Fifties (99 page)

Margaret Sanger’s fears about a Catholic President turned out to be ill-founded. After a century of American Presidents who refused to deal with the issue of overpopulation, Kennedy expressed cautious approval of federal support for contraceptive research. In 1966, a year before Mrs. Sanger’s death, Dwight Eisenhower and Harry Truman, neither of whom had been helpful to her while in office, became co-chairmen of Planned Parenthood’s world-population committee.

FORTY-ONE

I
N 1955, IN A
quiet ceremony in Huntsville, Alabama, Wernher von Braun, at the age of forty-three, became an American citizen. This was not a particularly good time for von Braun and his German colleagues in the American space program at Huntsville. To a nation trying on the uncomfortable new role of international power, space seemed, if anything, a futuristic fantasy—and an expensive one at that. That was particularly true for the President and most of his chief advisers, men born in the previous century. But for von Braun, who believed the space age was already here (thanks in no small part to his own V-2 rockets, used by the Germans in World War Two), this was unusually frustrating. When he had first come to America he had even written a novel called
Mars Project,
a book based not on idle fancies but on real data. It envisioned a major national effort to make manned space trips a reality. He sent the
book off to a publisher, who replied that “it sounds too fantastic.” Eighteen other publishers turned it down. He could hardly believe no one was interested.

Von Braun was probably at the moment the leading rocket scientist in the world. His V-2 was the first successful ballistic missile, and in the last year of the war, thirteen hundred of them had been fired at London with mounting success. Had German technology been on a slightly more accelerated schedule, Eisenhower mused later, the V-2s might have threatened his capacity to land at Normandy and thereby altered the outcome of the war. At the end of World War Two, von Braun and his team of German rocket scientists chose America as their future home as the Red Army pushed toward Peenemünde, where they were headquartered. In January 1945, von Braun called his team together and told them, “Germany has lost the war, but let us not forget that it was our team which first succeeded in reaching outer space. We have never stopped believing in satellite voyages to the Moon and interplanetary travel ...” To which of the victorious countries, he then asked, “should we entrust our heritage?” That was an interesting choice of words—skills were practical knowledge, whereas heritage was more like one’s lifeblood. They voted to stay together and to offer themselves to the Americans. The choice was relatively easy. “We despise the French; we are mortally afraid of the Soviets; we do not believe the British can afford us; so that leaves the Americans,” one team member said later. Richard Lewis, writing in
Appointment on the Moon,
noted of Dieter Huzel, (“perhaps the most articulate of the émigrés”) “... [he saw] their role as Promethean bearers of a great technological skill for mankind, forged in the fires of war, but of greater import as a means of exploring space than as a weapon. In the chaos of Germany’s collapse, Huzel saw himself and his colleagues as men with a mission to perpetuate the engineering science they had created. These men, Huzel believes, tend to think of themselves as a group apart from the Nazi war machine, with ambitions transcending its military and political objectives.”

The team slipped out of Peenemünde, burying most of their important papers in a deserted mine, and with the aid of faked papers, reached Bavaria and the American forces. Wernher’s brother, Magnus von Braun, who spoke relatively good English, went out to hunt for an American soldier to whom they could surrender. In time one was found, and Magnus announced to a rather startled private: “My name is Magnus von Braun. My brother invented the V-2. We want to surrender.” When Wernher himself
appeared soon after, there was considerable doubt that he could actually be the father of the V-2. He was, said one American, “too young, too fat, too jovial.” Then he began to talk. The American scientists were dazzled; his knowledge was so complete and he easily blended the practical with the visionary. Colonel John Keck, one of the debriefing officers, told reporters later, “This will make Buck Rogers seem as if he had lived in the Gay Nineties.” Had anyone else spoken like this he would have seemed a dreamer, but when von Braun spoke listeners paid attention. “We were,” said Keck, “impressed with their practical engineering minds and their distaste for the fantastic.” So the deal was done, and the entire German team of over a hundred scientists came over. In addition, von Braun led his captors to several V-2s and gave the Americans important documents. The capture of the Germans was known as Operation Paperclip, and it was one of the great coups of the war, since the V-2 was not so much the last weapon of the old war as the first new weapon of the war that might come next. The Russians were furious. Stalin was a major promoter of the uses of science and technology, and he was well aware of the importance of Peenemünde. He had pushed his generals to the north rather than straight to Berlin.

When his troops reached the rocket camp, they found almost everything of value gone and Stalin was reportedly furious. “This is absolutely intolerable,” he said, according to reliable defectors. “We defeated Nazi armies; we occupied Berlin and Peenemünde, but the Americans got the rocket engineers. What could be more revolting and more inexcusable? How and why was this allowed to happen?” In a way, the Red Army’s race toward Peenemünde was symbolic: It was, without anyone knowing it, the beginning of the race for outer space, or what Winston Churchill once called “the wizard war.”

Later, any number of American conservatives raged against the Soviet successes in Eastern Europe, but for all the territory swept up by the Red Army, the Americans, by getting the German scientists, had pulled off a major coup. In 1945, the Germans were far ahead of other nations in rocket developments, the Soviets were second, with a significant pool of talent, and the Americans, having diverted much of their scientific resources to developing nuclear weapons, were a poor third. But getting von Braun and his colleagues instantly made the Americans competitive. Rocketry was his life.

“For my confirmation,” von Braun once noted, “I didn’t get a watch and my first pair of long pants like most Lutheran boys. I got a telescope.” His father was a large landowner and served in the Weimar government as minister of agriculture. Young Wernher was
always fascinated by the stars and outer space. As a boy he tied six firework skyrockets to his child’s wagon, lit them, and was delighted when the wagon went surging forth. “I was ecstatic. The wagon was totally out of control and trailing a comet’s tail of fire, but my rockets were performing beyond my wildest dreams. Finally they burned themselves out with a magnificent thunderclap and the vehicle rolled to a halt. The police took me into custody very quickly,” he noted. At prep school, he neglected his math courses until he was informed they were critical to the study of space. Soon he was doubling as a math teacher. In Berlin he enrolled at the Charlottenburg Institute of Technology and apprenticed at a local metal shop. At the shop he was ordered to make a perfect cube. He was furious. “Why waste time filing a chunk of iron?” But he submitted. The foreman measured it. His angles were off. Try again, he was told. So he did. His angles were still off. Again he tried; again his cube was imperfect. Finally, five weeks later, when his cube had shrunk from the size of a child’s head to that of a walnut, the foreman said, “
Gut!
” It was an important lesson: Even dreamers have to perfect their practical skills.

At the age of eighteen, he and his friends experimented in an abandoned lot in Berlin, which they decided to call the Raketenflugplatz, or the Rocket Flight Field. Two years later, he was part of the embryonic German rocket team, under Dr. Hermann Oberth. Senior colleagues were already in awe of his extraordinary theoretical knowledge. Perhaps the Treaty of Versailles had limited German efforts in traditional weaponry, but it had said nothing about rockets and so the Germans began to undertake a major effort in this area. Von Braun soon became the leader of the team. In 1934, when it was decided a better place for testing than Berlin was needed, von Braun’s mother suggested a little-known area on the Baltic coast called Peenemünde, where her father had often duck-hunted.

When the war began they were just finishing work on the V-l, a twenty-seven-foot-long subsonic rocket, which flew just low enough and slowly enough to be intercepted. At first Hitler did not seem particularly interested in their research. During his first visit in 1939, he looked around, listened to the briefings, and said nothing—to the scientists’ bitter disappointment. Germany’s stunning early successes in the war had seemed to eliminate the need for a secret weapon. Who needed a weapon of the future when the weapons of the present—the Panzer divisions and the Wehrmacht—were so effective. Still, von Braun and his team pushed ahead with the V-2. It was to have a range of about 160 miles and had to be small enough
to be able to go through Germany’s railroad tunnels. The first V-2, fired in July 1942, reached an altitude of one yard and blew up; the first successful launch was on October 3, 1942. It broke the sound barrier and reached an altitude of some 55 miles and a range of 120 miles. Walter Dornberger, the military commander of the rocket team, turned to von Braun and said: “Do you realize what we accomplished today? Today the space ship is born!” It was now merely a matter of more thrust from bigger payloads, and gaining greater reliability and accuracy. “Our main objective for a long time was to make it more dangerous to be in the target area than to be with the launch crew,” von Braun once noted.

Then, just on the edge of success, the Peenemünde team received a message in March 1943, which seemed to doom its work. The Führer had had one of his psychic dreams, this one about the V-2. In his dream it had failed to reach London. Three months later, with continuing bad news from the eastern front, Hitler reversed himself. He granted an audience to Dornberger and von Braun, who made a brilliant presentation and showed dramatic film footage of their successes. Hitler was galvanized, and Dornberger later said he seemed almost to scold himself for not having been a believer earlier. “Europe and the world will be too small from now on to contain a. war,” he had said. “With such weapons humanity will be unable to endure it.” He immediately began giving military orders, and the Peenemünde scientists were relieved of whatever illusions they may have had that they were creating vehicles for space travel. These were to be
weapons.
Hitler demanded that the payload be increased from one ton to ten tons. “What I want,” he told Dornberg, “is annihilation.” Dornberg answered, “When we started our development work we were not thinking of an all-annihilating effect. We—” Hitler interrupted him in a rage: “You! No,
you
didn’t think of it. But
I
did!” One incident, though, convinced Dornberg of Hitler’s military genius. Hitler asked how the V-2 would explode. Von Braun said that the explosive would have extra destructive power because it would hit the earth with such velocity. Hitler said he thought that the high speed would cause the V-2 to bury itself as it was exploding and thus throw up a great deal of earth. He suggested a supersensitive fuse that would explode on impact. Von Braun checked it out—to his surprise, Hitler was right.

The situation was not without a terrible irony as these brilliant men, working with one eye on the world of the future, were hounded by the very system they worked for. Von Braun was briefly arrested in 1944 by Himmler because he had been overheard saying that he
was not really interested in weaponry but rather in space travel. Visionaries they might be, but they were working in Nazi Germany, and the rockets were manufactured at a nearby site by slave laborers, most of them from Russia. By some estimates, 150 of them a day died of malnutrition.

By the spring of 1944, they were producing three hundred V-2s a month (eventually, the figure would reach nine hundred). Production took place in underground facilities because RAF bombing strikes were so effective. On September 8, 1944, they launched their first V-2 (for Vengeance Weapon Two, by Goebbels’s decree) against London. Forty-six feet long and five and a half feet in diameter, it weighed 28,000 pounds, most of which was fuel and a fuel tank. Its rocket engine had a thrust of 56,000 pounds, and it was launched vertically. It took about six minutes to hit London. It flew faster than a rifle bullet, and there was no defense against it, no possibility of interception. Because it flew faster than the speed of sound, it gave no warning until after it landed—the sound of it arrived after the rocket itself. Thus, the casualties were very high. One V-2, for example, landed at a market in London and killed a hundred people. According to Dornberger, some 3,745 rockets were fired between September 1944 and March 27, 1945, when Peenemünde closed down. Seventy-four percent landed within eighteen miles of the target, and 44 percent within six miles. They were surprisingly accurate, in retrospect, for this was still an experimental weapon. At the end of the war, von Braun and his team were working on both the A-9 and the A-10 rockets—“the America” rockets. The A-9 was, in effect, a jet airplane with wings that would glide for long periods above the atmosphere when its fuel was exhausted; the A-10 was to have 440,000 pounds of thrust and launch the A-9. These were the forerunners of intercontinental ballistic missiles. Launched from sites on the French coast, they were supposed to hit New York. The future was closing in even as the war was winding down.

After surrendering, von Braun and his people first ended up at the White Sands, New Mexico, testing grounds. Von Braun was, he liked to say later, not a POW but a prisoner of peace. The early days at White Sands were hardly easy ones. They were men between countries in terms of loyalty; Germany was gone, but they were not yet Americans. Actually, their real loyalty was not to any nation but to science, and their special vision was little understood by others. They were paid six dollars a day. They were not even allowed to send packages back to Germany. But by 1947 many of the families had arrived, and that year von Braun was allowed to go back to Germany to marry his eighteen-year-old first cousin.