This New Ocean, page 18
4
Missiles for America
By mid-January 1945, the Red Army had swept through the Baltic and was moving toward Peenemünde while American and British forces were advancing in the west, squeezing what was left of German defenses in a relentlessly closing vise between the Oder and the Rhine. Seeing that the war was all but over and believing that they sat on a treasure more valuable than all the looted gold and art in the Third Reich, von Braun and his most trusted colleagues met in secret at a hotel near Peenemünde and decided to move to an area likely to be overrun by the U.S. Army. One of his engineers would later explain the reasoning this way: “We despise the French; we are mortally afraid of the Soviets; we do not believe the British can afford us, so that leaves the Americans.1”
The SS finally had its prize, though it was anything but one that would bring the killers power and prestige. Hans Kammler, now in charge, ordered the rocket team to evacuate Peenemünde and head south to the missile production facility at Nordhausen. The first train left on February 17, carrying 525 passengers, including wives and children. It was four days after Dresden had been turned into an inferno by a massive firestorm that was started and fanned by Allied bombs. A last V-2 was tested at Peenemünde on the nineteenth. Then many of the facility’s larger machines and workshops were systematically blown up to make them useless to the Russians who were advancing on the region. Enough would survive to make the place valuable to its conquerors anyway.
On March 19, Hitler ordered all of the nation’s research facilities and their records destroyed. Where Peenemünde’s rocketeers were concerned, however, getting rid of the only card they had with which to barter their futures would have been unthinkably stupid. The Führer’s command was therefore ignored. Instead, Dieter Huzel, von Braun’s assistant, was instructed to find a secure hiding place for the thirteen years’ worth of reports and drawings that constituted a priceless record of their work.
“These documents were of inestimable value,” Huzel would explain after the war. “Whoever inherited them would be able to start in rocketry at that point at which we had left off, with the benefit not only of our accomplishments, but of our mistakes as well—the real ingredient of experience. They represented years of intensive effort in a brand-new technology, one which, all of us were still convinced, would play a profound role in the future course of human events.”
That was precisely the point. Von Braun knew that those records and the experience the members of his team carried in their heads were a treasure trove of data on the world’s operational ballistic missile technology and the starter set for going to space. Keeping his team together as a usable commodity and protecting its records and brains would therefore very likely insure survival in a dangerous and uncertain time. Neither von Braun nor any of the others had illusions about what was in store for Germans who had nothing with which to bargain. Some of the team joked bitterly that while the new Germany would have no need for rocket scientists, all of their missiles’ war surplus aluminum could be turned into pots and pans and sold to housewives.3 But Wernher Freiherr von Braun had no intention of ending up as a tinker or a door-to-door salesman. He had plans, even as the last-ditch defense of the fatherland raged, to turn the rocket team into a phoenix that would fly first to America and then to space.
So Huzel, an engineer named Bernard Tessmann, and a small contingent of annoyed soldiers collected, crated, and carefully marked fourteen tons of documents from Nordhausen and another rocket center nearby and drove them in three trucks to Dornten, fifty miles to the northwest. Throughout the night of April 4 and well into the next morning, Huzel, Tessmann, and the cursing, sweating soldiers carried the crates into a vaulted room three hundred or four hundred yards inside an abandoned mine shaft. Dynamite charges were then set off, turning the chamber into a sealed tomb.
Meanwhile, as the U.S. 3rd Armored Division and other units approached Nordhausen, Kammler ordered as many as five hundred of the rocket team’s senior members farther south to Oberammergau, a town in the Bavarian Alps. The location could not have been more appropriate; it was the site of the famous passion play that is put on every ten years in memory of the great plague of 1633. They traveled without their families and were protected (and watched) by armed guards on Kammler’s private train, which contained a dozen crowded sleeping cars and a well-stocked dining car. Its rueful passengers promptly named it Vergeltungs-Express: the Vengeance Express.5
Kammler had been the overseer of several concentration camps and was well aware of what could happen to him after being captured. So he decided to hold the rocketeers hostage in case he had to make a deal with the Americans. Meanwhile von Braun, clearly the most valuable of the hostages, had broken his left arm and shoulder in an automobile accident and headed for Oberammergau by car.
Once there, the watchful Kammler suggested that the likelihood of enemy air attack made it imperative that his valuable flock be moved out of the barbed-wire compound into which it had been herded by his SS guards and dispersed in hamlets and villages around the ancient town. For his part, von Braun was more worried about the trigger-happy guards than about the boyishly exuberant U.S. Army P-47 fighter pilots who constantly crisscrossed the area looking for targets to shoot up. Kammler, meanwhile, seems to have concluded that whatever the rocket men were worth, he was worth nothing, and would therefore be locked up or worse if caught. He therefore slunk off and disappeared into the countryside.
American tanks and infantrymen entered Nordhausen on April 11 and, like Robert Baldridge, were sickened by what they saw. Just northwest of Nordhausen, outside of what appeared to be a mine entrance at Niedersachswerfen, enfeebled skeletons in filthy striped pajamas babbled and gestured excitedly to their saviors about “something fantastic underneath the mountain … important.” They were talking about Dora, whose cavernous tunnels contained parts for more than one hundred complete V-2s. Correspondent Ernie Pyle’s celebrated dogfaces had dug up an extraordinary bone.*
Special Mission V-2
No one in the Allied camp seriously believed that V-2s were going to win the war or ever could win it. But that did not alter the fact that the Nazis had birthed a major new weapon with a potential that was becoming obvious to the few who were paying attention. All of the major armies were by then using batteries of solid rockets, such as the Soviet Union’s Katyusha, to extend the range and, more important, the intensity of their artillery barrages.
Still, if liquids were not exactly in the popular culture during the spring of 1945—despite ample news coverage by Murrow and others who drew vivid pictures of the “death from the stratosphere” that the vengeance weapons had wreaked on England—they certainly had developed a small, dedicated, and secretive subculture.8 As early as 1936, for example, the Soviet Union’s GIRD had bench-tested an engine called the 12-K that produced an impressive 660 pounds of thrust and had a specific impulse of 210 seconds.9 Research on liquids had progressed steadily until the German invasion in 1941, when it was stopped because of the need to design and build the tactically more useful solids.
It was a far different story in the United States, however, where secure borders insured that research steadily continued. In Pasadena, GALCIT’s strict orders from the Army Air Forces to concentrate only on Jet Assisted Take Off for airplanes had been countermanded in the summer of 1943, when von Karman was asked to study and comment on three British intelligence reports on reaction propulsion devices for planes and “projectiles.” Much of the material was from German POWs and was inaccurate or exaggerated, Frank Malina would later report. “The fact that our conclusions bore little resemblance to actual German missile and aircraft developments … is irrelevant to their impact on the 1943 military scene in the U.S.A.,” he wrote.
The most immediate result of that impact had been a request by the Army Air Forces liaison officer at Caltech for a study on the possibility of using rocket engines to propel ballistic missiles. The study, called “Memorandum on the Possibilities of Long-Range Rocket Projectiles,” was completed by Malina and Hsue-shen on November 20, 1943. It concluded that missiles could not go more than a hundred miles with existing engines, but that more powerful ones would be able to send rockets over greater distances and with heavier payloads. It was as optimistic as it was solidly researched (von Karman had looked over his young charges’ calculations before they went out), and made the case for weapons of enormous, perhaps unlimited, range.
The report was an important catalyst for serious Army interest in long-range rocketry. It was also the first document to carry the small study group’s new name: the Jet Propulsion Laboratory. None of JPL’s founding fraternity could have known at the time how important a role it was going to play in the space age. What they did know, though, was that “jet” was infinitely more respectable than “rocket,” which was still often equated with firecrackers.
The liaison officer forwarded Malina’s and Hsue-shen’s report to then-Captain Robert B. Staver, the Army Ordnance officer on campus, who passed it on to Colonel Gervais Trichel at the Pentagon. Trichel headed the Ordnance Department’s Rocket Development Branch, which was founded that year as a direct consequence of the V-2s and which was trying to determine whether liquid-propelled ballistic missiles were really feasible.
The report led Trichel to award GALCIT/JPL a contract to develop a “long-range rocket missile and launching equipment” for the Army. The program was soon given yet another acronym: ORDCIT, for Ordnance/California Institute of Technology. If there was any doubt in Trichel’s mind that the age of the ballistic missile was about to dawn, the first V-2 attacks on London put it to rest. So in December 1944, with the alarming possibility of liquid-propelled German missiles turned to reality, he decided to double his chance to develop an American ballistic missile by awarding a second contract to the General Electric Company to do its own study. That project was given the code name “Hermes,” after the son of Zeus and Maia in Greek mythology. Not only was Hermes the messenger of the gods, but he conducted souls to Hell. It is unlikely that the U.S. Army knew that Hermes’s most typical monument, the herma, or herm, was usually a stone pillar carved in the shape of the head on the top of a penis.
Trichel also decided that Project Hermes could best be helped by rounding up the brains behind the vengeance weapons and picking them. So in February 1945, with Allied armies rolling ever deeper into Germany, he sent Staver to Europe to find as many of the leading German rocket scientists as he could, either before the shooting stopped or as soon afterward as possible. With the help of British intelligence, the newly promoted major compiled a long blacklist.12 The name at the top was, of course, Wernher von Braun.
Staver’s first stop was London, where he quickly learned that not everyone agreed on the value of the V-2 or of its creators. His immediate superior, Colonel Horace B. Quinn, expressed his own thoughts on the matter with characteristic succinctness. “I don’t care if the Russians get all those krauts,” Quinn snarled. “I say good riddance.13” If Staver needed proof that Quinn was missing a larger point, he got it shortly afterward, when he was knocked out of bed by one of several V-2s that exploded nearby. It or another slammed into Hyde Park, near his hotel, killing sixty-two people in a grisly eruption of earth and shrapnel.
But head-hunting was not all that Trichel had in mind. He was also after the real article: V-2s, and lots of them. In December 1944—the month after he drew up the contract with General Electric and three months after the first V-2 struck England—Trichel decided it was vital that Project Hermes (General Electric) get as many of the weapons as the U.S. Army could lay its hands on. Four months later, he asked Colonel Holger N. Toftoy, the Paris-based chief of Army Ordnance Technical Intelligence, to find one hundred V-2s in usable condition so they could be shipped to the White Sands Proving Ground in New Mexico. There, they would be test-launched by the Army and General Electric.
It is an indication of the seriousness with which the U.S. Army took ballistic missiles that by the end of 1944, while the Battle of the Bulge raged in the Ardennes, it contracted with GALCIT/JPL and General Electric for separate missile development work, picked a permanent site where the prototypes would be tested, and resolved to capture and bring to America both the inventors of the vengeance weapons and at least a hundred of the missiles themselves.
So within days of the capture of Mittelwerk, Toftoy, carrying out Trichel’s orders, put together an ad hoc unit called Special Mission V-2 whose job it was to grab both men and missiles and get them out of a disintegrating Third Reich. But there were three obstacles. Since the V-2s were meant to be launched soon after they were made rather than to be stored in large numbers, the soldiers who liberated the huge tunnel factory found mainly components, not finished missiles. They would therefore have to be sent home in pieces and put together at White Sands. That did not figure to be an insurmountable problem, especially since the rest of the war booty—Quinn’s “krauts”—was supposed to be sent to the United States with all the hardware.
Another obstacle dismayed Toftoy because it was potentially insurmountable. Nordhausen and Niedersachswerfen were due to be turned over to the Red Army on or about June 1 to become part of the eastern occupation zone. (The Soviets would not arrive until July, but he had no way of knowing that.) Toftoy therefore sped to the underground production site with a company of ordnance trucks brought in from Cherbourg, 770 miles to the west, and went right to the tunnel complex to grab the parts and get them out before their rightful owners showed up.
That was when the third obstacle became apparent: Toftoy had no V-2 parts list, and there was no longer anyone at Mittelwerk who knew enough about the finished missiles to tell him what to steal. So he took the precaution of ordering his men to take a hundred of everything. With a company of heavily armed infantrymen guarding the huge tunnel, the missile parts were loaded onto the trucks and driven to the town of Nordhausen, where they were transferred to German freight cars. The first train, with forty cars full of V-2 components, chugged out on May 22, 1945, bound for the port of Antwerp. Another shipment of equal size would leave every day for the next nine days.
While all that was going on, Staver showed up and immediately began looking for the men on his blacklist. He turned up a few, including Walter Riedel, who had remained behind and settled in the area. He also uncovered a complete Wasserfall guidance system in a barn and other equipment elsewhere. But Staver’s greatest accomplishment was tricking a local official into revealing where the Peenemünde archive was buried. He did that by pretending von Braun and others had already provided the information. The official, wanting to ingratiate himself to his country’s conquerors anyway, told the American officer about the bonanza that lay behind the dirt and rocks in the mine shaft at Dornten. Staver and a work detail rushed to the site and frantically dug through the debris. The precious cargo they found was quickly loaded onto trucks on May 27 and rushed safely west.
Colonel Korolyov Goes to Germany
Peenemünde was overrun by the Second White Russian Army on May 5. On the twenty-sixth, while the precious V-2 parts were being spirited out of Mittelwerk, a group of Soviet officers arrived there for a preliminary inspection. It had been firmly established that the facility was in the Soviet occupation zone and that it and its contents were therefore to have been left intact for their new owner. But that was unthinkable. The Russians were politely received. But their attention was diverted, and they missed the evacuation that was taking place illegally, and therefore very quickly, right under their noses. Mittelwerk was formally occupied by the Red Army on July 5, 1945. The relatively few rocket shells, engines, propellant tanks, fins, and other stuff that remained on the underground assembly line and in the network of adjacent tunnels was a paltry haul compared to what had been evacuated. Yet even the remnants astonished the Russians. Their potential certainly did not escape Sergei Korolyov, who had been released from Kazan a year earlier and made deputy chief designer of the People’s Commissariat of Aviation Industry. As fate would have it, his boss, the chief designer, was none other than Valentin Glushko, the rocket-engine genius who had been instrumental in sending him to prison in the first place.
Korolyov was commissioned a colonel in the Red Army that summer and, with several of his country’s best-regarded rocket specialists, went to Germany in early September to tour the captured facilities in the Harz Mountains and north to what was left of Peenemünde. A young and gifted engineer named Boris Y. Chertok led the contingent at Nordhausen and would spend the next two years directing the joint Soviet-German Raabe Institute in Bleicherode, where he would carefully turn Germany missile technology into Soviet missile technology.
Korolyov had in the meantime left Glushko and now worked for the newly created State All-Union Design Bureau of Special Machine Building, an organization whose ambiguous title camouflaged the fact that its assignment was to produce nuclear-tipped missiles that could, in the words of one of its members, “meet the challenge of the American atomic bomb.”18 He and many of his comrades who visited Germany while the embers of war were barely out would form the critical mass of their country’s space program. They included Glushko, Vasily P. Mishin, Vladimir P. Barmin, Viktor I. Kuznetsov, Leonid A. Voskresensky, Nikolai A. Pilyugin, Arvid Pallo, Georgi A. Tyulin, Viktor V. Kazansky, and Mikhail K. Tikhonravov. Barmin, Chertok, Glushko, and Tikhonravov in particular would emerge from the postwar chaos as stalwarts of their nation’s rocket program, some to challenge Korolyov, others to contribute to his luster.
