Space Race Read online

  DEBORAH CADBURY

  SPACE RACE

  The Battle to Rule the Heavens

  CONTENTS

  Cover

  Title Page

  Prologue

  PART ONE: The Race for Secrets

  1 ‘The Black List’

  2 ‘The Germans have set up a giant grill’

  3 ‘Kill those German swine’

  4 ‘First of all, to the moon’

  PART TWO: The Race for Supremacy

  5 ‘We’ve not got the right Germans’

  6 ‘I am not guilty’

  7 ‘Get dressed. You have one hour’

  8 ‘Did you understand about the warrant?’

  PART THREE: The Race to Space

  9 ‘A second moon’

  10 ‘Close to the greatest dream of mankind’

  11 ‘A Race for Survival’

  PART FOUR: The Race to Orbit

  12 ‘America sleeps under a Soviet moon’

  13 ‘We really are in a great hurry’

  14 ‘Why aren’t you dead?’

  15 ‘Which one should be sent to die?’

  PART FIVE: The Race for the Moon

  16 ‘The Soviets are so far ahead’

  17 ‘Friends, before us is the moon’

  18 ‘I just need another ten years’

  19 ‘We’re burning up!’

  20 ‘How can we get out of this mess?’

  21 ‘One small step’

  Epilogue

  Acknowledgements

  Bibliography

  Index

  P.S.

  About the Author

  The Canvas Emerging Louise Tucker talks to Deborah Cadbury

  Life at a Glance

  Top Ten Books

  A Writing Life

  About the Book

  Making Space Race by Deborah Cadbury

  Read On

  Have You Read

  If You Loved This, You Might Like…

  Find Out More

  About the Author

  Praise

  By the Same Author

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  PROLOGUE

  As the two great superpowers, America and the Soviet Union, confronted each other during the Cold War, the race to the moon became a defining part of the struggle for global supremacy. Victory in this race meant more than just collecting moon rocks or planting flags on a barren wasteland. The development of missiles and rockets went hand in hand with the struggle to develop the capacity to deliver nuclear weapons, to spy on the enemy and to control space. Above all, the space race became an open contest between capitalism and communism. Victory was not just a matter of pride. National security and global stability were at stake.

  The architects of this race were two extraordinary men destined to operate as rivals on two different continents at the height of the Cold War. Both were passionate about transforming their dreams of space travel into a reality yet both were cynically used and manipulated by their political paymasters as pawns in the wider conflict between the two superpowers. Both were men of their times but with visions that are timeless. Both were hampered by the legacy of a past which returned to haunt them, threatening to destroy the achievement of their dreams. One had collaborated with the Nazis to produce rockets in slave-labour camps during the Second World War. The other had been denounced as ‘an enemy of the people’, swept up in Stalin’s purges and incarcerated in the Gulag in appalling conditions. Yet their ingenuity and vision would inspire the greatest race of the twentieth century: the race for the mastery of space.

  For much of his life, the Russian Sergei Pavlovich Korolev was obliged to live in almost complete obscurity. Referred to as simply the ‘Chief Designer’, his name was obscured in the official records, never mentioned in the press and was virtually unknown to the public in his native country during his life. Such was the paranoia in the Soviet Union that this brilliant scientist might be assassinated by Western intelligence, he was shadowed constantly by his KGB ‘aide’. When his bold exploits in space produced national celebrations in Red Square, he rarely appeared on the balcony beside the Soviet leaders and received none of the national acclaim for his achievements. Often working in harsh conditions deep within the Soviet Union, short of resources and at times challenged by jealous rivals, he pursued his quest relentlessly, with no regard for the enormous toll this took on his personal life. In the early years as Chief Designer of the Soviet Union’s missile programme, Korolev understood that Stalin controlled his fate. Lavrenti Beria, Stalin’s notorious Chief of Secret Police, was watching. False rumours, repeated failures or simply incurring displeasure could finish him at any moment. His family life destroyed by his long sentence in the Gulag, and with the loss of friends and colleagues during Stalin’s purges, Korolev’s future held no certainty. But now, with the release of classified information in Russia, for the first time the true story of this extraordinary man can at last be pieced together.

  From his place in the shadows, Sergei Korolev was well aware of his rival in America, the charismatic Wernher von Braun. With his film-star good looks, his aristocratic manner, his brilliance in inspiring others, von Braun’s smiling face often appeared in the American press and his ideas were studied closely by Korolev. Yet through all his glory years of success at NASA designing rockets that came to symbolize the might of America, von Braun carried a secret from his work as a Nazi during Hitler’s Germany. During the Second World War, thousands of slave labourers had died of disease, starvation and neglect, or had been executed at the slightest whim of their SS guards while building the rockets that von Braun had designed to win the war for Nazi Germany. Sinister details of his assignment to save the Third Reich as Hitler’s leading rocket engineer were classified after the war by the US authorities under the codename Project Paperclip – so called because a paperclip was allegedly attached to every file which was to be whitewashed. Von Braun’s own secrets have only recently been unravelled.

  These two men – Sergei Pavlovich Korolev in the Soviet Union and the former Nazi, Wernher von Braun in America – were both obsessed by the same vision of breaking the bounds of gravity and reaching the moon and beyond. ‘In every century men were looking at the dark blue sky and dreaming,’ Korolev told his wife. ‘And now I’m close to the greatest dream of mankind.’ Both found their ideas were way ahead of their time. When Sergei Korolev campaigned simply to speak publicly about launching the world’s first satellite, ‘a second moon’, to the Academy of Artillery Sciences in 1948, he was repeatedly opposed, his ideas being dismissed as ‘dangerous dreams’. Such notions had no place in Stalin’s Soviet Union. As for von Braun, his vision of launching rockets and exploring the universe was considered so far-fetched in America even by the early 1950s that the only professionals who would take him seriously were those in the film industry.

  In the 1950s, President Dwight D. Eisenhower feared that the Soviet Union would regard the development of rockets by America that were capable of putting men into space as a hostile military act. If men could be launched into space, so could spy satellites and nuclear warheads. The fragile peace between the Soviet Union and America could be blown apart. However, by 1957, much to the American public’s consternation, the Soviet Union took the lead in space. Sputnik inspired terror – a Soviet satellite was flying over America. The US was in a race for survival, declared the New York Times. Away from the public’s gaze, America’s politicians and military elite panicked. They were horrified by the lead the Soviets had apparently developed in space technology.

  As the Cold War escalated in the 1960s and the need for increasingly sophisticated weaponry grew, their ideas were no longer confined to the realms of science fiction. Both men endured enormous pressure from their polit
ical masters to win one of the most fiercely contested battles of the Cold War. Against this backdrop, the world struggled to come to terms with the constant threat of nuclear war. The Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962 brought the world to the very brink of disaster, the war in Vietnam raged on and the nuclear arms race threatened to spiral out of control. In the Soviet Union, Red Army troops were trained for nuclear combat; in the United States, citizens built nuclear shelters as weapons of such explosive power that they could wipe any European city off the face of the earth in one blast were being mass-produced.

  The race to the moon was to become one of the defining events in the titanic struggle between two superpowers. With the release of records from the former Soviet Union it can now be shown just how close the Soviet Union came to winning this race. Although they lived on separate continents and never met, Sergei Korolev and Wernher von Braun became powerful rivals, locked in an unparalleled contest. Both men were prepared to sacrifice everything to claim the moon and the glory that went with it. But there could only be one winner.

  PART ONE

  The Race for Secrets

  ‘It will take 30 hours to get to the moon and 24 hours to clear Russian customs officials there …’

  BOB HOPE, 1959

  CHAPTER ONE

  ‘The Black List’

  In the mid-winter of 1945, the war in Europe had reached its final stages. Germany was crumbling under continued heavy Allied bombing. Cities were being obliterated, magnificent buildings returned to their original elements of so much stone, sand and lime. The massive Allied raids had demolished towns and cities on such a scale that Bomber Command was running out of significant targets. The attack on the Western Front was unrelenting, the dark shapes of Allied soldiers slowly advancing across occupied lands. The Rhine would soon be in Allied hands. From the east, with an unstoppable fury, the Soviets were approaching. In January 1945, the Red Army launched a massive offensive as 180 divisions overran Poland and East Prussia. Berlin was in their sights.

  Right in the path of the advancing Soviets, at Peenemünde on the Baltic coast, lay a hidden village housing some five thousand scientists and their families. Discreetly obscured by dense forests at the northern tip of the island of Usedom, it was here that Hitler’s ‘wonder weapons’ were being developed. The trees ended suddenly to reveal a chain-link fence and a series of checkpoints. At the local railway terminal a notice reminded passengers: ‘What you see, what you hear, when you leave, leave it here.’ Across a stretch of water known as the Peene River, a large village could be seen. It looked like an army barracks with regimented rows of well-built hostels. The sound and smell of the sea were never far away but remained invisible. About half a mile further on, hidden among the trees, was a scene from science fiction at the very cutting edge of technology, known as ‘Rocket City’.

  The world’s largest rocket research facility was created by a young aristocrat named Wernher von Braun. At thirty-two, he was head of rocket development for the German army. A natural leader, he possessed the ‘confidence and looks of a film star – and knew it’, according to one contemporary account, although what people remembered most about him was his charm. He had a way of lifting the most ordinary of colleagues to a new appreciation of their worth. His organizational skills had turned Peenemünde into a modern annexe of German weaponry. However, very few people were allowed to see beyond the practical engineer, who dreamed not of destructive weaponry, but, improbably, of space. He was driven by the ambition of building a rocket that could achieve ‘the dream of centuries: to break free of the earth’s gravitational pull and go to the planets and beyond’. He envisaged space stations that would support whole colonies in space. ‘In time,’ he believed, ‘it would be possible to go to the moon, by rocket it is only 100 hours away.’ But in Hitler’s Germany he was forced to keep such visions to himself. These were dreams for the future – a future that was increasingly in doubt.

  Hitler had pinned his last desperate hopes of saving the Third Reich on von Braun’s greatest achievement: a rocket known as the A-4. Even those working with von Braun were overawed on seeing this strange vehicle for the first time. In 1943, his technical assistant Dieter Huzel remembered being taken to a vast hangar which loomed above the trees. Once inside, the noise was deafening, a combination of overhead cranes, the whir of electric motors and the hiss of compressed gas. It took a second for Huzel’s eyes to adjust to the strong shafts of sunlight, which cut across the hangar from windows high in the far wall. ‘Suddenly I saw them – four fantastic shapes but a few feet away, strange and towering above us in the subdued light. They fitted the classic concept of a space ship, smooth and torpedo shaped…’ Painted a dull olive-green, standing 46 feet tall and capable of flying more than two hundred miles, the A-4 was the most powerful rocket in the world. ‘I just stood and stared, my mouth hanging open for an exclamation that never occurred. I could only think that they must be out of some science fiction film.’

  Far removed from any fanciful notion of space exploration, for Hitler this rocket represented the ultimate weapon that could save the Third Reich and prove German superiority to the world. In July 1943, Wernher von Braun had been summoned to Wolfsschanze, the Führer’s ‘Wolf’s Lair’ in Rastenberg, East Prussia, to give a secret presentation. Walter Dornberger, the army general who ran rocket development at Peenemünde, had not seen Hitler since the beginning of the war and was ‘shocked’ at the change in him. The Führer entered the room looking aged and worn, stooping slightly as though carrying an invisible weight. Living in bunkers for much of the time had given his face the unnatural pallor of someone who spent his days in the dark. It was devoid of expression, seemingly uninterested in the proceedings, except for his eyes, which were worryingly alive, touching everything with quick glances.

  Hitler’s original response to the rocket had initially hampered von Braun’s team. He had had a dream that no rocket could ever reach England, and simply refused to believe in the idea. Now, in the half-light, as he watched footage of the first successful launch of the A-4 shooting faster than the speed of sound over the Baltic Sea, his concentration became intense. With apparent satisfaction he took in an impression of the blond, blue-eyed von Braun, a perfect specimen of his ‘master race’ talking with uncontained enthusiasm as he outlined technical details of assembly, mobile launching facilities and testing. Here was the perfect terror weapon that could carry a 1-ton warhead, could be launched from any location and was undetectable on approach.

  As von Braun finished his presentation, it was clear that Hitler had been greatly affected. His former listlessness vanished as he fired questions with increasing excitement. He had found the weapon that could win him the war. ‘Why could I not believe in the success of your work?’ he said to Dornberger. ‘Europe and the rest of the world will be too small to contain a war with such weapons. Humanity will not be able to endure it.’ His next demand was that the A-4 – soon renamed the V-2, or Vengeance Weapon 2 – should carry a warhead not of 1 ton, but 10 tons, and be mass-produced with output of rockets raised to 2000 a month. As though recharging that core of nervous energy that responded to ideas of destruction, he continued: ‘What I want is annihilation – an annihilating effect.’ Recklessly, he was to gamble his dwindling resources on experimental rocket science. ‘What encouragement to the home front when we attack the English with it!’ With its deadly warhead it would surely turn the tide of the war and ultimately allow a German victory.

  Eighteen months later, this was looking less certain. With the Eastern Front collapsing, the Soviets liberated Warsaw on 17 January 1945. The Red Army swept across the country in little more than a week and reached the Oder. Berlin was only one hundred miles away. At Peenemünde, von Braun and his men could hear the steady barrage of the Soviet guns, increasing in volume as the wind changed, imparting a feeling of urgency. Outside, the streets teemed with the human flotsam and the debris of war as refugees fleeing the Red Army trudged through the freezing Baltic winter like so
me ragged army.

  With the death of well over twenty-seven million Soviet citizens caught up in Hitler’s war, the Russian appetite for revenge could not be satisfied. Writers such as Ilya Ehrenburg, who drafted Soviet propaganda broadcasts and articles, constantly urged retaliation against German civilians, unchecked by Stalin. ‘We now understand that the Germans are not human,’ he raged. ‘Let us kill. If you do not kill a German, a German will kill you …’ As the Soviet army swept across Europe from the east, there were endless reports of brutality. In countless villages, houses were plundered and torched, civilians summarily shot. ‘The tales of horror were as constant and unvarying as the unending stream of pitiful humanity,’ wrote Dieter Huzel. ‘Pillaging, burning, wanton killing – and worst of all rape and murder of old women, mothers to be and young women.’ German civilians fled leaving villages abandoned with no attempt at defence against the Soviet onslaught.

  Von Braun could hear the workforce of Peenemünde, the civilian engineers being trained in the use of rifles in the forlorn hope of defending the town before the great tidal wave of the Soviet army engulfed them. Any hope of trying to defend the town seemed futile – yet it was almost impossible to escape. The SS were trained in the brutal suppression of all opponents of the regime and were effectively in control of Germany. Roadblocks were being set up to catch deserters; even relatives of deserters, it was rumoured, could be sent to concentration camps. Some of von Braun’s engineers who had openly expressed their doubts about defending Peenemünde were now dead, their bodies strung up by piano wire and hanging stiffly from trees in the main street. They bore placards that read: ‘I was too cowardly to defend the homeland.’ Their SS murderers had left their bodies hanging as a warning to others.

  Confronted with this perilous situation, von Braun feared for the loss of his staff and his life’s work. He was determined to find a way to evacuate his entire team to a relatively safer part of Germany, but the scale of such an operation could hardly be concealed from the SS. It would require the movement of thousands of workers as well as their families and truckloads of heavy equipment. There was also a treasure trove of documents: 65,000 technical drawings and blueprints alone had been required simply to bring the first V-2 from drawing board to test site. This included data from thousands of painstaking hours of trial and error testing, together with meticulous drawings of each component. There was nothing like this in the world. Whoever acquired these blueprints would inherit the cutting edge of rocket research. More important still, for von Braun the drawings of the A-4 – and its descendants the A-9 and A-10 – represented his vision of space flight. He had guarded these documents against sabotage, theft and air raids, and now he still hoped he could find a way of saving his work and his men.