The following day, a detail of German soldiers surprised the residents of a quiet suburban neighborhood in The Hague, knocking on doors and ordering the occupants to vacate immediately. The next day, military vehicles hauling V-2s aboard Meillerwagen (mobile launch platforms) pulled into the now-deserted Dutch streets with orders to launch two V-2s at London. Well trained by Dornberger, the mobile units had the first combat V-2 rocket in position within an hour. Within another half hour, their job would be done.
Of the London-bound rockets, one did no serious damage, but the other wreaked havoc in the western suburb of Chiswick. John Clarke was six years old and playing in the bathroom of his family’s home when the rocket struck, causing his building to crumble and sending a shard of metal from the V-2 through his hand. His three-year-old sister, sleeping in the next room, was killed. “There wasn’t a mark on Rosemary,” Clarke, who was permanently deafened in the attack, remembered sixty years later. “The blast goes up and comes down in a mushroom or umbrella shape, but in the process of that my sister’s lungs collapsed. She was deprived of air.” An off-duty serviceman walking nearby and a woman sitting in her house were also killed, making a total of three deaths from the first V-2 strike on England.
That evening, the true dawn of the missile rocket age, von Braun was informed of the successful launches on Paris and London. Witnesses at Peenemünde provided different versions of his initial reaction to the fulfillment of his dream. One of his loyal secretaries, Dorette Kersten Schlidt, recalled the mood in the office. “Von Braun was completely devastated,” she said. “In fact never before or afterward have I seen him so sad, so thoroughly disturbed. ‘This should never have happened,’ he said. ‘I always hoped the war would be over before they launched an A-4 [the scientists’ name for the V-2] against a live target. We built our rocket to pave the way to other worlds, not to raise havoc on earth.’”
Another colleague at Peenemünde remembered the night much differently. “When the first V-2 hit London, we had champagne,” he noted. “And why not? We were at war . . . we still had a Fatherland to fight for.” Perhaps von Braun was truly remorseful at the stark reality of his invention killing civilians; after all, his interest in rocketry had begun in dreams of spaceflight. But once his V-2s began raining down on Britain, France, and later Belgium and the Netherlands, he crossed a damning threshold: the man who dreamed of the moon was now Hitler’s agent of mass destruction, working in a Europe imbued with sorrow and death.
At the time of the V-2 launches, about five million Germans had already been killed in the war. Nearly one in three Nazi servicemen would die in the bloody conflict. Allied bomber attacks sometimes killed thousands of people at a time. Nor was von Braun always a mere distant observer of the carnage that became commonplace during the Nazi reign of terror. At the wretched Mittelwerk factory, more than 10,000 slave laborers from the Dora-Mittelbau prison camp perished producing V-2 missiles, V-1 flying bombs, and other weapons. If von Braun wasn’t directly responsible for their deaths, he was certainly complicit. From September 1944 until the end of the war the following May, more than 4,300 V-2s were launched by the German Wehrmacht against allied targets, mostly in London, Antwerp, and Liege. These missiles killed an estimated 9,000 civilians and military personnel, caused serious injury to an additional 25,000, and damaged or destroyed over a million homes.
A V-2 rocket in launching position at Peenemünde (German Army Research Center) during World War II.
INTERFOTO/Alamy Stock Photo
So driven was von Braun by his quest for V-2 glory, and for Germany to win the war, that he grew inured to the chaos and loss his advanced work was causing. Like Lieutenant Colonel Nicholson in Pierre Boulle’s 1952 novel The Bridge over the River Kwai, von Braun was task driven, obsessed with completing a job no matter the cost. “With a satisfied eye he witnessed this gradual materialization,” Boulle wrote of Nicholson, “without connecting it in any way to humble human activity. Consequently, he saw it only as something abstract and complete in itself: a living symbol of the fierce struggles and countless experiments by which a nation gradually raises itself in the course of centuries to a state of civilization.”
Von Braun was convinced that rocketry was just that kind of symbol, elevating the technological excellence of a civilization. Much later, his convivial comments about the technical achievement of the V-2 betrayed no genuine anguish, only the arch observation that scientific breakthroughs since the fifteenth century had often begun in the sphere of weapons development. But the truth was that rather than elevating civilizations, his V-2 work for the Nazis degraded it, becoming nothing more than a tool by which a three-year-old British girl had been killed willy-nilly, and which would claim thousands more innocents to come. In that respect, Germany’s Wunderwaffe (miracle weapon) was no different from a simple club, hatchet, sword, or bayonet. Or, for that matter, the incendiary bombing raids the USAAF and RAF conducted on Germany.
Both versions of von Braun’s initial reaction to the launch of the V-2 on France, Belgium, and Great Britain might be entirely accurate. The enigmatic engineer often told people what they wanted to hear and showed the colors they hoped to see. If he was a hypocrite and accomplice, he believed, then so be it—that was how his rocket program had survived in the Third Reich. If he had an intense concern about the Holocaust happening around him, he never expressed it. Everywhere von Braun went in high Nazi circles after September 8, 1944, he was congratulated. With his broad shoulders, groomed hair, and splendid physique, gazing up in the air at parties with thoughtful self-importance, he was treated as the proud exemplar of German rocketry genius, and he possessed an exalted opinion of himself. Von Braun’s amoral hunger to construct rockets governed his embrace of an evil regime. Both during World War II and after, he accepted accolades as an engineering visionary who foresaw the potential of human spaceflight, never admitting that he was essentially a fast-track Nazi arms merchant who developed brutal weapons of mass destruction. In the late 1960s, as the United States was involved in a race with the Soviet Union to land a human on the moon first, humorist Tom Lehrer wrote a song about von Braun’s opportunistic approach to serving whoever would let him build rockets regardless of their purpose:
Don’t say that he’s hypocritical, say rather that he’s apolitical
“Once the rockets are up, who cares where they come down?
That’s not my department,” says Wernher von Braun.
Lehrer’s biting satire captured well the ambivalence of von Braun’s indifference on moral questions associated with the use of the V-2 and other rocket technology.
AFTER THAT FIRST September launch, German V-2s began striking targets in Great Britain at a rate of about two hundred per month. The hastily built rockets, however, were far from perfect. Some V-2s hit their targets but failed to explode. Others burst prematurely in the air, sending burning debris showering down for miles around, like spent fireworks. In October, the Third Reich launched V-2s on Antwerp, Belgium, determined to prevent that all-important European port from becoming an Allied stronghold. At the government level, British officials initially promulgated the fiction that ruptured gas pipes had caused the early V-2 damage, but the fact was that Whitehall didn’t want to release any information about the destruction that might be helpful to the Nazis. “The enemy,” Churchill recalled, “made no mention of his new missiles until November 8, and I did not feel the need for a public statement until November.”
The German propaganda announcement of V-2 attacks made headlines in the United States. Reporters searched for anyone knowledgeable to discuss rocket engineering. What did the V-2 mean? Did the United States have a similar program? One of the few Americans in a position to know was keeping a very low profile. Dr. Robert Goddard, then working on developing jet-assisted takeoff units for navy aircraft in Maryland, received intelligence on the V-2 that November, writing matter-of-factly in his diary entry from Annapolis, “V-2 type rocket appears to be of interest.”
Not sur
prisingly, Goddard felt threatened by von Braun’s engineering breakthroughs on the V-2, which made all previous rocketry trials seem quaint. Refusing to be crushed by the knowledge, though, within weeks he was echoing the Roosevelt administration’s efforts to promote a patriotic fallacy: that the V-2 had been copied directly from Goddard’s hundreds of static tests and earlier flight tests conducted at a ranch near Roswell, New Mexico. Starting early in 1945, articles in publications such as National Geographic Newsletter claimed that Goddard was the father not only of America’s infinitesimal rocket capability, but of Germany’s burgeoning efforts as well. This exaggeration took hold in the United States, despite the many basic technical points that separated Goddard’s last, lonely prewar rocket tests from the grand-scale work being done by the hundreds of scientists at Peenemünde. Even if the U.S. propaganda effort did a disservice to engineering history, it did spark a public demand for an increased American role in liquid-fueled rocketry and military missiles.
At the NACA headquarters in Washington, DC, located in a corner of the Navy building, leadership kept a close eye on the V-2. Described as the “Force Behind Our Air Supremacy,” the NACA research-and-development team tested highly sophisticated superchargers for high-altitude bombers such as the B-17 and B-24, as well as airfoils that are still being used in twenty-first-century aircraft manufacturing. While unable to develop anything as sophisticated as a V-2, the NACA engineers were responsible for a number of innovations that were vital to the war effort. Month by month, engineers at the NACA’s Aircraft Engine Research Laboratory, in Cleveland, Ohio, made vast improvements to fighter plane engines—for example, improving engine cooling capabilities in the B-29 Superfortress, a bomber essential to Pacific war strategy. The NACA’s first jet-engine test was performed in Cleveland’s Altitude Wind Tunnel. And when its Icing Research Tunnel opened in 1944, the notion of future manned space travel became more likely.
THERE IS NO record that Jack Kennedy, honorably discharged from the navy with the full rank of lieutenant on March 1, 1945, ever publicly commented on the V-2 rockets raining down on London. Like all Americans, he was happy that the V-1 and V-2 seemed to have appeared too late in the war to save the Third Reich, but having experienced the horror of war, he surely understood the weapon’s ghastly potential for mass destruction. In early 1945, he submitted an article to the Atlantic Monthly about the need for global peace, but the editors weren’t enthusiastic, and despite the intervention of his father, the piece was never published.
Like most returning veterans, Kennedy needed time to readjust. Seeing so much death had left the soldiers of his generation shell-shocked. He took his time, philosophically deliberating on his future and convalescing in the Arizona desert after his back operation. Eager to pay homage to his late brother, he edited a book of memorial essays about Joe’s short life, which would be privately published. But he also needed to contend with the stressful issue of claiming his new place as the eldest son in his family. With Joe Jr. gone, the expectation of a life in politics fell squarely on Jack’s shoulders. He told friends he felt obligated to fulfill his father’s longtime ambition to see one of his sons in high office, though at that point he scorned electoral politics as involving too much handshaking, baby kissing, and general pandering. Faced with paternal pressure and the prospect of having to abandon the more bookish and journalistic careers he’d contemplated before the war, Jack described plans for a future in public service, a vague goal with a range of possible options, including the diplomatic corps.
As a young intellectual, Kennedy showed promise, reserving special excitement for the field of international relations. His book Why England Slept had been a best seller and defined him as a thoughtful strategist with a natural affinity for global affairs. In person, Jack was known for his sense of humor, loving to laugh while downing a comradely glass of beer. Never humble but eager for self-improvement, he unquestionably had the kind of bright curiosity and original, analytical mind that made a good basis for a political career. But a certain indefiniteness was also a part of his personality. He could occasionally be high-strung, he was frequently in poor health, and he was always an unrepentant partier and womanizer—not, perhaps, the perfect recipe for someone contemplating a high-profile public life.
From his parents’ Palm Beach home, Kennedy was enthralled that the Third Reich was being squeezed on all sides. As the Americans and their allies pushed into the heart of western Europe in the months after D-day, the Soviets were closing in on Germany from the east. The war had cost the lives of an astounding twenty-four million Soviet civilians and soldiers, but Joseph Stalin’s government was still standing. On January 12, 1945, the Soviets launched a new offensive that liberated Warsaw and Krakow, captured Budapest on February 13 after a two-month siege, drove the Germans and their Hungarian collaborators out of Hungary in early April, forced the surrender of Slovakia with the capture of Bratislava on April 4, and captured Vienna on April 13. This crystallized the reality to Kennedy that World War II in Europe was almost at an end.
Even though the V-2 never struck a death knell to British morale, Hitler continued to authorize rocket attacks on Britain and Belgium, his two major target nations. Civilian deaths numbered around five thousand but were far short of the massive levels the German High Command had predicted. Many Allied four-engine bomber air raids killed more people in one night than a month of V-2 attacks. Winston Churchill claimed that two people were killed for each V-2 launched against his country—numbers that, while still tragic, were nowhere near enough to change the trajectory of the war, which had tilted decidedly toward Allied victory.
Production of V-2 rockets at Mittelwerk accelerated through January 1945, keeping thousands of slave laborers struggling to stay alive, including Jews diverted from concentration camps to work at the underground factory. The facility was manufacturing almost 700 V-2s per month when production ceased in March. The death rate at Mittelwerk accelerated in the last months of the war due to the collapse of the food supply and increased vicious repression in the Dora camp. And then, on March 27, the last V-2 was launched, killing thirty-four-year-old Ivy Millichamp in the English town of Orpington. All told, the 2,500 V-2s launched by Germany had killed 2,742 people in England and seriously wounded a further 6,467. Casualties in Belgium and France were fairly low. “The V-2’s role in the war was at the end,” historian Christopher Potter wrote in The Earth Gazers, “but its role in history was about to begin a new chapter.”
When U.S. troops crossed the Rhine River at Remagen in March 1945, Hitler issued his Nerobefehl (Nero Decree), ordering the complete destruction of German infrastructure to prevent its use by the invading Allied forces. Human assets, too, were in a precarious position. As German defeat had become inevitable, an emboldened U.S. Army Ordnance Corps used every means at its disposal to identify technical assets within Germany. One of the Army’s aims was to secure the country’s top scientists before they were captured by the Soviets or escaped to the Middle East or South America. Aeronautical engineers, synthetic-fuel experts, naval weaponeers, physicists, chemists, arms manufacturers, and thousands of others were on the list, but none was prioritized higher than the rocket scientist Wernher von Braun.
With Peenemünde bound to be overrun by the Soviet Union, von Braun followed orders by General Kammler to evacuate the facility on February 17. Von Braun helped transport thousands of personnel, equipment, blueprints, and research documents toward the Mittelwerk facility aboard a fleet of trucks, cars, and trains. All were marked with the insignia of the VZBV (Vorhaben zur besonderen Verwendung, or Project for Special Disposition), a nonexistent, allegedly top secret agency they’d invented as a ruse to get the items through SS checkpoints. Reaching Nordhausen, the site of the Mittelwerk factory, the convoy occupied abandoned buildings and began secreting V-2 documents underground. Then, in mid-March, von Braun received orders from General Kammler to evacuate again, with five hundred of his key personnel, to Oberammergau, in the Bavarian Alps.
&
nbsp; Monitored by the SS at Oberammergau, von Braun and his rocket team itself became bargaining chips for Kammler, who, using lawyer’s logic, hoped to trade them to the Allies for leniency. If no such bargain seemed possible, he would perhaps look for a deal with the Soviet Union.
Von Braun, however, was the kind of man who, while walking, exuded the feeling of always knowing his destination and how to get there. With the Soviets encircling Berlin on their final offensive and Germany collapsing, he decided that the best option for his team was to surrender to the U.S. Army. “We despise the French,” one member of von Braun’s rocket team later explained. “We are mortally afraid of the Soviets; we do not believe the British can afford us; so that leaves the Americans.” Taking advantage of the chaos and conflicting orders of those final days, von Braun bluffed his way out of confinement. After suffering a broken arm in a car wreck and demanding that it be quickly set in a cast so that he could continue on, he and his team settled at Haus Ingeborg, in Oberjoch, a resort town near the Austrian border. There they rendezvoused with General Dornberger and von Braun’s brother, Magnus, and waited for news. Within days, they learned that Adolf Hitler had committed suicide on April 30 in Berlin, beginning a process that would end a week later with Germany’s unconditional surrender.
American Moonshot Page 9
