American Moonshot

by Douglas Brinkley

  As a perfectionist, von Braun, in later years, was fond of saying that “crash programs fail because they are based on the theory that, with nine women pregnant, you can get a baby a month.” But time was of the essence for the Third Reich. The first official V-2 test rocket lifted off from Peenemünde in July 1942, reaching an altitude of one mile before blowing up over the Baltic. With the Eastern Front in a stalemate following Germany’s monumental failure to defeat Russia, armed rockets were needed for a renewed campaign against Britain. Another V-2 was tested in August 1942 and reached an altitude of seven miles before disintegration.

  Then von Braun and Dornberger, the military commander of the rocket team, had a success. On October 3, 1942, a V-2 launched from Peenemünde broke the sound barrier and traveled to an altitude of 52.5 miles at a range of 120 miles, nosing into the ionosphere, that wide band of extremely thin air that separates earthly atmospheric bands from outer space. The test marked the first time a man-made projectile had technically ever flown beyond the bulk of Earth’s atmosphere. Their first inclination was to think about how much the new weapon would help the Third Reich military. Deep down, they also knew that the test had longer-term implications for future space travel. This “was a true ancestor of practically every rocket flown in the world today,” says historian Paul Dickson. “It was a true spaceship in that it carried both its own fuel and oxygen and could, if needed, work in a vacuum.”

  Grasping the significance of the moment, von Braun and Dornberger kept their eyes glued to binoculars that game-changing afternoon until their forty-six-foot-long liquid-propellant missile disappeared. Some historians have erroneously claimed that October 3, 1942, ushered in the epochal Space Age. Such statements about the V-2 are questionable because it never reached the one-hundred-kilometer altitude until after the war. But the V-2 did mean that all that would be needed for futuristic moonbound rockets was increased thrust for larger payloads. “It was an unforgettable sight,” Dornberger recalled. “In the full glare of the sunlight the rocket rose higher and higher. The flame darting from the stern was almost as long as the rocket itself. The air was filled with a sound like rolling thunder.” While von Braun might have preferred to build space exploration vehicles, during the war years they found themselves working on ballistic missiles, rocket engines for aircraft, and other lethal machines.

  In early 1943, setbacks in the Mediterranean theater convinced Hitler, previously a skeptic, that the V-2 was now essential to victory, putting Peenemünde at the nerve center of Nazi war plans. When von Braun and Dornberger showed Hitler film footage of their V-2 success that July and promised him that the rocket could deliver 2,200-pound warheads across the English Channel into London and other cities, Hitler grew visibly intrigued. Inflated with revenge, he hoped to use the terror weapon on civilian targets in England as payback for the Allied bombings of German cities. “Europe and the world will be too small from now on to contain a war,” Hitler said. “With such weapons humanity will be unable to endure it.”

  AS VON BRAUN and Dornberger inaugurated the V-2 Age, Jack Kennedy was completing the Naval Reserve Officers Training School at Northwestern University in Chicago. The previous June, at Midway, the United States had halted the Japanese naval advance in the Pacific. Two months later, at Guadalcanal, in the Solomon Islands, U.S. troops halted Japan’s island-hopping advance toward Australia. During those tense times, Kennedy attained the rank of lieutenant, junior grade, on October 10, 1942. He immediately volunteered for the patrol torpedo (PT) boat service, a fairly new command whose development had been accelerated following the attack on Pearl Harbor. PT boats were long and fast, with a relatively low profile and a top speed of forty knots (about forty-six miles per hour). Modestly armed, they were intended mainly to interrupt enemy supply lines by sinking barges, freighters, and sometimes the warships that accompanied them. The most intimidating of the enemy ships that might be encountered on the supply routes in the Pacific Theater was a Japanese destroyer, which averaged a speed of thirty-four knots and lacked the PT’s maneuverability. Attacking in groups and buzzing around their Japanese targets, PTs were known to American sailors as “mosquito boats.”

  Looking something like an enlarged, fortified racing speedboat, each PT boat carried two officers and a crew of eleven. Not wanting to waste experienced career officers and other key personnel on such small-scale commands, the navy sought graduates of first-rate colleges, preferably men who had played team sports. An even higher priority was given to graduates who sailed or motored their own boats in private life. Because recruiters favored college-educated yachtsmen most of all, leadership of a PT boat became something of a snob assignment. But there were two catches: PT skippering was extremely dangerous, and the navy wanted men who weren’t married. Jack Kennedy was suited in all respects except one: he hadn’t been a leader in any organization, with the possible exception of his gang at Choate—and they’d all come close to expulsion for his offbeat pranks. And while he was a fine sailor on Nantucket Sound and Buzzards Bay, and had won sailing races, there was a huge difference between taking day outings in Atlantic waters and commanding a boat under the stress of war.

  Despite their yachting-set cachet, PT boats weren’t frivolous or experimental; they were choice weapons in the Pacific Theater. And unlike rockets, they could be mass-produced easily by companies such as Elco Motor Yachts, in Bayonne, New Jersey, and Higgins Industries, in New Orleans, Louisiana. William Liebenow of Virginia, who joined the PT boat service a few months before Kennedy, perfectly summarized the navy’s need: “Our big-ship navy had just about been destroyed at Pearl Harbor,” he explained. “So PT boats were kind of something that they could manufacture quickly and get them out to the war zones to harass the Jap fleet as much as possible.”

  In March 1943, Kennedy was given command of PT-109 as a lieutenant. He was ordered to the Solomon Islands and took command on April 23. At the helm, he initially participated in preparations for troop movements or invasion. That summer, nighttime patrols for enemy supply barges were also ongoing. All the enlisted men admired Kennedy from the get-go. Not only was the lieutenant a gallant leader, but he was also one of the boys and experienced the same homesickness as the rest. One afternoon, he tore the PT-109 patch off his uniform and mailed it in a letter to a cousin struggling in boarding school. “I’m not so crazy about where I’m at either, kiddo,” he wrote. “Be brave, wear the patch, and we’ll get through this.”

  Naval lieutenant John F. Kennedy on board the torpedo boat PT-109 he commanded in the southwest Pacific.

  MPI/Archive Photos/Getty Images

  Early on August 2, 1943, PT-109 was moving as quietly as possible in Blackett, North Solomon, a strait used for a so-called Japanese Express of supply ships and escorts fortifying troops on nearby islands. At about 2:00 a.m., the 109 was mostly powered down. With Lieutenant Kennedy and the crew stealthily looking for a floating target in the channel, their boat was rammed by a Japanese destroyer. Ten seconds later, Kennedy’s vessel had broken apart and was sinking fast. Two crew members had died. The PT-109 went up in flames. Stranded in the middle of the Pacific, an injured Kennedy later said he didn’t know exactly what had caused the disaster, whether human error or the bad luck of their boat being effectively unmaneuverable under low power. All he knew was that death was knocking. “People that haven’t been there certainly can’t, they just can’t understand how Jack Kennedy got hit by a destroyer,” observed Liebenow, “but I can see where it could happen.”

  Clinging to debris, Kennedy remained coolheaded in the shipwreck’s aftermath. He saved the badly injured Patrick McMahon by pulling him in a three-hour swim to a small island a few miles away. Over the course of the next twelve hours, all the survivors miraculously made it there. Desperate to stay alive, Kennedy ordered his crew to swim to another island, where food and water were available. Thinking fast, Kennedy carved an SOS message in a coconut and handed it to two natives willing to row in a primitive boat seeking help for the marooned Am
ericans.

  On August 8, six days after PT-109 was rammed, the badly sunburned surviving crew and their commander were rescued. Kennedy was welcomed back to the PT base as a full-fledged naval hero, earning the Navy and Marine Corps medals for leadership. Although he found it hard to explain how his boat had drifted into the middle of the sea alone, he certainly wasn’t blamed for the disaster; instead, he was almost immediately assigned to a different PT boat. “Most of the courage shown in the war came from men’s understanding of their interdependence on each other,” Kennedy would later reflect. “Men were saving other men’s lives at the risk of their own simply because they realized that perhaps the next day their lives would be saved in turn. And so there was built up a great feeling of comradeship and fellowship, and loyalty.”

  BY THE BEGINNING of the summer of 1943, Heinrich Himmler, leader of the German SS, with assistance from Walter Dornberger and Arthur Rudolph, brought hundreds of slave laborers to Peenemünde to work on rocket assembly lines as part of an effort to fast-track V-2 production. They were following orders given by Albert Speer’s Armament Ministry. The Baltic facility was now operating at a frenetic pace.

  On the night of August 17–18, 1943, a fleet of 596 British bombers, one of the largest air raid forces ever assembled by the RAF, filled the skies over northeast coastal Germany on a mission to find Peenemünde, which it did despite clever camouflage that included artificial fog. For two hours, British bombs rained down on the Baltic Sea facility, killing 735 people, including more than 500 “foreign workers,” some of whom were POWs. At first light, Dornberger’s test facilities seemed devastated, but it soon became clear that the rocket development facility was still operable. “After four weeks of cleanup work,” Dornberger later bragged, “Peenemünde worked full-time again. . . . In the case of the [overall] V-2 offensive, the bombing neither delayed it nor reduced it to any extent.”

  Heeresversuchsanstalt (Army Research Center), Peenemünde, 1942–1945, draft for a V-2 rocket launching position. The drawing was done on June 3, 1942.

  INTERFOTO/Alamy Stock Photo

  The British RAF attack on Peenemünde forced the German Army and the Armaments Ministry to establish new manufacturing sites at hard-to-find locations. Seeking a more secure spot for production of their ballistic missiles, the Nazis developed a secret underground facility carved inside Kohnstein Mountain, near Nordhausen, in the Harz Mountains. Using concentration camp slave labor, they transformed a tunnel complex into a facility that could produce thousands of V-2s. The location in the Harz Mountains was already a top-secret storage facility for the Nazis. Now it would be known as Mittelwerk (or “Central Works”), and it would employ slave labor from Dora, a subcamp of the Buchenwald concentration camp erected inside the tunnels themselves. The German aim was to avoid RAF and U.S. Army Air Corps bombing strikes, which had been destroying cities and industrial plants.

  The burden of preparing the Mittelwerk factory under the topographical restraints of a mountain area should have taken years, but von Braun, Dornberger, and their powerful Nazi Party colleagues in charge of the top-priority program didn’t have years. They barely had months. With Hitler’s strongest armies having been decimated by the Soviet Union on the Eastern Front and Allied troops seizing control of southern Italy, the V-2 could buy time to secure the Third Reich’s survival, but only if it arrived quickly.

  Conditions at Mittelwerk and Dora as 1944 began were nothing short of a living hell: there was no fresh air, little water or food, vermin and lice, plumbing that consisted of open barrels, and grueling work without end—slave laborers were tortured and beaten if caught working at less than a double-time clip. These physical strains were combined with the oppressive knowledge that illness or injury might mean instant execution by their Nazi overseers. The daily piles of corpses awaiting cremation—upon their arrival, the inmates were greeted with a somber Nazi induction speech of the “endurance or death” variety. Only some Italians were granted POW status.

  More than twenty thousand slave laborers perished from disease, exhaustion, malnutrition, torture, and beatings at Dora while building V-1 and V-2 rockets throughout 1944. Words can never aptly describe how difficult life at Dora-Mittelbau was for its workers. Von Braun, a colonel in the SS, was deeply complicit in these war crimes. He was a regular visitor to Mittelwerk.

  In later years, a disingenuous von Braun would profess to have been just an apolitical space lover from the ex-Weimar amateur rocket group tasked by the Nazis to engage in military missile development. He repeatedly pointed out that Himmler had the Gestapo arrest him in March 1944, supposedly for sabotaging war rocket projects. Incarcerated by the SS for the crime of articulating “frivolous dreams” of rockets orbiting Earth and the moon and expressing doubts about the war, he was tossed into a Stettin prison cell, and feared for his life. However, Dornberger and Reich Minister of Armaments Albert Speer vouched for him, and he was released under strict orders never to utter a word or even think about space exploration. After the war, trying to escape culpability for the Mittelwerk crimes, von Braun flaunted this prison story as inoculation against charges of Nazi collaboration.

  A BACK INJURY John Kennedy suffered in the sinking of PT-109 led to his medical discharge. Soon after his return to the United States in January 1944 (as Allied troops landed near Anzio to begin the six-month campaign to capture Rome), he was sitting in a Manhattan nightclub with John Hersey, who the previous year had published a Life magazine story about a PT boat squadron in the Solomon Islands. Upon hearing Kennedy’s saga, Hersey suggested another article in Life, about the demise of the boat and the fate of its crew. After checking with his father, Kennedy agreed to cooperate. By the time he and Hersey rendezvoused for in-depth interviews about the Solomon campaign, they had to meet in a hospital room in Boston, where Kennedy had undergone surgery for his back injury. He spent most of late winter and spring in various hospitals and resorts, recuperating and being treated for malaria, a common ailment among service members returning from the Pacific Theater.

  In May 1944, Jack reported to the Submarine Chaser Training Center in Miami. His father had purchased the six-bedroom La Querida (roughly translated as “my dear one”), in Palm Beach, for $120,000 in 1933. The Mediterranean Revival home, set on two acres, was expanded to eleven bedrooms; multiple second-floor balconies offered sweeping views of the Atlantic. The sprawling estate, designed by architect Addison Mizner, showcased two hundred feet of pristine Atlantic beachfront. Jack retreated there to enjoy the swimming pool, soak up the Caribbean trade winds, and assess his future while still serving in American wartime.

  Part of Jack’s job in Miami entailed piloting PT boats around South Florida waters in anti-German-attack defensive exercises. Getting to watch Floridians and tourists frolic on beaches was far better than bloody combat. “They all wait anxiously for D-day,” he wrote a friend, “and you can find beaches crowded every day with people—all looking seaward and towards the invasion coast.”

  Jack always loved being in Florida. Early in the war, his brother Joe Jr. had been stationed at Jacksonville, learning to fly PBY Catalina twin-engine patrol planes (“flying boats”) off St. John’s River. In May 1942 Joe Jr. received operational training at Banana River, Florida. His naval air station was next door to Cape Canaveral, from which NASA’s rockets would be launched during the 1960s, when Jack served as president.

  In May 1944, Jack decided to learn how to fly, following in the footsteps of his brother Joe Jr., who had earned his naval aviator wings two years before. He enrolled at the Embry-Riddle Seaplane Base, in Miami, and spent ten days piloting Piper J-3 Cub floatplanes around southern Florida, joining his new interest in aviation with his long-standing connection to sea and shore. (Kennedy’s flight log confirming these first attempts at piloting aircraft was not discovered until 2018, during research for this book. It now resides in the historical collection of the Shapell Manuscript Foundation.)

  After two years of planning, on June 6, 1944, the Allies l
aunched Operation Overlord, sending 156,000 American, British, and Canadian troops (most under twenty years old) across the English Channel to the beaches of Normandy. It was the largest amphibious military assault in history, intended to liberate Western Europe while forcing the Nazis to divide their efforts between their Russia campaign and this new front. On D-day, Allied troops landed on five beaches along a fifty-mile stretch of the heavily fortified Normandy coast. Overwhelming or evading the Nazis’ supposedly impenetrable defenses, the Allies gained a crucial foothold in Europe and decisively changed the direction of the war. Supreme Allied Commander Dwight Eisenhower later speculated that if German V-2 missile technology had been on a more “accelerated schedule,” it might have caused him to scrub Operation Overlord, thereby dramatically changing the endgame of the war. For Jack Kennedy, that historic June 6 set in motion unanticipated events that would connect the very highest and lowest points of his life.

  Just two days after the D-day landings began, Kennedy took his last flying lesson. For forty-five minutes he piloted over the Port of Miami, realizing that the war in Europe would soon be over and that his brother Joe Jr. would be coming home. For the first time in months, he worried that he was frittering away his time in sunny Florida. On June 11, one week after D-day, Kennedy was honored for his bravery in the South Pacific. Meanwhile, in Europe, Allied troops were spending the summer liberating Rome and pushing slowly inland from the coast of France. On the Eastern Front, the Soviets were launching a massive offensive in eastern Belarus, destroying the German Army Group Center and driving westward. By late July, the Anglo-American forces would break out of the Normandy beaches and begin racing southeastward toward Paris. By August, the Russians were pushing toward Warsaw, in central Poland.