Rocket Girl

by George D. Morgan

  And so, when von Braun asked if Huzel could undertake an effort to secret away all their blueprints and records in an old mine, Huzel readily agreed.

  Now all they had to do was make sure the Gestapo and the SS never found out.

  Mary was sound asleep, having had a very tiring day at work. There was a time not long ago when she would awake full of stamina and energy, but that was before. Sleep came easy to her these days, and not just because her body demanded it. She could sleep because she believed in what she was doing—making the world safe for democracy, one gunpowder magazine at a time. She and her fellow TNT-making sisters were so committed to the war effort that many of them spent as much as 10 percent of their meager earnings to buy war bonds.9 But that commitment displayed itself even more in the physical sacrifices they endured: harsh conditions, demanding workloads, and laboring long hours in unheated, uninsulated buildings. The structures were so poorly put together that sometimes snow would fall inside.10 One day one of Mary's coworkers, June Franklin, received a letter informing her that her husband had been wounded in battle in North Africa. Putting down the letter, June immediately marched into the payroll office to buy another war bond. Her job was to nail the bottoms onto the wooden crates that the TNT was packed and shipped in. Promising her fellow coworkers that she would never again miss a minute of work, she resumed hammering, proudly signing her name to the bottom of each box—a personal gift to the American soldiers.11

  There seemed no end to the insatiable thirst of the army and navy for gunpowder and other explosives, and Plum Brook Ordnance was their chief supplier. For three and a half years, Plum Book operated twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week.12 It was a factory whose products were designed to separate enemy hands from arms, legs from torsos, heads from bodies. They made nothing less than the highest quality wartime explosives ever developed, and the thousands of women who worked there were proud of it. It was they who had helped make Plum Brook the number-one supplier of gunpowder, and one of the top three companies producing TNT, in the United States.

  Plum Brook did not achieve this milestone without help. They enjoyed the kind of partner every entrepreneur would love to have in their hip pocket: the United States government. Using federal assistance, the founders of Plum Brook forcibly took the land of 150 family farmers, crushing their dreams under the tank treads of wartime necessity.13 The farmers were paid for their land, of course, but at amounts far less than market value. Rather than argue, all of the farmers moved on to farms and employment elsewhere, with one notable exception. Fred C. Baum, a third-generation farmer and lifelong Sandusky resident, chose to fight. The government had offered him $18,375 for his property. He felt it was worth much more, and he sued. A judge agreed with Baum, awarding him $31,700.14 No one will ever know what would have happened had the other 149 farmers chosen litigation over capitulation.

  The construction of Plum Brook had been achieved with such haste that the builders estimated the provisional structures had a life expectancy of only five years.15 Once the plant was up and running, Plum Brook's output soon averaged 400,000 pounds of explosives per day. Its construction proved serendipitous. Ordnance production began on the morning of November 15, 1941, just 22 days before the Japanese would launch their surprise attack on Pearl Harbor.

  By 1945, Plum Brook had produced almost one billion pounds of explosives.16 The enemies of democracy were taking major hits and were in full retreat in some areas. But they were hardly going quietly into the night. Fighting in both Asia and Europe continued to be furious.

  From the 500-pound bombs dropped on Peenemünde, to the spit of gunpowder in every one of Private Galione's bullets, the munitions made at Mary's factory were crucial in fueling any hope of an Allied victory in Germany.

  John Galione was being fired upon.

  Utterly alone, and out of contact with any Allied combat units, he had been walking almost nonstop for five days and nights. As the sun rose on the sixth day, Galione found himself standing fifty yards from the entrance to a large man-made tunnel. Directly in front of it, parked on a rail siding, were several boxcars, some empty, some filled with corpses. As John began examining the bodies in one of the cars to see if any of them were wearing the uniform of American or Allied soldiers, he accidently dropped his rifle magazine, and the sound, as slight as it was, drew the attention of a lone German guard.

  John took shelter behind a large pile of boulders as the guard ran toward him, firing one bullet after another. John fired back. Despite the fact that neither man had good shelter, none of the bullets hit their targets.17 Eventually the lone guard simply ran away. Of that moment, John would later write, “I don't think the Germans wanted to die this late in the war either.”18

  When he decided it was safe, John began to patrol the area, especially the tunnel entrance. Without knowing how many Germans, if any, were inside, he chose not to explore the tunnel deeply. But inside he could smell the stinging odor of some kind of munitions. Because of the possibility that the tunnel might be booby-trapped, he went back outside and surveyed the area in front. He saw a road and decided to walk down it a short ways. Rounding a curve, he came upon a high barbed-wire fence with a heavy, padlocked gate. Not far away, inside the gated area, he saw several men he took to be prisoners. The men stared back at him with hollow eyes and pale expressions.

  Both the tunnel and the locked gate would turn out to be major discoveries.

  This lonely journey by a single, determined army private striking out on his own, changed the course of history. After five days and nights alone in enemy territory in the German alpine wilderness, Private John Galione had not only stumbled upon the underground hiding place of the V-2 rockets and components, but the infamous Dora concentration camp as well (which some historians would later consider more notorious than Auschwitz).19

  Galione immediately began retracing his steps to rejoin his unit. In an amazing stroke of luck, he soon came across two American soldiers who were making minor repairs to their Jeep. They gave him a lift, and within hours, Galione was notifying his superiors of what he had found. Colonel Holger N. Toftoy wasted no time in sending a fleet of trucks to Mittelwerk. Once inside the tunnel, army technicians managed to collect enough components to build 100 V-2 rockets, many of which were eventually flown at the White Sands Proving Grounds.20

  Within a few days of von Braun's meeting with General Kammler, SS officers and guards began rounding up all five hundred of the men on von Braun's list. At each home they visited, one gut-wrenching experience after another played out like some theatrical drama as the engineers and technicians were literally pulled from the grasps of their wives and children. No one knew for sure their destination or destiny. All they knew, from long experience and a thousand stories, was that if the SS showed up at your door to forcibly remove someone, the results were often deadly. Though the scientists had no way of knowing it at the time, most of them would survive, thanks largely to a clever subterfuge that would later be cooked up by none other than their esteemed blond-haired, blue-eyed leader.

  Von Braun was sitting up front and was the first to see the tall metal gate. Owing to recent surgeries to repair a broken arm and shoulder suffered in an automobile accident, von Braun was one of the few allowed to arrive by car. Most of the other five hundred men would be arriving on the “Vengeance Express,” a train that had been dedicated a year before for the sole purpose and use of transporting the rocket engineers.21 A sentry, seeing the official SS Mercedes approach, did not even ask for identification and opened the gate wide. The vehicle entered the compound without even slowing down.

  Over the next few days, von Braun and his men took up residence at what officially was referred to as a Wehrmacht camp. Located near Oberammergau, the mountain hideout had been used as a retreat for high-ranking German officers.22 Because of this, the accommodations were better than what many of von Braun's men had enjoyed in their own homes. In the words of von Braun, “The scenery was magnificent. The quarters were plu
sh. There was only one hitch—our camp was surrounded by barbed wire.”23 But the facility also had a hidden purpose. Those in the know called it the “Alpine Redoubt,” and it had been built as part of a contingency plan in the event Germany was overrun by its enemies. Here in the remote forested foothills of the Alps, Hitler would come to command his troops in one final, magnificent battle that would vanquish their enemies and preserve the Third Reich.24 At least that was the grand theory.

  It did not take long for the German scientists to figure out General Kammler's real plan. They had been told they would be able to continue their research, yet none of the tools they needed to perform that research had been provided. General Kammler was under the impression those tools—the charts, records, and books—had all been destroyed. Only von Braun and Dornberger knew of Huzel's clandestine mission to preserve their work and legacy, and they certainly weren't telling the SS general. The relocated scientists were highly intelligent individuals—some of the best minds on the planet. They were smart enough to realize something other than research was on the mind of their keeper—that what they were really being held for was to ensure not their own safety and security, but the safety and security of General Kammler. The general had gathered Wernher von Braun and his engineers together like a stack of poker chips—something to bargain with in the event the Allied armies captured the general and threatened to hang him.25 The men also knew that if Kammler's gambit failed, they would all be shot in order to prevent their knowledge from falling into the hands of Germany's enemies and, of course, eliminate witnesses to Nazi war crimes.

  But General Kammler was not the only one who knew how to play a poker hand. He would soon discover the hard way that any individual who attempts to outthink five hundred rocket scientists is likely to be the player who loses his chips. Von Braun and his men managed to escape the luxurious prison General Kammler had put them in using a ruse so simple it is hard to believe it worked. One day, a number of Allied bombers dropped their explosive cargo on a target nearby. Von Braun told the SS officer in charge, known as the Sturmbannfuher, that if the Alpine Redoubt were bombed Germany would lose all of its great rocket technology in minutes. He convinced the officer that the best solution was to disperse his men to private homes in towns around the area. That way, the logic went, some of them might die, but many would survive. Unable to communicate with Kammler, the Sturmbannfuher agreed, and just like that, von Braun managed to talk himself and five hundred men out of prison.26

  On the morning of May 8, 1945, Mary awoke at her aunt's apartment to the sound of a hundred car horns. She looked at her bedside clock: 7:10 a.m. There was a rumble of a dozen fast-moving feet on the hall stairway, and she heard someone yelling. Mary stepped to the window and pulled back the curtains. Two stories below, the streets were filling with people, many of them still in their nightclothes. They jammed the sidewalks and mobbed the streets, preventing any semblance of traffic flow. Music was playing from somewhere, crowds were dancing, everyone was cheering, strangers were kissing.

  She opened the window and the first words she heard were, “Germany has surrendered!”

  Mary leaned out the window and shouted, “What about Japan?” She repeated her question two more times, but the clamor of the growing crowd was too great; no one could hear her. She turned on her radio and tuned the receiver for news. It did not take long—it seemed every station had information. It was true: Germany had officially surrendered. But the fighting in the Pacific was raging as hot as ever.

  Hundreds of thousands of young American women were waiting for their boyfriends and husbands to come home. Those who had loved ones in Europe would no doubt be crying and screaming in unrestrained happiness as soon as they heard. Those with loved ones in the Pacific would congratulate the first group, then pray that the new peace would spread. Mary, who was waiting for no one, would simply collect her last paycheck. Mary knew a two-tier social system was about to be created—those who knew their men were coming home, and those who had to wait. It would dramatically change the environment at work. Even so, it was obvious the war could not last much longer. Two of the three major Axis powers had fallen—it would be impossible for an isolated island nation like Japan to hold up against all the combined Allied powers that were now free to focus on a single theater of battle. The end seemed near.

  Mary's first thought was the future of her friends and coworkers at Plum Brook Ordnance. As she watched the feral revelry fill the neighborhood, Mary wondered how many of the Plum Brook women understood that they were about to receive pink slips. Most of her coworkers would be so euphoric over the anticipation of seeing their loved ones again, they would be blind to the approach of their new peacetime reality: joblessness. No war meant no business. No business meant no employees. Mary knew that once a peace treaty was signed by Japan, employment at munitions factories like Plum Brook Ordnance would vanish into the ether. The city of Sandusky, which depended so much on munitions contracts, might vanish as well. Just so much chaff on a windy Ohio day.

  Mary had anticipated this moment. Only fools thought war-related employment lasted forever. Three months before, when news of troop successes in Europe was being reported daily, she had bought an old typewriter at a pawn shop. Now, pulling it out from beneath her bed and grabbing several sheets of paper, Mary Genevieve Sherman began to craft her post-war résumé.

  A week prior to Mary crafting that résumé, von Braun, Dornberger, and several of their associates had hidden themselves in a hotel high up a mountain near the German–Austria border. On May 1, the day after Hitler had committed suicide, von Braun was in an upbeat mood.

  “Hitler is dead, and the hotel service is excellent!”27

  He and his engineers needed an emissary—someone who would be willing to leave the relative safety of their numerous hiding places and go out into the world, looking for American soldiers. They had voted and, almost to a man, decided that surrender to the Americans was highly preferable to falling into the hands of Russia's brutal and unforgiving Red Army. Owing to his passable command of the English language, Wernher's younger brother Magnus was chosen.28 On the morning of May 2, Magnus hopped on a bicycle and steered himself down the steep road on the Austrian side of the border.29 After several hours, Magnus returned, saying that he had met some American officers from the CIC (Counter Intelligence Corps), but they did not believe his story that he knew where the inventors of the V-2 were staying.

  “They want some of you to come back with me so they can question you.”30

  Wernher, Magnus, and Dornberger then took four others, piled into three staff cars, and drove down the mountain to meet the Americans. During the drive, all seven experienced various levels of trepidation. What would happen to them? Would they be interrogated? Beaten? Tortured? Sent to prison?

  According to von Braun, “When we reached the CIC I wasn't kicked in the teeth or anything. [Instead] they immediately fried us some eggs.”31

  On September 2, 1945, the Empire of Japan capitulated and sent representatives to a treaty signing aboard the battleship USS Missouri. Around the world, millions of people celebrated what they assumed would be a new world full of peace and harmony among nations.

  They were wrong.

  “The average defender operates in a fog of uncertainty.”

  —WIDELY ATTRIBUTED TO HUGH KELSEY, BRIDGE CHAMPION

  I look in the mirror to make sure I'm ready. Hair combed, glasses cleaned, gray slacks, white shirt, dark blue blazer. It's the uniform of Catholic school, St. Catherine of Sienna, Reseda, California. The year is 1964, and I'm in fifth grade. There is no middle or junior high in their system; we attend first through eighth grades at a single school. I gather my notebook, well-organized with ruler, paper, number-2 pencils, and a fountain pen. Ballpoint pens are popular now, but they are absolutely not allowed at St. Catherine's. No one, of course explains why they are not allowed. Rules are rules, and that's just all there is to it.

  I step out of the bathroom and walk to the din
ing room. My mother is there, playing four-handed bridge by herself. She has the morning paper, a mug of coffee, and she's smoking a cigarette.

  “Bye, mom,” I say. “I'm going to school now.”

  I wait a few seconds for a reply, but there is nothing. She says nothing, does nothing, acknowledges nothing. I'd give anything for a little bit of something, but everything is nothing.

  The only time my mother grants me any attention is when I do something wrong. If I drop a plate and break it, she will shower me with attention, but it won't involve hugging and kissing.

  “Bye,” I say again, then turn and walk out the front door.

  Through the open front window I can hear her gather the cards, tap them into a neat pile, and begin shuffling.

  For years this has been my routine: get up by myself, make breakfast by myself, shower myself, dress myself, go to school by myself. I live in a very myself world. Of course, I'm certainly old enough to do these things on my own, but I've been doing them much longer than most kids. I'm like one of those latchkey children, except my mother is always home.

  I leave the house at 7752 Lindley Avenue and begin my lonely journey to school. St. Catherine's is only four blocks away, but it's a very dangerous four blocks. In 1964, the cliché of milk-money-stealing bullies is not yet a cliché; it's just my life. And those who walk alone are the easiest targets. I've complained to my mother about it many times. She responds by reshuffling the deck.