A Fiery Peace in a Cold War

by Neil Sheehan

  Mettler was fortunate to have someone experienced in rocketry to serve as his deputy—a forty-year-old Austro-German aeronautical engineer named Adolf Thiel, another veteran of the V-2 program and a refugee from the Redstone Arsenal. Although “Dolf” Thiel had come to the United States in 1946 with the original group of German rocketeers under the clandestine Operation Paperclip, he had never been part of the von Braun coterie. A slender man of medium height, with a prominent nose and thinning brown hair, Thiel had a friendly if intense manner that hid a quick temper. He had been born in Vienna and grew up there, but went to Darmstadt, just south of Frankfurt, for his higher education, because Darmstadt’s university offered courses in aeronautical engineering. In 1940, right after he received his master’s degree, he was put to work on the V-2 project. He did not, however, move to the rocket center at Peenemünde to join the rest of the V-2 team. Instead, under a contract the university negotiated with the German military, he did mathematical calculations for the Peenemünde group on flight mechanics, control systems, and guidance, traveling there frequently to obtain the team’s requirements, then returning to Darmstadt to do his equations. In 1944, as part of his work for a Ph.D., he wrote a thesis on the control system for a ballistic missile, to be called the A-9, which was to have enough range to bomb New York. His Ph.D. project was aborted by the interregnum at the fall of Germany a year later and, fortunately for New York, the missile never got beyond the paper stage.

  While not a genuine member of the Peenemünde club, his mathematical analyses attracted enough attention for him to be invited to join the group when it was transported to Fort Bliss, Texas, to conduct firings of the captured V-2s at the nearby White Sands Proving Ground in New Mexico. In 1952, after the German rocket men had been transferred to the Redstone Arsenal in Alabama, Thiel managed to break away from von Braun and received permission to form his own research group. All, with the exception of one German, were American missile technicians. The design of the Army’s intermediate-range ballistic missile, XSM-68, emerged from their studies in 1955. It was to be named Jupiter after the chief god of the Roman state religion (Zeus was his equivalent in the Greek pantheon of gods), and like Thor was also associated with thunder and lightning. By this time, Thiel was an American citizen, eager to part with the Army and join a civilian firm. He began negotiations with Convair to work on the Atlas. Louis Dunn, former chief of Caltech’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory and a member of the Tea Pot Committee, whom Ramo had persuaded to become his general deputy for the ICBM project, heard about the negotiations through the industry grapevine. Thiel, like Mettler, was just the sort of man they wanted. A phone call was made and Dunn convinced Thiel that Ramo-Wooldridge would prove a much more interesting organization to be part of than Convair. When Thiel’s contract with the Army expired in March 1955, he left Huntsville for Los Angeles, soon to be pitted, as Mettler’s second, against his former employer.

  Although Hall was program director for the IRBM project, he did not attempt to micromanage it. He would not have been able had he wanted to do so. He was too busy advancing the North American engine and deciding on a source for the engine for the alternate ICBM, Titan. The Glenn L. Martin Aircraft Company of Baltimore, Maryland, was chosen to develop Titan in September 1955. Martin planned to build the missile at a new plant it was constructing on a 4,500-acre tract of land it had purchased near Denver, Colorado. Aerojet General Corporation of California emerged as the best source for a second 150,000-pound-thrust rocket engine to power Titan. Hall left it to Commander Truax and Mettler and Thiel to design Thor. Thiel had thoughtfully brought with him to Los Angeles duplicates of the Army IRBM studies he had supervised at Redstone. It was thus not a coincidence, as Thiel pointed out in an interview years later, that Thor was essentially a copy of the missile that was to become the Army’s Jupiter.

  Jupiter stood 60 feet high. Thiel made Thor slightly higher at 64.8 feet. Diameter was approximately the same, 96 inches for Thor and 105 inches for Jupiter. Both missiles weighed in fully fueled for liftoff and fitted with their nose cones at about 110,000 pounds. The main body of the Jupiter was smoothly rounded all the way to the bottom. To make Thor look slightly different, Thiel tacked on fins that flared out at the base. The fins added nothing in the way of aerodynamic advantage. Each missile relied for its booster on a single one of Hall’s North American Aviation engines and on both missiles the engines were attached to gimbals, the improved contrivances that enabled the engines to swing in any direction and thus steer the rocket with their thrust. In addition, Thor was equipped with two small rocket motors of just 1,000 pounds thrust, called verniers, attached to swivels and mounted on each side of the booster engine. They were kept burning after the main booster engine had been shut down and were used to make last-second adjustments in order to release the warhead at the precise angle required for it to hurtle through space to its target. These minor differences notwithstanding, Thor and Jupiter were, provided they flew as advertised, intermediate-range ballistic missiles of equal worthiness. The competitors now had to deliver on that question of whether and how each would fly.

  51.

  JOHN BRUCE MEDARIS AND WERNHER VON BRAUN

  Schriever’s opponent in this competition was Major General John Bruce Medaris of the U.S. Army Ordnance Corps. He was a man with visions of his own. A handsome, colorful figure to whom the art of promoting his cause seemed to come naturally, he was also an eccentric with a flair for showmanship. He sported a broad and bristling guardsman’s mustache and was given to greeting visitors dressed in old-fashioned officer’s riding breeches and boots, a short horse whip called a quirt tucked under an arm. To emphasize a point as he spoke, he would snap the quirt down and whack the side of a boot. He was also fond of the trappings of military authority. Anyone approaching his office was given notice that he was about to enter the precincts of an important man. He posted guards outside his door—military policemen in white gloves, spankingly pressed uniforms, and spit-shined boots. Yet for all these pretensions, Medaris was a highly intelligent officer with intiative and a talent for organization. Born in a small town in Ohio, he had joined the Marine Corps in 1918 at the age of just sixteen after the United States had entered the First World War and served as a rifleman in France. At Ohio State University in Columbus after the war studying for a bachelor’s degree in mechanical engineering, he became cadet captain of the school’s ROTC unit and won a commission in the Regular Army through a competitive examination. Bored by a couple of years of duty with infantry regiments, he had switched to ordnance, the branch of the Army that deals with the manufacture, storage, and supply of weapons, ammunition, and other military equipment. There he could exercise his engineering knowledge. But like many officers who found life in the shrunken, neglected Army between the wars too dull and underpaid to be borne, he had dropped out in the 1920s to go into business, retaining a connection through Reserve status.

  In 1939, with the Army gearing up to take on the Nazis and the Japanese, he had been recalled to active duty and by 1944 was a full colonel and chief ordnance officer for General Omar Bradley’s First Army in the Normandy landing and the campaign through France. Ten years later his career had flourished to the point where he wore the twin stars of a major general and was assistant chief of the Ordnance Corps at the Pentagon. In February 1956, he was sent to Redstone to form a new Army Ballistic Missile Agency out of the disparate guided missile activities there. He was granted special powers of decision and contracting similar to those Schriever had acquired in the Gillette Procedures. He had also been given a mission by a jealous Army, a mission to take the Army’s aspirations in rocketry, which had no limit, just as far as he could.

  Medaris’s ace in the game of rocket poker that was about to be played was, of course, the Germans. They had “demonstrated capability as the best qualified group of ballistic missile engineers outside the Soviet Union, if not in the world,” he was to boast. They represented, along with the American scientists and technicians who had
worked under them in the 200-mile-range Redstone missile program at the Arsenal, “over 9,000 man-years experience in guided missiles and rockets.” Their leader, Dr. Wernher von Braun, was a man of renown in the 1950s, regarded as the father of the V-2 (although the missile had, in fact, a number of fathers) and thus the leading rocket scientist of the day. Given his past, he naturally had his detractors. Thomas “Tom” Lehrer, the mathematician and satirical singer and songwriter, composed a ditty caricaturizing von Braun:

  “Once the rockets are up, who cares where they come down? That’s not my department,” says Wernher von Braun.

  Lehrer was unfair to von Braun in one respect. Von Braun did care where his rockets came down. He was a professional. He wanted his rockets to hit the targets at which they were aimed. But Lehrer nonetheless touched the essential amorality of the man. Rockets in themselves did not fascinate Wernher von Braun. His real passion was the exploration of space. He dreamt of journeys to the moon and Mars. He saw the advancement of rocketry as the path that would one day enable man to roam that previously unreachable realm. “Spaceships will eventually be used by everybody,” he told Daniel Lang of The New Yorker magazine in an interview in 1951. “All this military application of rockets—it’s only a part of the picture. A means to an end,” he said. In other words, it didn’t matter to von Braun whether he built rockets for Hitler or the Americans, as long as his endeavors led into space.

  An elegant German aristocrat, Wernher von Braun was the son of a noble family that traced its lineage back to the 1200s in the east Prussian region of Silesia. Almost all of the region’s two provinces of Upper and Lower Silesia and three neighboring German provinces were erased at the end of the Second World War when Stalin carved a slice off eastern Poland to move the border of Ukraine farther west. Poland was awarded compensatory territory in eastern Germany along the line of the Oder and Neisse Rivers. Virtually the entire German population behind the river line in Silesia and the rest of the area, about 12 million persons in all, was summarily expelled and driven west into the remainder of Germany. Von Braun, born in 1912, was the first engineer and scientist in the family. His father, Magnus Freiherr von Braun, educated in law and economics, had been a high-ranking civil servant, initially in the Prussian state and then, after the First World War, in the fragile Weimar Republic that preceded the Nazis. His mother, the daughter of another aristocratic family and an amateur astronomer, started him on his quest for space by giving him an astronomic telescope when he was thirteen. Stargazing with the telescope aroused a passion for astronomy, which in turn led to dreams of space travel. In 1930, when he was about to begin studies at the Technische Hochschule (Technical University) in Berlin, von Braun made the acquaintance of Hermann Oberth, an early German space visionary and rocket scientist. Oberth and his associates were conducting rocket experiments at a deserted government ammunition depot near Berlin. During his spare time, von Braun pitched in to help. He had found his life’s endeavor.

  By 1937, at the age of twenty-five, when most men are just starting their climb, von Braun was technical director of the German army’s new rocket center on the island of Usedom in the Baltic. He had hundreds of men under him. There was an army general over him, but he was an administrator. Von Braun reported to Major General Walter Dornberger in Berlin, an army rocket pioneer who had become head of all the Wehrmacht’s missile projects. (That same year von Braun entered the Nazi Party, probably for career motives, as he does not seem to have been an active anti-Semite. He appears to have simply been indifferent to the regime’s persecution of the Jews. Three years later he also accepted an officer’s commission in the SS, once more apparently for career reasons.) The rocket center had been named Peenemünde after the little fishing hamlet that had previously been the only inhabited spot on the island. The site had, ironically, been suggested by the mother who had set him on his course. He had told her the army (he had joined the army’s rocket section in 1932) was seeking a remote place to create a clandestine installation with plenty of room to fire rockets. She remembered that his father used to go duck hunting on Usedom. He then looked over the island himself. The expanse of the Baltic made for an excellent firing range. After he reported his findings to the military, the surveyors and engineers and bulldozers and concrete mixers arrived and the tiny fishing village and its island were tranquil no more.

  With Hitler’s invasion of Poland on September 1, 1939, and the outbreak of the Second World War, the center grew apace. Von Braun soon headed a staff of thousands. The führer initially seems to have regarded rockets as curiosities. He changed his mind in 1943 after the V-2, then still called the A-4 by the army, proved itself by flying its full course. The Luftwaffe was demonstrating its inability to stop the bombing of the Reich and the war in Russia was going against Hitler. He reached out desperately for anything he thought might help avert defeat. Suddenly Peenemünde had an unlimited budget and equivalent priority. Joseph Goebbels, Hitler’s minister for propaganda, renamed the A-4 the V-2, for Vergeltungswaffe, Vengeance Weapon. (The subsonic cruise missile driven by a pulse-jet motor that was to become known as the buzz bomb to Londoners, developed by the Luftwaffe at a separate installation on Usedom, was named the V-1.) But the activity at Peenemünde attracted the attention of others besides the führer. The RAF struck the place with 600 four-engine Lancaster bombers on the night of August 17, 1943. Hitler ordered all production moved underground and put the SS in charge.

  The precise number of slave laborers who died at the Mittelwerk, the V-2 factory burrowed into a mountainside in the Harz Mountains of central Germany for immunity against bombing, and at the nearby concentration camps that fed it, is unknown, but it was many thousands. Production began in the fall of 1943 and ran around the clock to satisfy the führer’s demand. Jet engines for the new Messerschmitt 262 fighter, another miracle weapon that was supposed to turn the tide, and submarine components were also assembled there. To discourage sabotage, the SS erected a gallows and hanged suspected men on it in front of their assembled fellow prisoners. One month in the spring of 1945 they hanged 162. But the big killers were overwork, malnutrition, and disease from the appallingly filthy conditions in the camps, where sanitation was virtually nonexistent.

  According to a sympathetic biography written by his close friend and fellow German rocketeer Ernst Stuhlinger and Frederick Ordway III, an American rocket historian, von Braun made frequent visits to Mittelwerk to solve manufacturing and testing problems. He told members of his staff back at Peenemünde whom he trusted that the sights he had seen there were “hellish,” but said there was nothing he could do to alleviate the conditions. When he had protested to an SS guard he had been told to mind his own business or he would also be wearing a concentration camp inmate’s striped uniform. He said he then unsuccessfully tried the tack with one of the senior SS officers that half-starved workers were turning out too many rocket parts of unacceptably poor quality. Heinrich Himmler, the chief of the SS, also put fear into von Braun by having him, his brother, Magnus Jr., who also worked in the V-2 program, and two of his senior engineers arrested and thrown into jail for two weeks in March 1944. The trumped-up charge was defeatist talk and hindering V-2 production by wasting time discussing the future of rockets in space exploration. There is considerable evidence, however, that while von Braun may have found forced labor distasteful, he was perfectly willing to accept its employment to manufacture his rockets. And one would think that if he had been truly repelled at seeing the face of Nazism in all of its satanic horror at Mittelwerk, von Braun would have put on a cooperative exterior while quietly denying the regime his expertise in the continuing effort to perfect the V-2. According to his friend Stuhlinger, he did just the opposite. Many of the Peenemünde laboratories and workshops had been scattered for safety to various places around Germany. Stuhlinger tells how, during the final months of the war, von Braun shuttled indefatigably by rail and automobile from one to another of these, “often under most difficult circumstances because of
the frequent air raids,” attending meetings, encouraging everyone, striving to make the V-2 a better weapon. In December 1944, Hitler even approved awarding him the Knight’s Cross of the War Service Cross, a high decoration that was the noncombat equivalent of the Knight’s Crosses given for notable valor on the battlefield. One has to conclude that despite what he had witnessed at Mittelwerk, Wernher von Braun, like most Germans of his time, loyally served his mad, murderous führer to the end.

  The mountain hell factory turned out about 5,800 V-2s before the end of the war. Of these, approximately 3,200 were launched against London, Paris, Antwerp, Brussels, and other civilian targets. The missile was too inaccurate to be of use against military targets and in no way delayed the end of the Third Reich. In all, the V-2s hurled roughly 3,000 metric tons of high explosive on urban centers, less than a third of the 10,000 tons that might be dropped by British and American bombers in a single big raid. But if the Allied bombers killed a lot more civilians than the V-2s could manage, the V-2s killed civilians nonetheless in the cause of one of the vilest regimes in human history.