Colonel Becker authorized the rocket’s development, but the Kummersdorf base was deemed both too small and too close to population centers to guarantee secrecy. In the fall of 1937, following the advice of Dornberger and von Braun, the Third Reich founded an enormous top-secret war rocket facility at Usedom, an island off the coast of the Baltic Sea. Christened Peenemünde after a small fishing village nearby, the Heeresversuchsanstalt (Army Research Center) officially separated from the Luftwaffe in 1938, around the time of Jack Kennedy’s happy-go-lucky summer tour of Germany, and soon became the most modern rocket research-and-development station in the world. With von Braun and a staff of about three hundred drawn mainly from military ranks, Peenemünde brought the full weight of German rocketry expertise under one roof, with the manpower and facilities to build and test the weapons that would give Hitler control of the skies. When the facility was at peak production, thousands of soldiers, employees, foreign laborers, and prisoners toiled to build German rockets there.
Secrecy reigned at Peenemünde. Even within the German Army, very few people were aware of the effort to turn rockets into long-range military weapons. In the project’s first years, regular rocket launches accelerated the research, but required additional staff. The army began to siphon top talent from other army programs and universities and send them to the remote Baltic base (which, in addition to rocket development, also hosted units developing a winged cruise missile eventually called the Vergeltungswaffe 1, or V-1). Between 1937 and 1941, von Braun launched more than seventy next-generation Aggregat rockets there, including the A-5, a scaled-down test model of the proposed A-4, which would soon be known to the world as the V-2, an abbreviation of Vergeltungswaffe 2, or “Vengeance Weapon 2.”
Rocketry’s destructive potential was the overriding goal, but its greater potential was never far from von Braun’s mind. On one occasion he interrupted a presentation for Colonel Becker on the progress of armed rockets to talk enthusiastically about breaking gravity’s grasp on mankind and “going to the moon.” And it was true: the same V-2 rockets that were being developed as long-range artillery could conceivably be adapted to spaceflight. But Becker and Dornberger’s willingness to indulge von Braun’s enthusiasms went only so far. Afterward, von Braun’s superiors, with faces that looked carved out of stone, sternly forbade him from talking about space travel in front of other officers—and especially in front of Hitler, with whom he occasionally interacted. Von Braun was ordered to channel his moon enthusiasm into helping the Third Reich control Europe by developing military rockets.
There is currently a debate over how enthusiastic the Nazi rocketeers were in supporting Hitler’s war machine. Some were supportive, it seems, while some were enthusiastic, others were opportunistic, and a few were opposed. Biographer Michael Neufeld says that von Braun fell into the opportunistic camp. The rocket engineers who truly opposed the Third Reich (such as Willy Ley) left Germany. Hitler, preoccupied with Germany’s hegemony in Europe, wasn’t much interested in space research on any level. His initial indifference toward von Braun’s project stemmed from disappointments with such wizard weaponry during World War I. One blustery spring day in 1939, Hitler arrived in Kummersdorf accompanied by Field Marshal Walther von Brauchitsch, General Becker from Army Ordnance, Deputy Führer Rudolf Hess, and Martin Bormann, Hitler’s personal secretary. This Nazi leadership squad had come to tour the facility and witness test engines. Smiling happily, full of bravura, and eager to show off his wares, von Braun tried to sell the Führer on the prototypes of his liquid-fuel rockets, touting their potential as weapons that could, in a year, be unleashed on France and Britain. On one level, Hitler was dismayed by von Braun’s fantasy weapons. (“Even now I still don’t know how a liquid-propellant rocket can fly,” he said. “Why do you need two tanks and two different propellants?”) On another, he was frustrated that even though Peenemünde and Kummersdorf were the leading rocket research centers in the world, progress was coming only in fits and starts.
Von Braun was disappointed that Hitler didn’t realize that at Kummersdorf and Peenemünde the Germans were inventing the ballistic missile future, and that budgetary restrictions were their largest obstacle. “There were thousands of major problems for which there was no answer at that time,” Dornberger later recalled of the work at Peenemünde and Kummersdorf. Over the first two years at Peenemünde, the team made steady but slow advances toward its goal of having ballistic missiles ready by 1943, but considering the state and pace of their research-and-development efforts, that deadline did not seem possible. Nevertheless, on September 5, 1939—four days after the Nazi war machine invaded ill-prepared Poland, and Jack Kennedy heard Neville Chamberlain declare war on Germany in the House of Commons—Dornberger promised a finished rocket for 1941.
It was a risky gamble, but the payoff was worth it: an order from Field Marshal von Brauchitsch preserved the Peenemünde program’s funding and protected key personnel from transfer to military units. At the end of October 1939, von Braun successfully launched his A-5 rocket. The time for mass production was near. As for any true engineer, one test result for him was worth one thousand opinions. “It was an unforgettable sight,” von Braun recalled. “The slim missile rose slowly from its platform, climbing vertically with ever-increasing speed and without the slightest oscillation until it vanished in the overcast.”
STARTING IN SEPTEMBER 1940, Jack Kennedy took classes as a Stanford University graduate student in business, economics, and political science, but his mind was on the war in Europe. As of May 1940, when Chamberlain resigned as Britain’s prime minister, Kennedy’s new all-seasons hero was Winston Churchill, who had formed a coalition government. By the time Hitler invaded the Netherlands and assaulted France, Kennedy was firmly in favor of U.S. intervention. By that summer, almost all of western Europe had fallen to the Nazis, and only Great Britain remained. From August through October, the Luftwaffe unleashed wave after wave of Junkers and Heinkel bombers, guarded by Messerschmitt fighters, on a systematic campaign against British towns, cities, fleets, ports, airfields, and radar bases. “The shocking German success and the dire threat to England forced Jack,” biographer Michael O’Brien wrote, “like many Americans, to revise his thinking about the war and America’s role in it.”
Hitler had put his faith in the Luftwaffe and its proven aircraft to destroy Britain’s Royal Air Force (RAF), paving the way for British surrender or, as a last resort, an invasion by German troops. The theory was sound, except for one thing: in the face of relentless attacks, the British and their airmen grew tougher, not weaker. As the campaign ground on, Hitler became impatient, directing the Luftwaffe to switch gears from engaging the RAF in aerial showdowns to bombing civilian targets in London, Coventry, and other large cities. But the Blitz, as it became known, only strengthened Britain’s stoic perseverance.
Frustrated, Hitler shocked the world in June 1941 by turning his attention away from the British campaign and toward the east, attacking Germany’s supposed ally the Soviet Union with a lightning-fast blitzkrieg offensive involving more than 3.5 million German, Finnish, and Romanian troops and 3,500 tanks—the largest invasion force in history. Virtually all German bombers were redirected from Britain to the USSR. Initial Soviet losses were so devastating that Hitler and his high command began confidently planning their next move, prioritizing conventional air and naval resources for a renewed push against the British. In a war economy riven with infighting, conflicting priorities, and raw materials shortages, this meant fewer resources for rocket development.
One of the problems Dornberger and von Braun faced in this competition was that Hitler’s support for their rocket program was erratic. Germans faced steel shortages and other economic demands that stunted the fast growth of the rocket program. According to most sources, Hitler was skeptical of Germany’s being able to launch full-blown rocket attacks on other European countries from the safety of the homeland. Faith in missile rockets meant no pilots, no soldiers, no ships, and no s
ailors—a strange new reality that was hard for him to fathom.
In this make-or-break moment, Dornberger and von Braun tried a new tactic to persuade Hitler of rocketry’s military efficacy, arguing for its effect as a psychological weapon. In a meeting with Hitler on August 20, 1941, they made the case that their planned rocket could succeed where hordes of Luftwaffe aircraft had failed, and finally break the morale of the British people. Traveling at 3,500 miles per hour, the rocket would appear seemingly from out of nowhere, they argued. By the time anyone on the ground saw it coming, only seconds would be left before it slammed thousands of pounds of explosives into a crowded neighborhood, destroying blocks. Dornberger and von Braun sweetened their pitch by promising cooperative projects with the Luftwaffe and, significantly, rockets for even more distant targets. The stabilizing wings and two-stage propulsion they envisioned would enable a rocket to reach the big eastern cities of America. Hitler was adequately convinced, by both the A-4’s destructive capabilities and its potential to instill terror in the British populace, and gave the project his lukewarm backing, subject to final testing. Despite the cost (far higher in both manpower and resources than more conventional weapons), the A-4 appealed to Hitler’s sense of his own mythic power and Germany’s technological superiority. “The Führer,” wrote Dornberger after the meeting, “emphasized that this development is of revolutionary importance for the conduct of warfare in the whole world.”
OVER THE COURSE of a half century, American, German, and Soviet dreams of putting a human on the moon threaded past numerous vital turning points. World events, both large and small, accelerated rocket engineering at an astonishing rate. As the complexity, scale, and malevolence of Hitler’s drive for world domination became manifest, his August 1941 turn on the subject of rocketry was a critical pivot point. No other nation at the time had Germany’s momentum in the field, paired with a dedication to leveraging new science for secret weaponry. Although the connection wasn’t fully understood at the time, Hitler’s commitment to the V-2 advanced the pursuit of a moonshot by perhaps decades. Though Hitler had no expressed interest in reaching the moon, the uncomfortable fact is that the darkest shafts and foulest backwater of human savagery helped bring this loftiest of human dreams to reality. Indeed, the engineers at Peenemünde were solving essential questions about celestial navigation and mechanics, about how to innovate easily applicable ways of determining position and velocity when away from Earth’s surface, which would prove all-important in future U.S. lunar voyages. German ballistic missile technology—built to kill people—laid a foundation for spaceflight.
Had Hitler demurred in the August meeting and continued only a halfhearted accommodation of the strange new technology, the course of World War II might have changed. According to many senior Nazi officers at the time (and some military historians since), Hitler’s commitment to the V-2 actually decreased Germany’s chances of winning the war. The voracious appetite of the Peenemünde project drew off resources when an accelerated program for conventional weapons and Luftwaffe aircraft might have made for a stronger German military machine. But to Hitler, the V-2’s perceived value went beyond dollars and cents. Over the following years, as the tides of war shifted, he came to see it as a superweapon that could finally deliver German victory over the Allied nations.
Portrait of Ensign Joseph P. Kennedy Jr. and Lieutenant (jg) John F. Kennedy in their Navy uniforms. The photograph was taken in May 1942 at Turgeon Studios.
Frank Turgeon Jr., Courtesy of the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum, Boston
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Surviving a Savage War
He is really home—the boy for whom you prayed so hard . . . what a sense of gratitude to God to have spared him.
—ROSE KENNEDY, DIARY ENTRY, JANUARY 1944
Jack Kennedy knew all the rules in sailing, but the rules didn’t know him. The fiercer the Atlantic wind, the choppier the whitecaps, the more exhilarated Kennedy became. He longed to test his mettle against the raw elements, to feel part of the barrel and roar of the sea, to infuse his days with wind-whipped adventure. Some called his extreme sailing reckless, others a death wish, but the fact was that Kennedy simply possessed a “blue mind,” experiencing his greatest contentment at or beside the sea. Whether speed-racing in the Edgartown regattas, beachcombing around Hyannis Port, collecting shells on Monomoy Island, challenging the inward-pressing tide on Nantucket Sound, or suntanning in Palm Beach, Kennedy was his most authentic self, his freest in the old transcendentalist sense, near the ocean.
That love of a maritime environment guaranteed that Jack Kennedy would join the U.S. Navy as war engulfed the world. On September 25, 1941, at age twenty-four, he was sworn in as an ensign. Because of his grim history of physical ailments, his commission had been anything but automatic, requiring that his father help arrange the appointment via a former colleague. That Joseph Kennedy Sr. could facilitate such things wasn’t news to his two oldest sons, but increasingly that overbearing influence had to be contained. Jack’s older brother, Joe Jr., was very cognizant of not getting smothered by his father. Taking a break from Harvard Law School and politics—he had been a 1940 Democratic Convention delegate—Joe Jr. had joined the Naval Reserve and, during the second half of 1941, was training to become an aviator. Although he had dabbled in anti-interventionist thinking, he was now fully committed to helping Great Britain defeat Germany.
Joe Jr. earned his naval wings in March 1942 and was already thinking of his postwar political career. Strikingly handsome with a touch of arrogance in his smile, he had a lofty conception of obligation and devotion to America, and believed that with ardor, focus, and drive, there was nothing he couldn’t achieve. Though he never explicitly expressed the desire to be a senator or governor, a sense of destiny swirled around him. Occasionally he hinted that being president was a noble pursuit. To his credit, he intuited the danger of being tarred by his father’s reputation for isolationism and appeasement, which had fallen out of favor in the Democratic Party. Indeed, some scholars believe he joined the navy with “a private mission” to prove that the Kennedys “were not cowards or defeatists.” The Kennedy brothers were fitting themselves into navy service, determined to test their patriotic grit along with millions of other Americans. But more than most families, the Kennedy children coveted their status within the confines of their own clan.
When the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941—“a date which will live in infamy,” as President Roosevelt termed it—Jack and Joe Kennedy were already in uniform and ready for combat duty. They would never have to scrub off the taint of using their father’s influence to avoid military service. Four days after Pearl Harbor, Nazi Germany and its Axis partners declared war on the United States. “Industrial mobilization” became an urgent catchphrase across the nation. Military bases were built on empty land. Factories were adapted to switch from manufacturing consumer goods to producing war matériel. Between 1940 and 1943, enlistment in the U.S. Armed Forces expanded from fewer than five hundred thousand to more than nine million. Mobilization efforts swelled in every direction, from far-flung Honolulu to the shipyards of Norfolk.
Jack Kennedy, it seemed, was headed for a wartime career at the Office of Naval Intelligence, in Washington. With his precarious health, vaguely journalistic ambitions, and rarefied background as a best-selling author, a stateside desk job that involved researching and writing reports seemed the ideal post. However, Kennedy had no intention of staying put in Washington, and he almost immediately began jockeying for a naval combat role in the Pacific. Trying to prove his valor, he hopscotched around the country from one military base to another, from Rhode Island to South Carolina to Illinois, and he stayed on course, despite back surgery that required a two-month respite in the hospital.
While Jack Kennedy was exchanging his rich, footloose lifestyle for the disciplinary navy, Wernher von Braun had made what amounted to a Faustian bargain for the advance of rocketry. He joined the Nazi Party and beca
me an SS officer. He later argued that he’d had no choice, claiming he was watched carefully by the Gestapo for any sign of disloyalty. It must be observed, however, that some of von Braun’s contemporaries found ways to resist the fascist regime, often perpetrating small, undramatic acts of slowdown, sabotage, or resistance. But not the coddled team at Peenemünde. Many of these engineers were Hitler loyalists who looked forward to the day when Aryan Germans would have the promised Lebensraum (room to live) granted by conquest of Europe. Desperate in later years for an excuse to vindicate himself from his close association with Hitler, von Braun would contend that he was merely an earnest engineer who put his craft above all else. This excuse didn’t prevent him from enjoying his wartime position or being fêted by the Third Reich’s rich and powerful.
What wasn’t disputed was the intense demands von Braun faced at Peenemünde. The pace was grueling, and he worked long hours. Fellow SS officers found him fast-minded, articulate, brusque—only his proclivity for inserting literary and historical allusions in everyday conversation made him unusual. Hitler had set a goal of making five thousand V-2 ballistic missiles annually; frustrated, von Braun knew that was an improbability. The unfortunate reality was that a practical version of the V-2 had yet to fly, despite the many test launches he and an ever-larger corps of engineers fast-tracked.
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