Rude Astronauts (20 page)

All that changed on the morning of January 29, 1942, when two civilians from the OSS and an officer from the US Army General Staff, Col. Omar Bliss, found Robert Goddard in the assembly shed at Goddard’s ranch with an assistant, working on another high-altitude rocket. The rocket scientist greeted his unexpected visitors with courteous surprise; he dismissed his assistant and sat down on a bench outside the shed to hear what they had to say.

Bliss, now living in retirement on Sanibel Island, Florida, remembers the meeting he had with Goddard. “He was completely shocked, horrified,” Bliss says. “He told us that he had kept up with German research during the ’30s and knew that they were making progress with their rockets, but he had no idea that their work had come this far. We asked if Sanger’s plan was possible and he thought about it a minute, then told us that if they had the resources and a little luck, yes, they could make it work. He knew that von Braun and Oberth were working for the Nazis, and he had no doubts that they and others had the knowledge to develop the
Amerika Bomber
.”

The men from Washington asked Goddard if he had any ideas how to prevent New York from being blitzed from space; Goddard indicated that he had a few notions. “Then we asked him if he would help us,” Bliss recalls. “I was afraid that he would refuse. People had treated him so unfairly before, after all. But he at once nodded his head, yes, he would do whatever was necessary to stop the Nazis.”

The space race had begun.

Robert Goddard’s role in what would become known as Project Blue Horizon, however, was not played in New Mexico. For various reasons, the War Department returned the professor to his home town. Although the
Lucky Linda
would be launched from the White Sands Test Range less than 100 miles from Goddard’s ranch, Washington decided that the best place for Blue Horizon’s brain trust was in Massachusetts.

The Department of War wanted to keep Goddard within arm’s reach, and Massachusetts is closer to Washington, DC, than New Mexico. Yet it was also decided not to take unnecessary risks. Goddard was reputed to personally tinker with his rockets while they were on the launch pad. This fact was known by Dr. Vannevar Bush, President Roosevelt’s science advisor, who gave orders for “the Professor” to be kept away from the rockets themselves. In hindsight, this was good logic. There were many spectacular explosions in White Sands over the next two years of the crash program, one of which claimed the lives of two technicians. It would have been disastrous if Goddard himself had been killed during one of these accidents.

There was some resistance by the War Department to having Project Blue Horizon located in Worcester because another top-secret military R&D program was already underway in Massachusetts: the radar defense project being developed in Cambridge at MIT’s so-called “radiation laboratory.” It was felt by many in the Pentagon that having two secret projects working so near to each other would be risky. Goddard was not eager to return to Worcester, either. It had become difficult for him to endure the New England climate, and he especially chafed at not being able to witness each rocket test. Bush argued, however, that neither Clark University nor MIT were high-profile enough (at the time) to attract Nazi spies; having Blue Horizon camouflaged by a college campus, like MIT’s “Rad Lab,” made perfect sense.

The White House won out over the Pentagon, and Goddard went along with his relocation orders. Esther Goddard, always protective of her husband’s health, naturally returned to Worcester with Robert. They moved back into their former residence, where Goddard had been born, and readjusted to life in New England’s second-largest city.

To build the security cover for Blue Horizon, the FBI coerced Clark University’s directors into reinstating Goddard’s status as an active faculty member. It was arranged that Goddard’s only real academic workload was to teach a freshman class in introductory physics. In the university’s academic calendar for the semesters from 1942 through 1943, though, there was a listing for an advanced-level class, “Physics 390,” whose instructor was “to be announced.” But even senior physics students at Clark found it impossible to enroll in the class; it was always filled at registration time.

Goddard’s “graduate students” in Physics 390 were a group of nine young men enlisted from the American Rocket Society, unrepentant rocket buffs and far-sighted engineers with whom Goddard had corresponded over the years. Goddard had quickly hand-picked his group from memory; the War Department and the FBI had contacted each person individually, requesting their volunteer help. None refused, though the Selective Service Administration had to issue draft deferrals for four members. The FBI moved them all to Worcester and managed to get them quietly isolated in a triple-decker on Birch Street near the campus.

Team 390 (as they were codenamed by the FBI) were strangers even among themselves. Almost all were from different parts of the country. Only two members, Lloyd Kapman and Harry Bell, both from St. Louis, had met before, and although Taylor Brickell and Henry Morse were known to each other from the letters page of
Astounding Science Fiction
, of which they were both devoted readers, they had never met face to face. The youngest, Roy Cahill, had just passed his eighteenth birthday; the oldest, Hamilton “Ham” Ballou, was in his mid-thirties, and was forced to shave off his mustache to make him appear younger.

And there were other problems. J. Jackson Jackson was the only black member of the team, which tended to make him stand out on the mostly white Clark University campus (his odd name earned him the nickname “Jack Cube”). Michael Ferris had briefly been a member of the American Communist Party during his undergraduate days, which meant that he had undergone intensive scrutiny by the FBI and nearly been refused on the grounds of his past political activity before he had agreed to sign a binding pledge of loyalty to the United States. And Gerard “Gerry” Mander had to be sprung from a county workhouse in Roanoke, Virginia: a rocket he had been developing had misfired, spun out across two miles of tobacco field and crashed into a Baptist preacher’s house.

Once they were together, though, Blue Horizon’s R&D task force immediately hit it off. “We spoke the same language,” recalls Gerry Mander, who now lives in Boston and who was then the team’s “wildcat” engineer. “Rockets were our specialty, and putting something above the atmosphere was a dream we all shared. I mean, I was a young snot from backwoods Virginia, so sharing a room with a colored man like Jack Cube, at least at the time, seemed more unlikely than putting a guy in orbit. But Jack talked engineering, so we had that much in common, and in a couple of days I didn’t even care.”

“We were all a bunch of rocket-buffs,” says Mike Ferris, the team’s chemistry expert, “and the War Department had given us carte blanche to put a man in space.” He laughs. “Man, we were like little kids thrown the key to the toy store!”

Team 390 had little doubt about what was needed. The only device capable of intercepting the Sanger bomber was another spacecraft, and the only reliable navigation system was a human pilot. Since the ’20s, Robert Goddard had drawn, in his “gunpowder experiments” notebooks, rough designs for a rocket-plane, along with notes for gyroscopic guidance systems and other plans which turned out to be useful for the team. Studies at the California Institute of Technology had also suggested that a single-stage rocket-plane could be sent into space on a suborbital trajectory, with the ship gliding back through the atmosphere like a sailplane.

The team postulated that a spaceplane, launched by a liquid-fuel engine and ascending at a forty-five-degree angle, could function as a one-man space fighter capable of intercepting the
Amerika Bomber
. Upon studying the Sanger Report, Team 390 further realized that the bomber would be most vulnerable during the ascent phases of its flight. At these points, the ship was slowest and least maneuverable, a sitting duck for another spacecraft’s ordnance. So if the US ship were launched from New Mexico just as the German ship flew over the Pacific coast, it could intercept the
Amerika Bomber
before it reached New York City and shoot it down with ordinary solid-fuel rockets.

“We came up with it in one night over beer and pretzels in the Bancroft Hotel bar,” says Henry Morse, the team’s electrical engineer who now lives in Winchester, New Hampshire, “Bob wasn’t with us that night, but we had gone through his notebooks and read all that stuff he had thought up, so it was mainly a matter of putting it together. We knew we didn’t need a very sophisticated ship, nothing like a space shuttle today. Of course, we didn’t have time to make anything like a space shuttle. Just something quick and dirty.”

“Quick and dirty” soon became buzzwords for Goddard’s People. The team took the plan to Goddard the following morning, during their “class” in Goddard’s lab at the university. By the end of the day, following many hours of arguing, scribbling notes on the chalkboard, and flooding the trashcan with wadded-up notes, Team 390 and Goddard settled on the plan. The professor was amused that his “grad students” had come up with the scheme in a barroom. “If Mrs. Goddard will let me out of the house, I’d like to be in on the next session,” he told Morse.

The FBI, though, was not amused when it discovered that Team 390 had been discussing rockets in a downtown Worcester bar. There was always the chance of Nazi spies. The FBI was especially sensitive given the proximity to the MIT Rad Lab only forty miles away. Team 390 was ordered to stay out of the Bancroft, and J. Edgar Hoover assigned special escorts for Goddard and his team. The team thought the FBI was over-reacting.

“It was a pain, of course,” Roy Cahill recalls. “We couldn’t visit the men’s room without having a G-man escorting us. They were also parked all night outside Bob’s house and our place on Birch Street. Esther couldn’t stand it at first, but she changed her mind after the City Hall thing.”

By early 1943, the V-2 missiles were perfected and the first rockets launched against targets in Great Britain. The Allies had been flying air raids upon V-2 launch sites in occupied northern France, and finally against Peenemünde itself. During one of the early reconnaissance missions over France, Ham Ballou—temporarily brought over to England for the purpose of gathering much-needed intelligence on the V-2 rockets—flew over the Normandy coastline in the back seat of a P-38J Lightning, snapping pictures as the pilot dodged anti-aircraft flack. Ballou returned to Worcester with little which was immediately useful to Team 390, but for a while he was able to claim that he was the only person among Goddard’s people who had come under enemy fire—until Goddard himself almost caught a bullet.

Following a devastating Allied air raid on Peenemünde, the German High Command covertly transferred the principal R & D of the
Amerika Bomber
250 miles inland to Nordhausen, where the base of a mountain had been hollowed out into vast caverns by prisoners from the nearby Dora concentration camp. This was the secret Nazi rocket facility which MI-6 had been unable to locate. Many of the same European Jews who built the Nordhausen site were later sacrificed in grotesque experiments, over the objections of von Braun and Oberth, which tested human endurance at high-altitude conditions.

Little of this mattered to Reichsführer Heinrich Himmler, whose Luftwaffe had now taken over the A-9 project from the German Army. He was more concerned with the fact, surmised through briefings with von Braun, that the German rocket team’s work had been largely inspired by Goddard’s research; he suspected that the United States might be embarked on a secret rocket program of its own. Although Gestapo agents in America had not found any evidence of a US space initiative, Himmler decided not to take chances. In March, 1943, he ordered the assassination of the only known American rocketry expert: Robert Hutchings Goddard.

For all of his brilliance, Goddard was also absentminded about the mundane tasks of life; he could forget to fold his umbrella when he walked in from the rain. On March 30, 1943, the Worcester City Clerk’s office sent the professor a letter informing him that he had not filed his city taxes. Goddard received the letter while working in his lab. Both irritated and alarmed, he put on his coat and immediately bustled out to catch the Main South trolley downtown. He left so quickly that his FBI escort, who was relieving himself in the men’s room, missed the professor’s departure.

But the Nazi Gestapo agent who had been watching Goddard for a week, waiting for such a break, didn’t miss the opportunity. Following Goddard from his post on the Clark campus, the assassin also took the downtown trolley, getting off at the same stop in front of City Hall. As Goddard marched into the building, the Nazi slipped his silenced Luger Parabellum from his trenchcoat pocket and followed the scientist inside.

At the same moment, Worcester police officer Clay Reilly was walking downstairs from the second floor of City Hall when he spotted a trenchcoated man, carrying a gun, closing in on another man, who was walking toward the tax assessor’s office. The second man was unaware that he was being pursued, but Reilly immediately sized up the situation.

“I didn’t think twice,” Reilly, now retired from the force, says in retrospect. “I pulled my pistol and shouted for the guy to freeze. He decided to mess with me instead.”

Reilly was a crack shot on the WPD firing range; his skill didn’t fail him then. The Gestapo agent turned and aimed at Reilly, and the officer nailed the assassin with one shot to the heart before the Nazi could squeeze his trigger. Goddard himself fled from City Hall, where he was spirited away by his FBI escort, who had just arrived in his car.

No identification was found on the body of the man Patrolman Reilly had shot. The
Worcester Telegram
reported the story the next day under the front page headline, “Mystery Killer Shot in City Hall.” No one knew that he had been trying to kill Goddard; Reilly didn’t recognize the scientist and Goddard had not remained at the scene. Clay Reilly was promoted to sergeant’s rank for his quick thinking, but it wasn’t until long after the war that the policeman was informed of the identity of the man he had shot or the person whose life he had saved, or the fact that J. Edgar Hoover himself had insisted upon his promotion.