Breaking the Chains of Gravity Page 7
In December, the AAF Science Advisory Group (SAG) was staffed with experts in fields ranging from aircraft design and aerodynamics to fuels and propulsion. As his deputy, von Kármán selected his friend and colleague Hugh Dryden, an aerodynamicist from the National Bureau of Standards. Dryden had been twelve years old when he saw his first airplane, a fifty-horsepower Antoinette with a top speed of forty miles per hour that left him thoroughly unimpressed. The passenger and cargo payloads of airships outstripped the capabilities of winged machines designed for commerce, exploration, and recreation, the preteen wrote in an English composition just days later. It was an acute insight that earned him a failing grade but hinted at the course his career would take. Following a path of excelled academics, Dryden enrolled at Johns Hopkins University when he was just fourteen and graduated three years later with honors. By twenty, he’d added a master’s degree to his credentials. He spent the 1920s working at the Bureau of Standards on design characteristics that would allow airplanes to fly faster than the speed of sound, paying special attention to issues of compressibility, the phenomenon of air building up in front of a fast-moving airplane.
This work, done at a time when airplanes were barely flying at half the speed of sound, led Dryden to the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics in 1931. The NACA, the leading national body for aviation research, had been established as a rider, a minor add-on to a naval appropriations bill in 1915 to help the United States gain air superiority during and in the wake of the First World War, a role it would reprise during the Second World War. Not long after the war in Europe began, Dryden was named the head of the NACA’s fledgling guided missile section under the Office of Scientific Research and Development. In this capacity he led the team that developed the Bat guided missile, a U.S. Navy weapon that combined an existing airframe with a state-of-the-art thousand-pound bomb. Gyrostabilized with an autopilot system and steered by a tail elevator powered by small wind-driven generators, the Bat was America’s first reliable precision bomb that successfully sank a number of enemy submarines and earned Dryden a Presidential Certificate of Merit.
The call for Dryden to join the SAG came from von Kármán himself. The Hungarian physicist told Dryden over the phone that he had agreed to travel to Europe for General Arnold’s project to assess enemy wartime breakthroughs in flight, explore German laboratories, and interview their scientists. Von Kármán wanted Dryden to bring his experience with missiles to Europe as well. Dryden accepted the appointment, and in December started learning everything he could about the V-2. One of his overseas tasks would be to interview its creator, Wernher von Braun.
Assembling the scientists that made up the SAG was one thing. Getting the group into Europe to carry out their research and interviews was another. The war was still raging. Not only was it unclear how exactly the scientists would manage their assignment, they would need clearance from General Eisenhower just to enter the European Theater. The general, meanwhile, was singularly focused on orchestrating the final push to crush Germany. He didn’t want civilians in the area and didn’t need the distraction of a group of American scientists with no military training moving through the country. But by the same token, the scientists needed to find their German counterparts before it was too late. Every day increased the chances of them being bombed by the Allies, captured by Russian soldiers, or even killed by their own German garrison.
Fear began seeping through Germany as 1945 dawned. The East Prussian Offensive had pushed the Russian front just fifty miles from the German border, and it was only a matter of time before Russian soldiers crossed into the country. In the west, Allied troops had liberated France and were pushing toward Berlin. The feeling that Germany’s collapse was imminent bred paranoia, and the country’s leaders were trying to hold on to the last vestiges of control to turn the war around.
At Peenemünde, von Braun’s team continued working on an advanced version of the A-4 including one called the A-4b, short for A-4 bastard. It was an enlarged A-4 with two sharply swept-back wings 18.5 feet across welded to its midsection inspired by the Luftwaffe’s rocket-powered Messerschmitt Me163B Comet interceptor aircraft von Braun’s team often saw streaking through the skies. If they could develop a winged A-4 with room for a pilot, the engineers reasoned, they might be about to show up the rocket planes. Designating their version as the A-4b was a means to fast-track this advanced program by folding it under the guise of the high-priority status granted the A-4 program. This strange-looking missile was launched from Peenemünde on January 24, rising straight up about fifty miles before its fuel stores were depleted. It then arced over to begin the aerodynamically assisted gliding descent its wings were designed for. It was a successful flight until one of the wings broke off, sending it crashing to the ground. The flight was, for a new design, considered a success, but it wasn’t one the rocket team expected to build on. They had bigger and more pressing concerns.
Not one member of von Braun’s team could deny that, having built the first functional missile launched on civilians, they wouldn’t be popular after the war ended. They each wanted two things at that point: to escape alive and to continue working on rockets in the future. Since his release from Stettin, von Braun had been ready to leave Peenemünde on a moment’s notice—he kept a trunk packed full of vital documents ready at all times. He put his staff on the same alert.
Toward the end of January, the rocket men gathered in a parlor at the Inselhoff Hotel in Zinnowitz near Peenemünde and turned to their leader for guidance. Von Braun began the meeting by reminding his men of their common passion for rocketry and spaceflight. Then he added that even if Germany lost the war, they had the upper hand because even enemy nations wanted their knowledge. This gave the scientists some freedom to choose where they wanted to go, and so they weighed their options. By that time the V-2s had been falling on London for months, making Britain an unlikely nation willing to support continued rocketry work. The Russians weren’t an option either. From what little the men knew of Stalin, they felt certain that surrendering to Russia would be trading one oppressive regime for another. None were keen on France, which had been under Nazi occupation. That left the United States, a nation that hadn’t been directly affected by the A-4 and that might be interested in bringing the technology into its own military. They all agreed that surrendering to the Americans was their best hope for survival and a future. They just had to find the Americans before anything happened to them.
Unknown to the German rocket team, the Americans were on their way to meet them. Weeks after the rocket team’s meeting at the Inselhoff Hotel, the Army Air Force finally gained permission from Eisenhower for the SAG to enter Europe, question German scientists, and inspect German laboratories. The knowledge gained in Europe would feed into the army’s Project Hermes, an ordnance program established to first unpack the technology of the V-2 rockets and then build an American version that could meet the needs of future army field forces.
But a meeting between the German rocket team and the American scientists wouldn’t be easy to come by in a war zone. The conclusions of the Yalta Conference promised to complicate matters as well. Between February 4 and 11, 1945, President Roosevelt, British prime minister Churchill, and Soviet premier Stalin conferred at Yalta in the Crimean Peninsula of Russia to discuss the fate of Germany. The Allies’ intent was to destroy German militarism and Nazism and assist the liberated population. To this end, they decided to break Germany into four occupation zones following the war, each under British, American, Soviet, or French control. Though each nation had its own goals to recover certain people or places after the war’s end—the V-2 scientists and sites being high on everyone’s list as a form of intellectual reparations—no nation could recover anything or anyone from another’s zone once the occupation took effect.
On January 12, 1945, Dryden was still studying the German rockets in the United States when the Russian Red Army mounted an offensive against the German front in Poland. They broke through the
Nazi guard and began marching toward Berlin, passing so close to Peenemünde that the rocket team could hear artillery fire. Von Braun knew that as soon as Berlin fell the war would be over, and hearing the war so close by underscored the reality that his time at Peenemünde was fast coming to an end. But for the moment, von Braun and his men remained at the mercy of higher authorities who would issue orders and check they were being followed. The chaos seeping through Germany offered a silver lining. Von Braun knew someone would eventually slip up, issue a conflicting order or something just vague enough to give him a chance to get his men out from under Nazi rule. He would have to be ready.
Unfortunately, von Braun also had to contend with Kammler, the special commissioner for the A-4 program whose recent promotion to lieutenant general put him in charge of the army’s V-2 arsenal as well as the scientists who built it. As hope for a German victory faded, Kammler’s devotion to the Reich turned into a desperate fanaticism that shone through in the orders he gave von Braun. Kammler first ordered that the rocket team evacuate Peenemünde and hide in Bad Sachsa, a town southwest of Berlin. While his men were readying to leave the site that had been their home of more than a decade, Kammler ordered von Braun to meet with him at the A-4 factory at Mittelwerk. There, in the shadow of the death camp that was still producing deadly missiles, Kammler ordered von Braun to concentrate all secret weapons projects, including the A-4, in the centrally located Harz Mountains near Bad Sachsa. The area was a perfect hiding spot, naturally protected, but also one that kept the rocket team firmly under the thumb of the SS.
Kammler’s orders weren’t the only ones landing on von Braun’s desk. There were others telling him and his men to stay where they were and fight any incoming soldiers to the death to save Peenemünde, their materials, documents, and rockets. It was a wholly terrifying prospect. His men were scientists, not soldiers trained in hand-to-hand combat. Staying behind to fight and protect Peenemünde was a death sentence, but it was also the opportunity von Braun had been waiting for. Conflicting orders gave him some freedom to pick which ones he wanted to follow, and it was lucky that those coming from the SS were those that put his team on the path toward finding the Americans. Disobeying Kammler’s orders was the likeliest way to be killed by a firing squad, and evacuating toward central Germany was the Peenemünde team’s best chance and the only one von Braun might get. He was going to take it.
CHAPTER FOUR
Escape and Surrender
Allied bombers roared through German skies night and day, each attack on a city, a factory, or a communications center reaffirming that it was only a matter of time before the country was left in ruins and forced to surrender. This backdrop bred chaos, and Peenemünde was no exception. The rocket team could hear Russian guns in the distance. They watched as refugees marched wearily across the island of Usedom near their rocket facility, carrying with them scant possessions and stories of brutality suffered at the hands of a vengeful Russian army. In a last-ditch effort to protect the site, the staff at Peenemünde were armed and the civilian workers trained with the Home Guard in anticipation of a battle for control of the rocket center.
But the chaos helped provide a cover for von Braun’s evacuation of his rocket team, as did a typo. Months after the 1943 Allied raid on Peenemünde, Walter Dornberger was transferred from the army’s Ordnance department and promoted to army commissioner for special tasks, abbreviated in German to BzbV Heer. The promotion gave Dornberger more power within the army, though it did little to help him counter Heinrich Himmler’s attempts to control the A-4 program. A letterhead issued to Dornberger as BzbV Heer had been misprinted as VzbV. Von Braun’s transportation coordinator, Erich Nimwegen, who was known to routinely skirt the line of illegal activities, exploited this typo by turning it into the acronym for a fictitious top secret project within the SS, Vorhaben zur Besondern Verwendung, roughly “Project for Special Disposition.” With trigger-happy SS guards everywhere, von Braun knew that his team moving documentation and equipment would draw their attention. That no one would recognize the acronym “VzbV” would serve as a shield since the average guard wouldn’t have clearance to know about a special project and would know better than to question the team. But to be safe, Nimwegen also wrote transportation orders for the group on the misprinted forms. Von Braun signed them using his rank as a SS Sturmbahnführer, or major. It was one of the few times, if not the only time, he exploited this title.
As the group prepared to leave Peenemünde, “VzbV” began appearing in massive letters on boxes of documents and materials. The acronym was similarly printed in several foot-high letters on the sides of the cars, trucks, and railcars into which the men loaded their material and personnel. The first train, carrying 525 members of the rocket team and their families, as well as boxcars of materials, left on February 17 under the auspices of the VzbV. Almost immediately they were stopped at a roadblock where SS guards were looking for deserting soldiers or civilians shirking the duty of fighting to save their homeland. Nimwegen flashed the travel orders signed by SS major von Braun and pointed to the cars stamped with “VzbV.” Rather than risk the punishment of denying an SS special group passage, the uncertain guards stepped aside to let the rocket team pass.
Two days after the evacuation began, the last rocket launched from Peenemünde. A little over a month later, on February 27, von Braun made his final trip to the island center after a month traveling around the country setting up the new site for the rocket team. He told the few men left at Peenemünde that he had found space for them at a central development location. They would even have test stands for the A-4 program, a surprising show of support for their continued work so late in the war.
Von Braun knew it was all in vain. But he also knew the Gestapo was watching his every move, and that he could only retain the logistical support to evacuate his men as long as he maintained the appearance that he was still working on developing the A-4 for Germany’s ultimate victory over the Allies. He traveled enthusiastically through the Harz Mountains seeking out mines, schools, and factories that might be used as temporary A-4 facilities. He presented to Kammler plans for new test facilities and launch sites. But von Braun knew no new site could possibly support the program as Peenemünde had, not to mention it was impossible for work to continue uninterrupted with the entire team moving in a slow convoy through the countryside. For von Braun, continuing to organize the program that would build rockets that would never fly was all a charade. Kammler, still convinced Germany could win the war, believed the ruse.
As winter turned to spring, von Braun continued to travel throughout the country under the auspices of advancing the A-4 program. And with a nearly constant overflight of Allied Thunderbolt and Mustang fighter planes, he began traveling increasingly by night to avoid detection, a relative quiet he welcomed in an otherwise hectic schedule. In the early hours of March 12, the rhythmic thumping of tires traveling at sixty miles per hour on the autobahn from Thuringia to Berlin lulled an exhausted von Braun to sleep in the passenger’s seat. The sound had a similarly soporific effect on the driver, and near the town of Weissenfels the vehicle careened off a forty-foot-high embankment. Inside the airborne car, the sudden absence of the sound of tires on pavement woke von Braun, who instinctually tried to protect himself from the impending crash by raising his left arm above his head. An instant later, the car landed 130 feet from the road near a railway track. The force was enough to break von Braun’s arm and shoulder and knock him and his driver unconscious. Behind them, another car full of men from Peenemünde spotted the wreckage off the road. Von Braun woke up in a private room in a hospital in nearby Bleicherode with his arm in a heavy cast. He was bedridden, his hectic travel schedule replaced by a stream of visitors day and night.
Confined to the hospital and increasingly anxious for the war to end, von Braun learned on his thirty-third birthday that the Allies had crossed the Rhine River. American, Canadian, and British forces had moved from Marseille in France and pushed through
Holland so quickly that German defense forces were caught off guard. One armored division participating in the offensive successfully secured the Ludendorff Bridge before the German defenses could destroy it, preserving a key path toward Berlin.
When the news reached U.S. Army Lieutenant General Omar Bradley, he called Eisenhower, who was at dinner in Reims with division commanders of the Army Air Force. Eisenhower was incredulous when Bradley said he had secured a permanent bridge over the Rhine. It was a dream scenario. Eisenhower told Bradley to send as many divisions over that bridge as he could. Bradley agreed, telling the general that had been his instinct, too, but he’d thought it best to check with the commander of the European Theater first. It was one of Eisenhower’s happy moments in the war. The assault had gone like clockwork and the Allies had pierced Germany. By the end of March, German resistance on the Rhine had collapsed. It was only a matter of time before the war would be over. All that remained was for the Allies to take Berlin. Then would come the division of a defeated Germany as per the arrangement laid out after the Yalta Conference.
This politically ordained division of Germany complicated matters for the Army Air Force’s Science Advisory Group. Under Theodore von Kármán, the men were planning a trip to Germany to interview the scientists who had developed the A-4 and other advanced weapons and also bring back hardware to the United States as part of Project Hermes, the American V-2 program aimed at developing a new missile. But according to the new political boundaries crossing through Germany, Peenemünde was slated to fall under Soviet control. The Americans would have to reach the rocket site before the postwar occupation went into effect and do so without angering their temporary Soviet allies.