American Moonshot

by Douglas Brinkley

  With elements of the advancing U.S. Seventh Army only a few miles away, it was decided that Magnus von Braun (who was near fluent in English) would depart to make contact. Climbing on a bicycle, he set off down a country road toward Allgäu. On May 2, in one of those fortunate moments in history, he soon encountered a surprised private, Fred Schneikert of Wisconsin, who aimed an M-1 rifle at him while ordering, “Hands up.” Magnus told Schneikert that the inventor of the V-2 was nearby, ready to surrender. “I think you’re nuts,” Schneikert told him. Nevertheless, Schneikert relayed the message to his U.S. Army superiors.

  Enter into the unfolding drama Holger Toftoy, from Illinois, a graduate of the West Point class of 1926 and chief of the U.S. Army technical intelligence teams assigned to Europe to search for, examine, and appraise captured German weapons and equipment. The snatching of von Braun and other Peenemünders was the biggest bonanza imaginable to Toftoy, who was earning a reputation in army circles as “Mr. Missile.” If the army could take custody of V-2 research and parts, then in one fell swoop the United States would soon be the premier rocket-builder in the world. Von Braun’s surrender was the kind of gift horse that Toftoy could only dream about.

  Arrangements were made for the Peenemünders to be escorted through the lines that night and held in a safe haven. Following information provided by von Braun and Dornberger, General Toftoy had U.S. Army troops race toward Nordhausen (in what was soon to be the Soviet Occupation Zone) for the spoils of the V-2 program and to Mittlewerk (where the corpses of slave laborers were piled up like cordwood). Having captured the area around Nordhausen and Mittelwerk, Toftoy set up a special V-2-related mission. In one of the great technology grabs in history, U.S. forces collected fourteen tons of blueprints and design drawings from these Nazi facilities and von Braun’s secret mine shaft, and enough parts to fabricate one hundred V-2s. Just days after the U.S. grab, Peenemünde was seized by the Soviets. They confiscated missile hardware and production facilities and the remnants of von Braun’s left-behind production team—but most of the vital personnel, documents, and equipment were already in the American occupation zone. The V-2 materials apprehended in Germany by Toftoy’s team at Nordhausen were shipped by the U.S. Army to Antwerp, and then onward to the United States.

  Realizing he was in a technology race with America and was already behind the eight ball, Stalin fumed over being a step behind in the apprehension of Peenemünde technicians, and von Braun in particular. “This is absolutely intolerable,” Stalin pronounced. “We defeated Nazi armies; we occupied Berlin and Peenemünde, but the Americans got the rocket engineers. What could be more revolting and more inexcusable.” This agonized realization came far too late, for the United States had already nabbed the most valuable technology. The Red Army was, however, able to seize research facilities on the island of Usedom, as well as hundreds of executive-level German technicians and engineers. As a further consolation prize, the USSR discovered plenty of machine and rocket components at Mittelwerk. In 1946, the Red Army relocated the captured German assets to the USSR, where the V-2 began a second career as the Soviet R-1.

  Safely ensconced with the American forces, von Braun was confident that his team’s priceless ballistic missile know-how would buy them immunity, even though their work had led directly to the deaths of thousands of Allied civilians and ten to twenty thousand prisoners. Undoubtedly the German officers who’d ordered the V-2’s use on civilian populations would be charged with war crimes. Certainly, the soldiers who fired the rockets would be captured and treated as enemy combatants. But the Nazi missilers and mechanical engineers responsible for refining the ballistic rocket technology to kill as many people as possible? For their willingness to surrender and put their knowledge to work for their new American hosts, they would be respected and treasured by the U.S. government (although von Braun got only about 25 percent of the engineers and foreman-level craftsmen he had requested). The double standard was in play. In a dramatic reversal of fate, instead of being treated as war criminals in the months that followed Hitler’s death, von Braun and his team were housed with their families in Landshut, Bavaria, in southern Germany, in a comfortable dormitory complex built for the 1936 Olympics. Von Braun’s team’s alibis were that the tentacles of circumstance had forced them to work for their German Fatherland in wartime. Now, with the Allied victory, they would use their hard-learned rocket engineers’ expertise to help the great United States become a leader in ballistic missile production and, perhaps someday, the only Space Age superpower.

  After German surrender in 1945, Charles Lindbergh, working for United Aircraft as a test pilot, was recruited by the U.S. Navy to conduct a study of German rocketry and jet propulsion accomplishments. With a .38 automatic in a shoulder holster and dressed otherwise like a regular GI, Lindbergh explored Germany, stunned at the level of annihilation and decay. Following an intelligence lead, he tracked down Willy Messerschmitt, the designer of the German Messerschmitt warplanes. Messerschmitt saved his postwar hide, as von Braun had with the U.S. Army, by telling Lindbergh all the secrets of Nazi jet propulsion science. What interested Lindbergh the most was the ballistic missile technology of the Third Reich. Working for the navy, he then made his way to Nordhausen to investigate the catacombs where V-2 rockets were constructed in the highest elevation of north Germany, in a rugged mountain terrain. What he saw there, the stunning technology the Germans had developed in the ballistic missile realm, left him flabbergasted. “Imagine,” he recalled, “finding the demon of sheer space hiding in a mountain like a giant grub?”

  WITHIN WEEKS OF Germany’s capitulation, the U.S. Army was shipping V-2 rocket parts back home, most eventually making their way via New Orleans to the White Sands Proving Ground in New Mexico. A complete V-2 was confiscated and shipped to the Annapolis Experiment Station for examination, where U.S. government propogandists deemed it quite similar to Goddard’s Roswell rockets. Under Toftoy’s leadership, the U.S. Army was preparing to guide missiles into its postwar weapons program at a rapid pace. In July, at the Potsdam Conference, the Big Three leaders Winston Churchill, Joseph Stalin, and the new American president, Harry Truman—Roosevelt had died of a stroke while in Warm Springs, Georgia, on April 12—disingenuously promised to share all German scientific assets discovered. As historian Walter A. McDougall aptly put it, this so-called agreement “was a sham.”

  With the Pacific war still raging, the United States wanted to accelerate America’s missile program, mostly by copying the V-1. Plus, there was no faster route than the wholesale acceptance of the V-2 scientists, parts, components, and complete systems from Peenemünde and Mittelwerk to upgrade America’s long-term missile capability. That June, U.S. troops had conquered Okinawa, the last stop before the Japanese islands. But military leaders knew that sending U.S. troops into Japan itself could easily result in over one hundred thousand casualties. The hope was to bomb Japan into submission.

  Von Braun was held at Kransberg Castle for a couple of days, which under the code name “Dustbin” served as an Anglo-American detention center for German scientists, doctors, and industrialists. The interrogation that was integral to his intake process went well. On July 20, 1945, U.S. secretary of state Cordell Hull green-lighted the transfer of all German technology experts as part of a secret recruitment program that had been named Operation Overcast. Initially, von Braun fretted that he and his team would be squeezed for information, perhaps bullied, and then shipped back to West Germany to stand trial for war crimes, but he needn’t have worried. With the war in the Pacific still raging and competition with the Soviets already heating up, the rocket engineers were given protected status by Toftoy. Working clandestinely, the Joint Intelligence Objectives Agency (JIOA) classified the records of German “Peenemünders,” as they were dubbed, expunging any evidence of Nazi Party membership that might pose a security threat. With this whitewashing complete, the German rocket engineers, physicists, chemists, and others were provided security clearances to work in America
, inoculated against prosecution for war crimes.

  In full cooperation with Toftoy, von Braun’s team exhaustively explained the captured V-2s to their new American colleagues, rebuilt the rockets, and commented on current missile-related projects not yet actualized. With the same sureness of touch, von Braun even began campaigning for the financial resources needed to make more advancements. His sharp and level pitch was convincing: in just a few years, the V-2 would be considered last year’s military hardware, replaced by warheads one hundred times more lethal. What surprised the U.S. interrogators most was von Braun’s determination to fire V-2s beyond the “top layer of the atmosphere”—that is, into space. To his interrogators, von Braun praised the pioneering work of Dr. Robert Goddard, who had died on August 10, 1945, in Baltimore, after a battle with throat cancer. Over the years, von Braun gave several accounts of Goddard’s influence on the V-2, indicating that it had been minimal. His abundantly generous comments in 1945, however, marked an almost symbolic turning point for American rocketry. Once Goddard was buried in Worcester, Massachusetts, leadership in the field of rocket engineering fell to the newcomers who had surpassed him. In a calculated ploy, von Braun, facile at scheming and maneuvering to promote his work, had nothing to lose and everything to gain by citing Goddard so extravagantly.

  In November 1945, Operation Overcast was renamed Operation Paperclip by JIOA for security breach reasons. The name was chosen by officers who would fasten a paper clip to the folders of Nazi rocket experts they chose to hire. In its first year, 119 German rocket engineers were brought to the United States, cleared of war crimes, and put to work under Operation Paperclip. While von Braun and the others were assigned to work at forlorn Fort Bliss, near El Paso, Texas, Toftoy himself directed the army’s new guided missile program from an office in Washington, DC.

  IN THE ENTIRE twentieth century, the splitting of the atom during World War II would prove to be the only human event on a par with the American moonshot. The Atomic Age was born on July 16, 1945, when the Trinity Test was successful in New Mexico. What this meant to human civilization became abundantly clear on August 6, 1945, when the Enola Gay dropped the first atomic bomb, “Little Boy,” on the city of Hiroshima, Japan. Within four months, the acute effects of the atomic bombing had killed somewhere between 90,000 and 146,000 people in Hiroshima, and 39,000 and 80,000 people in Nagasaki, where a second bomb, nicknamed “Fat Man,” was dropped three days later; about half the deaths in each city occurred during the first twenty-four hours. There was nothing iffy about the total annihilation of these cities; each was turned into a smoking wasteland of rubble. Confronted with the possibility of total destruction of their nation, the Japanese surrendered on August 14, 1945. (The formal surrender ceremony was held aboard the USS Missouri in Tokyo Bay on September 2.) While most Americans cheered, relieved that U.S. armed forces had been spared a bloody invasion of the Japanese homeland, the reality began to sink in that humanity had entered a dangerous new epoch. “Dropping the bombs ended the war,” President Truman later boasted, “saved lives and gave the free nations a chance to face the facts.”

  Created in Los Alamos, New Mexico, hours northwest of Goddard’s Roswell ranch, the atomic bomb ushered in an age in which humans held the godlike power to end life on Earth. The potential combination of the bomb with the new forms of ballistic missile technology conceived by von Braun meant the end could come without warning, at any time. Ironically, Germany’s V-2 program had been partially spurred by unreasonable fears of American rocket development—U.S. rocketry was then effectively nonexistent—while America’s conviction that Germany would soon invent an atomic bomb had spawned the Manhattan Project, which produced the bombs used on Japan. (In fact, Germany canceled its atomic program long before conceiving a viable weapon.) Significant though the Soviet breakthroughs in military aviation had been, after World War II, the United States held a virtual monopoly on both V-2 rocket and atomic bomb technologies.

  The atomic bomb instantly transformed the nature of warfare and rendered all previous strategy moot. Armies didn’t have to roll down the street with tanks to conquer. War no longer had to mean the rumble of diesel engines or the thunder of big guns in the distance. Because it could not be defeated by conventional forces, the American superweapon became a new source of fear and dread to the Soviets. Some thought America’s monopoly over the atom gave it the leverage to obtain a postwar settlement largely on its own terms. Others knew that the Soviets, whose decisive victory over the Nazis had just won them the first real security they’d enjoyed since 1917, would never accept U.S. hegemony.

  The atom bomb also made individuals think differently about their own lives. Global citizens could no longer feel fully safe in their own homes. Rockets didn’t offer parents time to run and save their children. Any given second could be the last. Ominous portents were self-evident. “A screaming comes across the sky,” novelist Thomas Pynchon wrote decades later in Gravity’s Rainbow. “It has happened before, but there is nothing to compare it to now.”

  ACCORDING TO THE U.S. federal government’s own estimate, at the close of the war, America had been eight years behind the Germans in rocket capability. With the arrival on American soil of von Braun and the other Peenemünde engineers, that gap vanished all at once.

  Meanwhile, in late 1945, von Braun and his rocket team were assigned work contracts with the U.S. Army Ordnance Corps, which was interested in developing rockets and artificial satellites out of the public glare. They were officially called “War Department Special Employees.” For the next five years, these German scientists, stationed at Fort Bliss, Texas, near El Paso, were engaged mainly in rebuilding captured V-2 rockets, which would then be sent to the army’s White Sands Proving Ground in nearby New Mexico, where army and navy personnel and technicians from General Electric would conduct tests designed to improve the rockets’ destructive capacity. New Mexico had already had a world-altering role as the site of the first-ever atomic bomb test, on July 16, 1945; now this isolated White Sands tract of land the size of the state of Connecticut was populated by scientists, pilots, and engineers, its beautiful arid landscape dotted with spider-like antennas, cargo trucks, watchtowers, and optical telescope laboratories. Federal purse strings had been loosened for rocket construction in the region.

  At first the status of the German rocket engineers at Fort Bliss was murky. Considered wards of the army, the men in the von Braun team had no passports or visas, their mail was censored, and they weren’t allowed off the Fort Bliss base without an escort. But their families were allowed to join them from Germany, which was a real boon. These engineers weren’t exactly prisoners: they could return to Germany, if they insisted, though they couldn’t move anywhere else in the United States. Von Braun himself was well paid for his work by the federal government, earning an annual salary of six thousand dollars—more than twice the average American income of the era.

  Although exasperated by their limbo, few on von Braun’s team opted to leave El Paso during those first years. Located across from Juarez, Mexico, on the northern side of the Rio Grande, the city offered a better, more secure lifestyle than a now-divided Germany, especially for a valuable scientist. In El Paso, the expatriate scientists occupied their nonworking hours hiking the Franklin Mountains (with escorts), watching local football games, going to movies, and learning English. Von Braun dubbed himself a POP (prisoner of peace) rather than a POW, and he nurtured his genuine interest in local history by talking with cowboys and drifters about the curve of the Big Dipper and the non-visible four points of the Southern Cross at local gatherings. At Fort Bliss, he said, “The GIs sized me up with uncomfortable accuracy,” referring to his German accent. “But they also invited me to join their black jack and poker games.”

  Though isolated and confined, the Germans at Fort Bliss knew they’d been lucky to escape what could have been much worse fates after the war’s end. While they were comfortably under contract in Texas, rocket engineers in Russian-occupie
d East Germany faced the real prospect of being kidnapped and sent to the USSR under house arrest. Ultimately, the Soviets would appropriate four thousand German rocket engineers, along with several complete V-2 assembly lines. At the same time, many old colleagues from the Third Reich’s scientific and industrial hierarchy were standing trial in Nuremberg for war crimes. Thousands of other Germans were under scrupulous investigation as part of the Allies’ denazification process.

  Von Braun and his scientists had also been denazified, but in a more clandestine way, having had their security ratings changed by the U.S. Army intelligence to make them acceptable emigrants. Any nostalgia for their German homeland—the dark forests, beer halls, and autobahns—had been subordinated by a newfound love of American democratic institutions by most. But some of the imported Germans were sent back home, labeled as “ardent Nazis,” unfit for U.S. residency. Others left voluntarily. Those that stayed, deemed not “ardent Nazis,” were the ones the Army wanted to keep.

  Arthur Rudolph, a close colleague of von Braun and chief operations officer at the Mittelwerk V-2 production facility, where he oversaw the slave labor, was an ardent Nazi and anti-Semite. Nevertheless, he was quietly accepted into the United States and granted citizenship in the mid-1950s. Keeping a low profile at Fort Bliss, working in secrecy, he immediately began making contributions to the American rocket program, as did ex-Peenemünder Kurt Debus. Hubertus Strughold, another beneficiary of Operation Paperclip, was a physician who had been the director of the Luftwaffe Institute of Aviation Medicine during the Nazi era. In the United States, he was given a similar job, heading the new Air Force School of Aviation Medicine, in West Texas. Even as Strughold was settling in America, quite at liberty to enjoy the privileges of democracy, his former colleagues were facing trial at Nuremberg for war crimes he’d known about. In one experiment, Jewish inmates from concentration camps had been forced to squat in a chamber as the pressure inside the chamber was altered in a matter of seconds, simulating a depressurized airplane dropping from high altitude. The doctors watched as the prisoners died or permanently lost their minds.