Space Race

by Deborah Cadbury

  Meanwhile, Wernher von Braun and his group of scientists had been taken to the south-west of the United States, to an army base called Fort Bliss, in Texas. This was situated on the edge of the desert land known as the Tularisa, near the Mexican border. On a clear day he could see the little town of El Paso, high in the mountains to the south. Apart from this, the desert stretched away, a vast, featureless, sandy plain, to the San Andreas Mountains in the west. The flowers of summer had died, and mile after mile of sage and brushwood wearing the subdued colours of late summer carpeted the sandy plain to the Sacramento Mountains in the east. In every direction there was nothing to be seen but the shifting cloud patterns changing the shades of the desert floor. It was only a few months since von Braun and his team had been caught up in the horror of Germany’s disintegration. Now, they were dwarfed by vast skies and an unpopulated landscape, the only noise the sound of wind in the brushwood.

  The American army had brought them into the country unofficially and hidden them away at Fort Bliss. Home was a nucleus of shed-like buildings containing barracks, a mess hall, supply buildings and a popular clubhouse. The men had no passports or passes into the outside world and, except for a visit once a month to El Paso under guard, movement was restricted. No fences surrounded their new home – the desert came right up to the door – but it was understood that six acres was the limit of their freedom.

  The hot days were without direction. There was a modest programme for rocket development in the Ordnance Department of the army but it was underfunded. America had just made a massive contribution to the war in Europe and nobody held the view that there would be another such demand in the near future. The war in Japan had been quickly settled with the atom bomb. The United States was the only country in the world with a weapon of such massive destructive power. Despite the urgency with which US Army Ordnance had wanted to bring von Braun and his men to America, in Washington developing guided weapons was not seen as a priority – not least because they already had bombers. The type of high-powered rocket programme the Germans had developed under the Nazis was not in existence – nor had it even been discussed. And there was little at Fort Bliss to encourage von Braun’s group as they viewed the silent desert all around them from their wooden sheds. Refusing to be demoralized, however, they set about improving their lot.

  They started to learn English and read books, as well as watching American films which brought curious idiomatic expressions and slang to their intellectual scientific vocabularies. Sport was popular when they were allowed to use the army swimming pool, bowling alley and tennis courts. An event anticipated with great pleasure was visiting El Paso. Once a month a group of four, under guard, would visit the town and enjoy the feeling of being part of the world again. They marvelled at the American idiosyncrasy of wearing ten-gallon hats and tall boots, assuming that this reflected the taste in men’s fashion country wide.

  Living quarters were in the former army junior officers’ barracks and they were furnished with a very un-American lack of generosity. There was little comfort, no floor coverings or bedside tables and chairs. Some of the men discovered a new skill in joinery, making furniture from whatever scrap wood they could find. Confined to their six acres, so many brilliant minds found the restrictions irksome. Often the tension was relieved by lengthy pillow fights in the dormitories. Tempers were frayed as the wait in limbo continued. Being housed at such close quarters led to petty irritations, the personal habits of an individual often taking on huge importance. One of them, observed Huzel, ‘had the habit of going to the washroom stark naked, save for a pair of wooden sandals, to the annoyance of his many co-tenants, both aesthetically and acoustically. One day, an unknown vigilante nailed his wooden sandals to the floor with six inch spikes, the protruding points of which they bent over in the ceiling below.’

  At White Sands they had nothing more exciting to do than reassemble the rusting V-2s brought over from Germany. No American was remotely interested in von Braun’s dream of a satellite orbiting the world as an observation platform to monitor hard-won peace. The Germans were merely guests of the US, expected to grow plump on good living, to advise and help, but, most of all, to be in America rather than the Soviet Union. Von Braun was in despair. He had brought his team to a ‘lockup’ in a desert with no future for the skills that had been so fêted in Peenemünde. To keep spirits up he kept his team busy on speculative space projects.

  The firing of the first V-2 at White Sands before assorted top brass from the Pentagon would, von Braun hoped, be the springboard for an American interest in space, but after an impressive takeoff with thunderous noise and flames, it began an equally impressive disintegration three miles up and had to be aborted, not auguring well for the future. By June 1946, however, they successfully fired a V-2 to a height of sixty-seven miles, complete with equipment for taking measurements of the atmosphere. And in the following months they assisted the Americans in firing some twenty-five V-2s, but there was no money for new development, let alone a space programme.

  In the absence of official backing, von Braun did find some local interest. On 16 January 1947, he spoke to the El Paso Rotary Club on the future of rocket development. He dazzled the elderly citizens of the town with his account of rockets 90 feet high, powerful enough to reach orbit around the earth. He described weightlessness in space, the theory of achieving earth orbit and even how to create space platforms that could serve as refuelling posts to reach the moon. ‘The first man who puts his foot on the moon or another planet,’ declared von Braun, ‘will be in much the same position as Columbus when he discovered the New World. With mankind visiting and exploring other planets, the future history of our world is both unlimited and unpredictable.’

  For the Rotarians of El Paso all this was a revelation and they showed their appreciation with a hearty round of applause, although a little unsure when it would all begin. The local papers were less appreciative. ‘Builders of Nazi Secret Weapons Working for US’ fumed the El Paso Times. The stunned readers of the El Paso Herald Post learned: ‘Germans Scientists Plan Re-fuelling Station in Sky en route to the Moon.’ The Germans, twiddling their thumbs in the desert, starved of resources, and in America on a short lease, could only wonder quite how their ‘refuelling station in the sky’ was to be achieved.

  While von Braun had to be content with talking to the Rotarians of El Paso, that same spring, on 14 April 1947, according to his biographer, Golovanov, Sergei Korolev was summoned to meet Joseph Stalin himself to discuss the Soviet missile programme. In the dark and labyrinthine recesses of his mind, Stalin thoroughly understood that fear was a significant weapon. The Americans had shown their superior strength with the atomic bomb. The Soviet Union, too, would soon be in that position; but it would not be enough. Soviet weaponry must be feared. Methods of delivery of an atomic bomb were uppermost in his mind. He wanted an infallible means of delivering such a potent means of destruction. What was needed was a missile of deadly accuracy that could travel several thousand miles with its nuclear warhead and was immune to attack.

  Korolev never forgot that meeting with Stalin. Everyone in the room was acutely aware of his power, so much so that Stalin could afford to be restrained in his manner. His voice was quiet and controlled as he cultivated a calmness full of threat, then would suddenly explode. In spite of the fact that this was the man who had authorized the purges which had led to his years of imprisonment, the man to whom he had written in despair from prison protesting his innocence, Korolev admired Stalin. Like millions of Russians, he did not hold Stalin personally accountable for his misfortune, convinced that NKVD henchmen and jealous colleagues were responsible. ‘We all took Stalin as a “god” back then,’ recalled Korolev’s daughter, years later:

  Father was told not to ask questions and to speak as concisely as possible. He was surprised that he could take no papers with him; he had to know everything by heart. Stalin greeted father, but did not give him his hand. He slowly walked around the room smoking
his famous pipe. He listened carefully, sometimes interrupting father to ask him questions in a reserved voice – and surprised Korolev with how competent he was … all the questions were well thought over. Father did not know how much Stalin would agree with what he was saying, but he knew how much Stalin’s word meant. Father counted on Stalin’s support and he was not mistaken in his hopes.

  The room was packed with military officials and senior ministers. Stalin proved to be extremely interested in liquid-fuelled rockets. Korolev could see that the ideas he had been harbouring for years might fit with Stalin’s calculating vision. He put his case forward, while Stalin listened at first in silence, then interrupting with intelligent questions. Korolev felt ‘terribly agitated’, anxious to convince the premier that the V-2 was already obsolete – it was a matter of pride for Korolev to go beyond what von Braun had achieved. He wanted to gain approval for his own Soviet missile, the R-2. This, however, was a step too far for Stalin. He wanted the Soviet rocket team to show that they were masters of the German technology. First they had to make a perfect Soviet copy of the German A-4.

  For Korolev, who had still not been officially pardoned for his ‘crimes’, the meeting was a personal triumph. Despite the fact that he did not win approval for the development of the R-2, he told Golovanov years later, ‘I was incredibly happy to be in the presence of comrade Stalin.’

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  ‘Did you understand about the warrant?’

  With the Nuremberg trials in progress in Germany to try Nazi leaders for war crimes, von Braun and his men had not quite evaded the stigma of their Nazi past. By now, news of Operation Overcast, set up to exploit the knowledge of German scientists, had been leaked to the press and the operation had been discreetly renamed: ‘Project Paperclip’. Under the expanded remit of Project Paperclip, approval was given for a thousand scientists and their families to reside in the United States.

  For the American government the timing of Project Paperclip presented particular difficulties. At the time, in 1947, investigations were underway for the Dora–Nordhausen War Crimes Trial later that year. It was to be held at the former Dachau concentration camp where more than a thousand Germans, including senior SS officials, were imprisoned. Lawyers and investigators for the Military Court wanted to know who was responsible for the horror of the concentration camps that had produced von Braun’s rockets. Since Hans Kammler had vanished and Albin Sawatzki, the technical director, had died, questions about who had been in charge and how this horror had come about could not be satisfactorily answered. Dornberger could shed no light on the matter and, from his castle in Wales, the charming folly of a Welsh coal ‘king’, he also successfully argued that he was no more responsible for V-2s landing on London than British and American pilots were for bombing raids on Germany.

  There was a wall of silence from the Germans imprisoned at Dachau and sometimes there were flat denials – one even claimed, when confronted with evidence of atrocities, that ‘the prisoners beat each other’. Gradually, the finger of suspicion began to point across the Atlantic to German scientists now working for the American government, notably the former general manager of the factory, Dr Georg Rickhey, now working for the American Army Air Force. Facing a potential death sentence, Rickhey was obliged to travel to Germany to be tried. For Germans working in America the fear was: who would be next?

  Against this troubling background, unable to shake off his links with his Nazi past, von Braun, as well as the other German scientists, maintained at the army’s insistence a low profile. The days at White Sands passed as unmemorably and as monotonously as life in the surrounding desert. Contracts were discreetly renewed. The scientists’ families left behind in Germany came out to join them. In March 1947, von Braun married his beautiful eighteen-year-old cousin, Maria von Quistorp. Although marriage had not been mentioned when they had last seen each other in Germany, there had been an unspoken alliance and an understanding. Von Braun wrote to his father, Baron von Braun, asking him to find out how Maria felt. By chance, Maria was planning to visit his father, and the moment she arrived the baron ran out to see her in the drive. ‘Wernher wants to marry you,’ he announced elatedly. ‘How about it? How do you feel? Will you marry him?’ Maria smiled: ‘I never considered anyone else,’ she replied. They were married in Germany and just in case the Soviets attempted to get too close, they were chaperoned by an armed guard until they arrived back at White Sands.

  In America, von Braun began married life modestly, on $675 a month, but with the definite feeling that the ‘prisoner’ status with which they had arrived in 1945 was less marked. He and his team were kept busy assembling and firing V-2s for the US military, but attempts to keep the German presence in Texas discreet failed when in May 1947 a spectacular mistake almost caused an international incident. A V-2 was fired, programmed to ascend north, but a fault in the gyroscope altered its direction south towards Mexico. The ground crew watched in horror. Within seconds the thud of impact was heard. It had landed on or very near the Mexican town of Juarez, crowded and spectacularly adorned for fiesta. A massive crater showed that it had missed the city by only a mile and a dynamite store by mere feet.

  The following month, the trail from the war crimes investigation at Dachau led to White Sands. Military officials arrived from Germany wanting to know more about the role of the scientists and especially that of Georg Rickhey. Arthur Rudolph, the director of V-2 production, was also interviewed – in particular over exactly who had been responsible for the regular hangings in the tunnels. But getting information was extremely difficult; time had passed and witnesses were dispersed. Both Rickhey and Rudolph denied all knowledge of atrocities. Rudolph went one better, painting a picture of order and harmony, explaining that ‘working conditions in the factory appeared good’. He claimed he had eaten the same food as the prisoners and had never witnessed a death in the tunnels.

  Sixty thousand prisoners had worked at the Mittelwerk complex. More than twenty thousand had died. Towards the end the crematoria had consumed bodies four at a time, twenty-four hours a day. Yet the investigators could not find a reliable witness to explain how all this had happened. It was not long, however, before a cable arrived from Germany requesting von Braun’s presence at the trial.

  Sergei Korolev’s meeting with Stalin had awakened in him a renewed sense of urgency. With the first launch of the A-4/V-2 planned for autumn 1947, he was always in a hurry, running, it seemed, to meet the next deadline. To his staff he appeared to have the inexplicable ability to be everywhere at once; with his restless, untiring energy they began to wonder if he ever went home to sleep. One of his designers remembered his first sight of Korolev: ‘We were standing near the gates when they opened and a powerful American trophy car came in and passed us at high speed. Inside was a guy in a brown jacket who looked very intense. “Who is this crazy guy?” I asked. “That is the King”, we were told. “He can’t drive slower.”’

  Korolev’s working day was long and arduous. Within the sprawling factory of NII-88, his department inhabited semi-derelict old buildings; packing cases were used for drawing boards and endless shortages slowed production. His three hundred dedicated workers were living in squalid conditions, but Korolev was generous with his time and tried to help in practical ways. ‘People would come to him with all kinds of requests,’ recalled his secretary, Antonina Zlotuckova. ‘Every Thursday was reception day and he would begin seeing people in the morning and stayed until he had seen his last appointment.’ Many times there were queues of more than thirty people needing urgent help to obtain housing or medicines for a sick member of the family.

  Officially Korolev himself had still not been rehabilitated for his so-called crimes against the state, and was not a member of the Communist Party, a fact which gave those who opposed him ammunition for criticism. Valentin Glushko, who had also suffered a lengthy prison sentence, now, like Korolev, held a position as Chief Designer in his own right, presiding over a specialist rocket en
gine plant, OKB-456, near Moscow. The Lehesten engine testing plant that he had been using in Germany had been transferred virtually in its entirety. Rapidly establishing himself as the foremost Soviet rocket engine designer, he was now at work on improved designs.

  Glushko had always felt when he first looked at the V-2 engines that it would be possible to achieve smoother and more efficient combustion. In particular, he studied the injector plate where the oxidant and fuel were injected into the combustion chamber. He knew that if he could improve the mixing, he would reduce the risks of creating pockets of unmixed fuel, which could explode, creating pressure waves which damaged the engine. To prevent this combustion instability he wanted to modify the injector plate. He also knew he could improve the fuel pumps and raise the combustion chamber pressure to increase engine thrust.

  Glushko was prepared to collaborate with Korolev in his plans for a truly Soviet rocket, but their relationship, strained by the purges of the 1930s, was not an easy one. Korolev could hardly forget what he referred to as Glushko’s ‘despicable lie’, but Glushko, too, had been told by the NKVD that Korolev had testified against him! Both were aware that they had been forced to name each other in their confessions. Whether Glushko also knew of Korolev’s continued affair with his sister-in-law at this stage is not clear. Any lingering ill feelings, however, had to be cast aside as they were seen to cooperate fully to advance Soviet missile technology. The work continued under the watchful eye of the state security system. Ivan Serov, Beria’s deputy, was a key member of Stalin’s Special Committee for Reactive Technology supervising missile technology. He reported regularly to his master, Beria, on progress, or lack of it.