Operation Overcast had its processing point. As he turned in a stack of completed paperwork, his arrival into the United States was official.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  Nazi Rockets in New Mexico

  Once home to hunters and agricultural villages, the Tularosa Basin in New Mexico in the southwestern United States was all but abandoned in the mid-1300s after a ten-thousand-year occupation. The climate had become increasingly arid over the centuries, turning salt lakes into salt flats before drought made the land inhospitable. Settlers returned in the mid-1800s, cultivating agricultural plots and establishing small ranches. But new laws regarding private ownership of public land combined with another drought in the 1930s brought the frontier era to an end. In 1942, the military moved in. The British earmarked the site as an ideal place to train pilots overseas because of the wide open New Mexico skies but abandoned the site toward the end of 1941, leaving it open for the American military to move in.

  Construction of the Alamogordo Army Air Field, six miles west of the town of Alamogordo, began on February 6, 1942, with the first forces moving in two months later. Throughout the Second World War, the Alamogordo Army Air Field served as a training ground for more than twenty different groups who spent six months learning to fly and operate their B-17s, B-24s, and B-29s before heading into combat.

  Questions about Alamogordo’s usefulness after the war were quelled
in 1945 when another military outpost arrived in the Tularosa Basin. A committee of military personnel, men from the Corps of Engineers, and civilian scientists had surveyed topographical and population maps of the Continental United States and found this remote area adjacent to the White Sands National Monument perfect for a missile range. Construction began on June 25, and the facilities were minimal with living quarters, an administrative space, a building for maintenance and housekeeping, and a building to house all technical aspects of the program. To make the site truly livable, six wells were dug to provide freshwater for those who would live and work there. The White Sands Proving Ground was formally established on July 9, and the first troops arrived a little more than a month later. White Sands proved to be a blessing for the nearby Alamogordo Army Air Field. The laboratory would also support the White Sands Missile Range, a site of the new American V-2 program, Project Hermes. The desert firing range was about to get very busy.

  The first recovered pieces of V-2 hardware arrived in New Mexico in August of 1945. Tons of materials packed in three hundred train cars backed up the railway for miles. It took personnel twenty days to unload what turned out to be a very mixed bag of hardware, rocket parts, instruments, documents, and warheads. Some pieces were in good shape; the midsection shells of the rockets in particular needed just minor repairs to torn metals. Other parts, however, arrived broken, damaged, vandalized, or otherwise unusable. Almost all the wooden parts used to house elements in control chambers and rocket fins that had been retrieved from their hiding place in the Harz Mountains had to be replaced. There was evidence of poor workmanship and sabotage from the parts built at the factory at the Mittelwerk factory, too. And not one rocket arrived assembled and ready to fly. The Germans had learned from experience that the longer an assembled V-2 sat in storage, the more problems it developed. This wasn’t a setback for the American program. Any rocket that arrived assembled would have had to be disassembled for inspection for safety and quality assurance, anyway. It turned out that only two full V-2s could be built from the three hundred train cars full of material. American Army and General Electric personnel would have to learn to put the V-2 together before any would fly, becoming intimately familiar with its parts and systems in the process if they were going to successfully build an American offshoot.

  Rockets had never been favored by the American military, though the technology was familiar nationwide after “The Star-Spangled Banner” was adopted as the United States’ national anthem in 1931. Britain’s defeat at the 1781 Battle of Yorktown marked the end of the American Revolution and the nation’s beginning as an independent country. But continued interference with the young nation’s international trade prompted the United States to declare war on Great Britain in 1812. It was two years before British troops arrived in the former colony, burning the capitol building and the White House before moving on to capture the vital seaport of Baltimore. Fort McHenry, guarding the port, became the target of British warships that fired bombs and iron-cased black powder rockets with incendiary, shrapnel, or explosive warheads. Fort McHenry never fell, and the red glare from the rockets illuminated the American flag through a night of attack. “And the rocket’s red glare, the bombs bursting in air, gave proof through the night that our flag was still there.”

  Rockets similar to those used by the British were adopted by the American military in the mid-nineteenth century. But they were cumbersome, required multiple men to pack the black powder, and the full crews that launched them only had simple guide poles as a means to aim the missiles. The advent of better guns, streamlined bullets, and a stronger integration between soldiers, machines, and a tactical approach to war eventually made these short-range rockets all but obsolete as weapons. But seeing the way rockets developed in Germany during the Second World War changed the American Army’s thinking about this technology. That these modern versions demanded minimal manpower to launch, could be directed in flight, and could travel significantly longer distances than artillery shells had inspired the Army Ordnance to create its own rocket branch in 1943, which in turn created Project Hermes.

  While recovered V-2 hardware was making its way to White Sands for the army’s rocket program, the Army Air Force Science Advisory Group worked diligently to prepare comprehensive reports that synthesized everything its seven members learned in Germany for chief of the Army Air Corps General Henry “Hap” Arnold. Each member covered a specific technology while the head of the SAG, Theodore von Kármán, prepared the general reports that addressed the overall implications of these technological advances on future wars.

  The group recognized that nations on both sides had begun the Second World War well armed with conventional weapons, and while both had made significant advances as the war progressed, the V-2 was the standout technological achievement. Even if it was expensive, took many man hours to build, and could only carry a fraction of its weight as an explosive payload, it was still a stunning piece of technology. This one missile combined cutting-edge aerodynamics, structural elements, electronic components, servo mechanics, control units, and propulsion elements. And there was no way to counter a V-2 attack. Once it was in flight, it was invulnerable, flying unhindered until it reached its target. And because it flew supersonically, it was silent and impossible to track, qualities that made it a psychologically powerful weapon as well; fear of a bomb arriving without warning was constant. As for the group from Peenemünde that brought the V-2 to life, von Kármán similarly considered them the most capable missile research group in all of Germany. The operational rocket, it turned out, was far from the Germans’ only product. While it might have been the most advanced weapon used during the war, the V-2 was the tip of the iceberg. The SAG had found evidence of far more sinister long-range Aggregate rockets that had thankfully never been built during the war.

  From the first proof of concept rocket developed at Kummersdorf West, the A-1, to the operational A-4 renamed V-2, the German Aggregate rockets had all been sleek with an internal guidance system and rear fins for stability in flight. But later rockets in the series, beginning with the A-6, showed signs of change. The Science Advisory Group had found wind tunnel models and drawings of advanced, winged Aggregate rockets designed to fly supersonically, a design goal that had so far eluded Allied aerodynamics experts. The A-6 and the A-8 were intended to test different propellants and a longer fuselage, respectively. The A-7 looked similar to the A-5, the precursor to the A-4, but had wings and was intended to launch from an airplane on high arcing trajectories that would allow it to gather scientific data on supersonic flight. The A-9 and the A-10 were two long-range bomber systems, early incarnations of intercontinental ballistic missiles designed to reach the United States.

  The A-9 was a winged version of the V-2. Wide, swept-back wings running from its nose to midsection turned the simple rocket into a glider intended to fly through the atmosphere rather than above it. It would still launch on a ballistic flight path like the V-2, but with wings it would not follow the same path on its fall back to Earth. The aerodynamic stability afforded by the wings would turn it into a glider, reaching a target much farther away. There were even variants of the A-9 with a pressurized cockpit for a pilot, effectively turning the glider into a manned precision bombing system similar to the one Eugen Sänger had envisioned but never built. The A-10 was a multistage weapons system consisting of an A-9 stacked on top of an eighty-five-ton booster that could generate two hundred tons of thrust. The booster would accelerate the A-9 to thirty-six hundred feet per second before its own rocket engine fired to increase the payload’s velocity to eighty-six hundred feet per second. Once its fuel was burned, the winged missile would glide through the upper atmosphere to reach a target up to three thousand miles away, which the German Army had noted was roughly the distance between a western European launch site and a major city on America’s East Coast.

  The SAG had found some drawings and calculations of the A-10 and evidence that a few experimental A-9s had been buil
t. What they didn’t find was evidence that one prototype A-9 had flown, the A-4b that von Braun and Dornberger had launched with moderate success over Peenemünde in January 1945.

  It was clear to the Science Advisory Group that if Hitler had given the Peenemünde team priority status and more support earlier in the war, things might have turned out very differently. But as it was, Hitler’s shortsightedness about these cutting-edge weapons held the Germans back, much to the advantage of the Allies. Now with the V-2 rockets and scientists in the United States, the Army Air Force could develop the technology to its full offensive potential. Von Kármán recommended that the AAF use the Germans’ advanced V-2 spin-offs, the winged and multistage versions, as starting points for its own long-range missile systems.

  But it wasn’t just the rockets and their powerful engines that were worth incorporating into the American military’s arsenal. Hugh Dryden was particularly impressed by the Germans’ systems, including the autopilot that guided the V-2 to its target. It was more advanced than anything that existed in Allied research laboratories. It would be just as useful for the Army Air Force to bring this advanced autopilot into its defensive antiaircraft weapons as it would to incorporate it into offensive missiles, strengthening America’s overall military position. But more than anything, the SAG’s reports underscored the importance of putting resources into developing long-range missiles. Given the technological strides taken during the Second World War, Dryden offered his opinion that the next major conflict could easily start with a single missile strike.