Alternate Wars

by Gregory Benford

  At the same moment, Worcester police officer Clay Reilly was walking downstairs from the second floor of City Hall when he spotted a trench-coated man, carrying a gun, closing in on another man, who was walking toward the tax assessor’s office. The second man was unaware that he was being pursued, but Reilly immediately sized up the situation.

  “I didn’t think twice,” Reilly, now retired from the force, says in retrospect. “I pulled my pistol and shouted for the guy to freeze. He decided to mess with me instead.”

  Reilly was a crack shot on the WPD firing range; his skill didn’t fail him then. The Gestapo agent turned and aimed at Reilly, but the officer nailed the assassin with one shot to the heart before the Nazi could squeeze his trigger. Goddard himself fled from City Hall, where he was spirited away by his FBI escort, who had just arrived in his car.

  No identification was found on the body of the man Patrolman Reilly had shot. The Worcester Telegram reported the story the next day under the front-page headline “Mystery Killer Shot in City Hall.” No one knew that he had been trying to kill Goddard; Reilly didn’t recognize the scientist, and Goddard had not remained at the scene. Clay Reilly was promoted to sergeant for his quick thinking, but it wasn’t until long after the war that the policeman was informed of the identity of the man he had shot or the person whose life he had saved, nor the fact that J. Edgar Hoover himself had insisted on his promotion.

  “Everything changed for us after that,” says Henry Morse. “I guess we were sort of looking at Blue Horizon like it was a kid’s adventure. Y’know, the Rocket Boys go to the Moon. But Bob’s close call sobered us up.”

  The incident also sobered up the White House. On the insistence of Vannevar Bush, the FBI hastily sought a new base of operations in New England for Team 390. Within a week of the attempted assassination, a new locale for Project Blue Horizon was found: the Monomonock Gun & Rod Club, which had been closed since the beginning of the war. The lodge was in the tiny farm community of Rindge, due north of Worcester just across the New Hampshire state line, close enough to Worcester to allow the rocket team to relocate there quickly. Because the club was accessible by a single, unmarked dirt road only, it had the isolation the FBI believed was necessary to keep Team 390 hidden from the world.

  The FBI purchased the property, and in the dead of night on April 6, 1943, all the rocket team’s files and models were loaded into a truck. As far as Clark University’s collegiate community was concerned, Dr. Goddard had taken an abrupt leave of absence due to health reasons, and nobody on campus seemed to notice the sudden departure of the small, insular group of grad students from Physics 390.

  The Monomonock Gun & Rod Club was set in seven acres of New Hampshire forest on the northwestern side of Lake Monomonock. The club consisted mainly of a two-story whitewashed lodge that dated back to the turn of the century; it had a handsome front porch that overlooked the serene main channel of the lake, a couple of Spartan rooms on the upper floor that contained a dozen old-style iron beds, and a single outhouse beyond the back door. Mail from relatives was still sent to Worcester and forwarded once a week to New Hampshire; except for Esther Goddard, none of the families of the rocket team was made aware of the fact that their sons and husbands were now in New Hampshire.

  The former sportsmen’s club was a far cry from the comforts of Clark University; most of the rocket team were unused to roughing it in the woods. Mice had taken up occupancy in the kitchen next to the long dining room, and the only sources of heat were a fireplace in the den and a potbellied stove on the second floor. One of the first orders of business was to knock down the hornet nests in upper bedrooms and under the porch eaves. “The first week we were there, we almost went on strike,” says Gerry Mander with a laugh. “If we hadn’t been in a race against time, we might have told Bush and Hoover and all the rest to stick it until they found us some decent accommodations. As it was, though, we knew we had little choice.”

  Yet there was another major problem in the relocation. In New Mexico, the engineering team at White Sands was building unmanned prototype rockets based on the plans sent by Goddard’s team, firing the rockets as soon as they could be made. The major hurdle was in producing a reliable engine for the spaceplane, now dubbed the “X-1.”

  It had to be able to lift 65,500 pounds to orbit, yet most of the prototypes exploded, sometimes on the launch pad. For each small success, there were dozens of setbacks. There had been several pad explosions already, and in the latest failure a couple of technicians had been killed when the liquid-hydrogen tank ruptured during pressurization. “Part of the problem was that the team wasn’t in New Mexico to oversee the final stages of each test,” Morse says. “We were expected to build rockets without getting our hands dirty, and you simply can’t compartmentalize a project like that. What it came down to, finally, was that we had to have a testbed in New Hampshire, whether Van Bush liked it or not.”

  It took Robert Goddard several weeks of lobbying to convince Vannevar Bush that some of the hands-on research had to be done by his people.

  Once Bush finally caved in, though, the next task was to locate an appropriate location for the construction of the new prototype. A giant rocket engine is difficult to conceal; it could not be constructed on a workbench in a former sportsmen’s club.

  One of the prime military contractors in Massachusetts was the Wyman-Gordon Company of Worcester, which was making aircraft forgings for the Army in its Madison Street factory. Upon meeting with Wyman-Gordon’s president in Washington, D.C., Vannevar Bush managed to finagle the company into renting out a vacant warehouse on the factory grounds. Final assembly of Team 390’s new prototype engine—referred to as “Big Bertha”—would be made in Warehouse Seven, from parts made across the country and secretly shipped to Wyman-Gordon. Big Bertha’s aluminum outer casing was cast at Wyman-Gordon as well, although only a few select people at Wyman-Gordon knew exactly what it was.

  Secrecy was paramount. Only a handful of Wyman-Gordon workers were involved in the construction of Big Bertha; all had survived extensive background checks by the FBI, and what they were told was on a strict “need to know” basis. The FBI put counterspies to work in the factory to guard against Nazi infiltrators, and work on Big Bertha was done only after midnight, when the least number of people were at the plant. When necessary, the Team 390 members were brought down from New Hampshire to the plant to supervise the engine’s construction, making at least three transfers to different vehicles en route, with the final vehicle usually being a phony Coca-Cola delivery van owned by the FBI.

  It was a little more difficult to find a suitable site for test-firing Big Bertha; Wyman-Gordon’s plant was in the middle of a residential neighborhood. This time, though, the rocket team didn’t leave it to the FBI; Henry Morse and Roy Cahill borrowed Esther Goddard’s car and spent several days driving around southern New Hampshire trying to find a place for the test-firing. After only a few days, they finally located a dairy farm in nearby Jaffrey, New Hampshire.

  Jaffrey had a freight line that ran straight up from Worcester, and the farm was only two miles from the siding. Its owner, Marion Hartnell, was a World War I veteran who just had lost his only son in the fighting in France. He had no love for the Nazis, and once he was approached by Goddard himself, he eagerly volunteered to let the team use his barn for the test-firing of Big Bertha. “We told Mr. Hartnell that there was a possibility that our rocket might blow up and take his barn with it,” Cahill recalls. “The old duffer didn’t bat an eyelash. ‘So long as you can promise me you’ll shoot that rocket of yours right up Hitler’s wazoo,’ that was his response. He even turned down our offer of rent.”

  On the night of November 24, 1943—Thanksgiving Eve, almost exactly six months before the launch of Lucky Linda—Big Bertha was loaded onto a flatcar at the Wyman-Gordon rail siding. A special freight train took it due north across the state line to Jaffrey, where after midnight on Thanksgiving Day the massive rocket engine was carefully off-loaded ont
o a flatbed truck, which in turn drove it to the Hartnell farm. An Army Corps of Engineers team from Fort Devens in Ashby, Massachusetts, spent the rest of the morning anchoring the prototype engine onto the concrete horizontal testbed that had been built in the barn. Shortly before noon, Goddard and his scientists began making preparations for the test while the townspeople of Jaffrey unwittingly enjoyed their Thanksgiving meals. Team 390 waited until exactly 10:00 P.M.; then Robert Goddard threw the ignition switch on the control board outside the barn.

  “I think everybody was standing a hundred feet away from the barn door when we lit the candle,” Mander recalls. “When it went, I almost wet my pants. I thought we were going to blow up the whole damn farm.”

  Big Bertha didn’t explode, though; the engine produced sixty tons of thrust for the requisite ninety seconds. “When it was over,” Morse says, “Bob turned to us, let out his breath, and said, ‘Gentlemen, we’ve got a success. Now let’s go have that Thanksgiving dinner.’ I swear, the old man was ready to cry.”

  The next night, Big Bertha was taken back to the Jaffrey railhead, loaded on another flatcar, and began its long journey across America to New Mexico. The first big hurdle of Blue Horizon had been jumped. Yet, despite the place he had earned in history, farmer Hartnell never told anyone about the Thanksgiving rocket test that had been made on his farm. He died in 1957 still maintaining secrecy, leaving the new owners of his farm puzzled at the strange concrete cradle that rested inside his barn.

  The final months of Project Blue Horizon were a race against time. MI-6 and the OSS knew that the Nazis were in the final stages of building the Amerika Bomber, but the location of work was still unknown, and the Nazis’ rate of progress was uncertain. “Silver” and “Gold” had long since been pulled out of Peenemünde, so the Allies were now blind as to what the Nazis were doing. Reconnaissance flights by the Allies over Germany had failed to locate the two-mile launch track that Sänger had specified in the Black Umbrella document. Unknown to MI-6, it had been built near Nordhausen by the Dora concentration camp prisoners and camouflaged with nets. The Luftwaffe’s scientists were coming steadily closer to fulfilling their primary objective; within the secret caverns of Nordhausen, the sleek antipodal rocket plane was gradually taking shape and form.

  Nonetheless, there was talk within the White House and the Pentagon that the Black Umbrella report had been a red herring. There had already been one similar instance, earlier in the war, when the Nazis had been suspected of developing an atomic weapon. In response, the War Department had begun a crash program to develop its own atomic bomb. This program, based in rural Tennessee and code-named the Manhattan Project, had been unsuccessfully struggling to develop an atomic bomb when a Danish physicist, Niels Bohr, managed to escape to the West with the reliable news that the Nazis were nowhere close to attaining controlled nuclear fission, let alone perfecting an atomic bomb.

  Although minimal atomic research was secretly continued at the Brookhaven National Laboratory on Long Island, the Manhattan Project had been scrapped, mainly to fund Project Blue Horizon. Now, however, some people within the Pentagon were saying that Sänger’s antipodal bomber was another chimera and that vital American resources were being wasted. On their side in the White House was Vice President Harry S Truman, who had begun referring to the American rocket program as “Project Buck Rogers.” Yet Vannevar Bush persisted; unlike the atomic bomb scare, there was no proof that the Nazis were not developing the Amerika Bomber. Roosevelt pragmatically followed his advice, and Project Blue Horizon was not canceled.

  “Not knowing what the Germans were doing was the scary part,” Roy Cahill recalls, “so all we could do was work like bastards. We stopped thinking about it in terms of the glory of putting the first American in space. Now we only wanted to get someone up there without killing him.”

  Through the early part of 1944, Team 390 rarely left its makeshift laboratory at the former sportsmen’s club. The ten scientists were constantly in the lodge’s dining room, pulling twenty-hour days in its efforts to design the rest of the X-1. The FBI bodyguards had taken to cooking their meals for them, and the long table in the middle of the room was buried beneath books, slide rules, and teetering mounds of paper. Big Bertha had only been one component that had to be designed from scratch; life-support, avionics, telemetry and guidance systems, even the pilot’s vacuum suit still had to be developed. As the long New Hampshire winter set in, the days became shorter and the nights colder; tempers became frayed. More than once, members of the team went outside to settle their disputes with their fists. The only instance of relaxation any of the team’s survivors remember was the December morning after a nor’easter dropped seven inches of snow on them; they dropped work and had a spontaneous snowball fight on Lake Monomonock’s frozen surface.

  “Bob was the one who really suffered,” Henry Morse remembers. “His health had never been good, and the overwork, plus the hard winter we had that year, started ganging up on him. Esther used to come up from Worcester to make sure he didn’t overexert himself, that he rested once a day, but he started ignoring her advice after a while. None of us was sleeping or eating well. We were frightened to death that the very next day we would hear that the Amerika Bomber had firebombed New York. It was that much of a race.”

  Piece by piece, the X-1 was assembled in New Mexico from the specifications laid down by Team 390. Unlike Big Bertha, some vital components such as the inertial guidance system were installed virtually without testing. There was simply not enough time to run everything through the wringer. The White Sands engineers knew that they were working from sheer faith. If Goddard’s people were crucially wrong in any one of thousands of areas, the spacecraft they were building would become a death trap for its pilot.

  “How in the hell did we get a man into space?” After many years, Morse shakes his head. “Because we were scared of what would happen if we failed.”

  In the end, it was a photo finish. Both the Amerika Bomber and the X-1 were finished and brought to their respective launch pads in the same week. Goddard and his team left New Hampshire for White Sands on May 15 to oversee the final launch, whenever it occurred. It was now a matter of waiting for the Germans to launch the Amerika Bomber.

  The denouement is well recorded in the history books. The vigil at White Sands ended early on the morning of May 24, 1944, when high-altitude recon planes and ground-based radar spotted the Amerika Bomber over the Pacific Ocean. Within twenty minutes the X-1—christened the Lucky Linda by its pilot after his wife—was successfully launched. Skid Sloman piloted the X-1 through a harrowing ascent and intercepted the A-9 in space above the Gulf of Mexico—during its final ascent skip before the dive that would have taken it over New York. Sloman destroyed the Amerika Bomber with a solid-fuel missile launched from the X-1’s port wing. He then successfully guided his ship through atmospheric reentry to touchdown in Lakehurst, New Jersey.

  With the landing of the Lucky Linda, Project Blue Horizon was no longer top secret. Once the X-1’s mission was announced to the American public by Edward R. Murrow on CBS Radio, it became one of the most celebrated events of World War II. The destruction of the Amerika Bomber was also one of the final nails in the Nazi coffin. So many resources had been poured into the project that the rest of the German war machine suffered. Sänger’s squadron of antipodal bombers was never built, and within a year Germany surrendered to the Allies. The Lucky Linda flew again in August 1945, modified to drop a massive incendiary bomb on Hiroshima, Japan. Japan surrendered a few days later, and World War II ended with the dawn of the space age.

  Yet the story doesn’t end there.

  Because the technology that had produced the Lucky Linda was considered vital to national security, the OSS clamped the lid on the history of the spaceplane’s development. The story that was fed to the press was that the ship had been entirely designed and built in New Mexico. The OSS felt it was necessary to hide the role that Robert Goddard and Team 390 had played.


  In the long run, the OSS was correct. When the Third Reich fell, the Russian White Army rolled into Germany and took Nordhausen, capturing many of the German rocket scientists. Josef Stalin was interested in the Amerika Bomber and sought the expertise that had produced the spaceplane. Unknown to either the Americans or the Germans, the Soviet Union’s Gas Dynamics Laboratory had been secretly working on its own rockets under the leadership of Fridrikh Tsander and Sergei Korolov. The Soviet rocket program had stalled during Russia’s long “patriotic war,” however, and Stalin wanted to regain the lead in astronautics. But von Braun, Oberth, and other German rocket scientists escaped the Russians and surrendered to American forces; eventually they came to the United States under Operation Paperclip and became the core of the American space program.

  The lead was short-lived; in March 1949 the USSR put its own manned spacecraft into orbit. Shortly thereafter, Brookhaven physicists announced the sustenance of nuclear fission, demonstrated by the explosion of an atomic bomb in the Nevada desert. This was followed, in less than a year, by the detonation of a Soviet atomic bomb in Siberia. The new Cold War between the two superpowers moved into the heavens; for the next twenty-five years, until the passage of the United Nations Space Treaty in 1974, which outlawed nukesats, no person on Earth could ever feel safe again.

  Nobel laureate Richard Feynman accurately assayed the situation in his memoirs, Get Serious, Mr Feynman: “It was bad enough that the United States and USSR shared the capability to launch satellites into orbit; now they both had atomic bombs to put in the satellites. In a more sane world, it would have been bombs without rockets, or rockets without bombs—but, God help us, not both at once!”

  Because the United States was now competing with the Soviet Union for dominance in space, the American rocket team lived under oaths of secrecy for more than forty years, forbidden to discuss publicly what they had done in Worcester and Rindge. Robert Goddard himself died on August 10, 1945, the day after the firebombing of Hiroshima. Esther Goddard remained silent about her husband’s involvement with Blue Horizon until her death in 1982.