Space Race Read online

  He was confronted by several conflicting orders on how to cope with the advancing Red Army: from the local defence commander, the Gauleiter of Pomerania, the Ministry of Armaments, the army ordnance department in Berlin. Some directed von Braun and the rocket team to stay and fight to the death with the home guard ‘in defence of the holy soil of Pomerania’. Others ordered immediate evacuation. ‘I had ten orders on my desk,’ von Braun admitted to his team. ‘Five promised death by firing squad if we moved and five said I would be shot if we didn’t move.’

  For Wernher von Braun the operation at Peenemünde represented the culmination of a vision that had started in childhood. His first experiments in rocketry began when he was a boy of twelve. With his younger brother, Magnus, he had created a glorified go-cart powered by six enormous skyrocket fireworks. Zooming down Tiergarten Strasse in Berlin in a haphazard course, it had frightened all the summer-frocked housewives before crashing into a grocer’s shop. His aristocratic parents, Baron Magnus von Braun and his wife Emmy, both from families that were very much guardians of tradition, were surprised at their son’s appetite for science. In the hope that he would stop firing his rockets among the tenant farmers on the family estate in Silesia and follow more gentlemanly pursuits, they bought him a telescope. It had the opposite effect, merely inflaming his interest. With it he explored the moon and wondered at the stars, new worlds that, one day, could be explored by rockets.

  ‘I was deeply disappointed by the sketchy information I could glean from my space gazing,’ he wrote later, perhaps frustrated by the small size of his telescope. Then one day he came across an essay ‘which showed how a certain Professor Hermann Oberth claimed it would be possible to fly to the moon and the planets on rockets. It seemed to me that this was a much better way of learning about our nearest planets than that offered by the telescope.’ Born in Transylvania, Hermann Oberth had studied mathematics and physics before he set out his startling vision of space travel in 1923 in his book The Rocket into Interplanetary Space, in which he claimed it would one day be possible for rockets to carry men into space. Oberth’s ideas were subsequently incorporated into a popular 1929 film by Fritz Lang, Frau im Mond (Woman in the Moon).

  For the young von Braun – poring over Oberth’s studies showing the possibility of launching a satellite into the earth’s orbit or building a space station – it was a revelation. Here at last were the calculations that would allow humankind to defy gravity, and he was enraptured at the idea of flying to distant planets. Oberth described a ‘recoil rocket’ based on principles first defined by Isaac Newton in his third law of motion: for every action there must be a reaction of equal force but in the opposite direction. It is not unlike the firing of a bullet from a gun. When the trigger is squeezed, the bullet rushes out of the barrel creating a recoil which jolts the rifle butt back on the marksman’s shoulder. In a similar way, a rocket is like the barrel of a gun – and the gases ejected from the back are like the bullet creating a recoil which propels the rocket upwards. The power of the rocket can be measured in tons of recoil – or thrust. To achieve liftoff, the thrust must exceed the weight of the rocket. And just as a shell rapidly reaches a certain speed and then coasts through a curved path towards its target, so a rocket needs a considerable initial speed before it is carried by its own momentum. For the young von Braun the message was clear: gain enough speed and space could be within his grasp. He just needed a powerful enough engine.

  By the time he was nineteen, von Braun had joined the Society for Space Travel based at the optimistically entitled Raketenflugplaz, or ‘Rocket Airport’. Here, in a disused army dump outside Berlin, a group of rocket enthusiasts met to experiment with rocket design. They developed small prototypes and attempted test firing. Oberth had argued that rather than solid-state fuels like gunpowder, which, once alight, burn uncontrollably, liquid fuels were the future. The flow of a liquid fuel to the engine can be turned on and off and regulated like a tap, allowing for more controlled combustion. He recommended alcohol or gasoline fuel combined with liquid oxygen as the oxidizer. Von Braun and the other enthusiasts experimented with these ideas in their first rocket known as the Mirak, or ‘Minimum Rocket’.

  The first flights were dogged by explosions or wildly erratic firing – a million miles from any dreams of space. Yet by 1932, von Braun, never one to lack confidence, and his colleagues were ready to demonstrate their test rocket at the army’s artillery range at Kummersdorf, south of Berlin. Although the rocket rose just 100 feet before veering off course and crashing, von Braun’s technical knowledge impressed Captain Walter Dornberger, who ran the rocket programme for the army. By the time he was twenty, while still a student at the University of Berlin, von Braun was recruited by the army and charged with building a rocket that was superior to the largest guns.

  Von Braun began designs on his first rocket, known as the A-1. They were ready to test it in 1933 – the year Hitler came to power – but the liquid-fuelled engine blew up on launch. That same year, von Braun’s father exchanged his senior government position as Minister of Agriculture for a quiet country life on his estate in Silesia and invited his son to join him. Wernher von Braun, however, was absorbed by plans for the more elaborate A-2, which successfully flew about one and half miles. By 1936, as Hitler’s new, enlarged army marched to reoccupy the demilitarized Rhineland, von Braun was hard at work on the A-3 and then, even more ambitiously, on the A-4 – a rocket of such size and significance that secret new launch facilities were to be developed at Peenemünde. The army wanted a rocket that could travel 160 miles bearing a 1-ton warhead which would land within half a mile of the target. For von Braun it was the perfect opportunity: it would be the largest and most powerful rocket ever created. ‘We were only interested in one thing – the exploration of space,’ he claimed later. ‘Our main concern was how to get the most out of the Golden Calf.’

  Research for the A-4 proceeded slowly at first as von Braun’s team tried to introduce major innovations. The engine, designed by the brilliant Dr Walter Thiel, was to incorporate several original features that would enable it to achieve more thrust. The fuel was ejected into the engine combustion chamber as a fine spray, which allowed it to mix better with the liquid oxygen. This improved mixing of the propellants gave more efficient combustion and reduced the risk of explosions. Thiel changed the design of the combustion chamber to give greater volume and incorporated a pre-chamber where the propellants were mixed: these innovations also facilitated a smoother burn. Pumps were used to direct the fuel to the engine at a faster rate to give yet more thrust. The result was an engine producing about 56,000 pounds of thrust, seventeen times more powerful than any previous design.

  Apart from the new engine design, the shape of the rocket itself was more aerodynamic, with large fins for stability and rudders at the bottom of the fins for control. The guidance system was greatly improved. It was based on an inertial guidance system, a spinning gyro or wheel which could measure the position and acceleration of the rocket and then regulate guide vanes in the exhaust which could deflect the thrust to control direction. There was even a radio transmission system to communicate data to the ground – the first developments in telemetry. With a growing staff of several thousand at Peenemünde to help him accomplish this, in the space of a few short years von Braun had progressed from amateur enthusiast to the technical director of the largest rocket facility in the world. And as more funds conveniently flowed through, von Braun joined the Nazi Party in 1937. If Kristallnacht – ‘the Night of Broken Glass’, the smashing up of Jewish homes and businesses in November 1938 – did anything to make him question his party membership, his work was so absorbing that he did not act on it.

  When Hitler invaded Poland in September 1939, research for the army assumed a new urgency. Despite high hopes, the initial testing on the A-4 in 1942 ended in midair explosions, but by 3 October they were at last rewarded. The rocket flew about 120 miles at a speed of 3500 mph, and, with an altitude of almost six
ty miles, was the first to reach the fringes of space. This was an extraordinary achievement. At a celebration later that day, Dornberger triumphantly announced that rocket propulsion was indeed ‘practical for space travel’. It was the dawn of a ‘new era of space transportation’.

  The film of this successful launch was what Dornberger and von Braun had shown Hitler in July 1943, but their success was short-lived. After months of testing, problems remained, the missile frequently exploding before it reached the target area. Under increasing pressure to deliver the Führer’s wonder weapons, von Braun went to the new testing site in Poland in July 1944, intending to stand at the spot where he estimated the rocket should explode in order to see for himself what could be going wrong. The rocket was fired two hundred miles away from the test site at Blizna. This time, to his astonishment, he saw it was exactly on target, aiming for the very place where he was waiting. In panic he started to run, hoping he had the direction right and realizing that he was likely to be killed by his own expertise. ‘I was hurled high in the sky by a thunderous explosion,’ he remembered. Clearly the guidance system was beginning to work.

  With this increasing success, the SS became more interested in the rocket programme. The head of the Gestapo and Reichsführer of the SS, Heinrich Himmler himself, began to take notice. After an army officer, Count Claus von Stauffenberg, failed in his attempt to assassinate Hitler on 20 July 1944, Himmler was able to consolidate his power, gaining control of the Home Army as well. Just over two weeks later, von Braun’s friend and colleague of thirteen years, General Walter Dornberger, found himself replaced by the notorious SS officer Special Commissioner Hans Kammler.

  Kammler, an engineer himself, had gained rapid promotion within the Third Reich, dedicating his ruthless intelligence to the promotion of his own career. With unswerving fanaticism, he had built concentration camps, including Auschwitz-Birkenau, and managed and controlled slave labour, relentlessly demanding heavy work from inmates who were close to starvation. He had systematically dismantled the Warsaw ghetto, destroying all evidence of German atrocities. His dedication to the cause won him Himmler’s trust, who gave him full power over the rocket programme and proclaimed that ‘my orders and his directions are to be obeyed’.

  Von Braun and Dornberger, whose responsibilities were now greatly diminished, were appalled at this projection of Kammler to the top and recognized the danger that now stalked their enterprise. The man was a chimera: with mobile features and eyes full of expression went the coarse hands of a labourer. Despite the favourable first impressions he created, wrote Dornberger, like ‘some hero of the Renaissance’, he soon found that Kammler had an air of ‘brutality, derision, disdain and over-weaning pride’. He was intensely alert to any slight, alternating this with overconfidence. His amazing ego swallowed flattery whole, and he would hold centre stage, careful to surround himself with obvious inferiors, issuing orders, never taking suggestions, erupting into megalomania. Logical, ordered thought and careful forward planning were things of the past. The whole V-2 enterprise now spun in the mad chaotic orb of the ambitious Kammler’s whim. He continued to work feverishly for a German victory, supervising the development of a secret factory buried underground in the Harz Mountains in central Germany near Nordhausen, known simply as ‘Mittelwerk’, or ‘Central Works’, where the A-4 was being built. By August 1944 more than a thousand missiles had been made and Kammler ordered that they were to be put into action at once.

  Even as he was drafting the manual to issue to the military, von Braun could not quite dismiss his fanciful notions of space in his ‘Top Secret’ guide for the firing crews, a fact which doubtless contributed to Kammler’s view of von Braun as ‘too young and too childish … for the job’:

  On this planet where you live

  In an age of guided missiles

  A sky ship in the universe

  A long dream of mankind

  May someday fascinate our century

  But first you must master a new weapon …

  (Extract from the V-2 manual, 1944)

  On 8 September 1944, the V-2 bombardment of London began. The age of the ballistic missile arrived in Chiswick in west London as the first V-2 struck at 6.43 p.m. Travelling at four times the speed of sound, the V-2s soon created terror as they plunged silently on to their targets: the explosion was always heard first, followed by the dreaded sound of its approach. For long-suffering Londoners who had survived the Blitz and countless bombing raids, the massive explosion without the accompanying warning sound of the bomber had just the unnerving effect that Hitler had hoped for. Despite production difficulties during the autumn, attacks intensified. The Allies responded, bombing roads to the mobile launch sites on the Dutch coast and blocking fuel supplies. Yet even with the situation disintegrating in Germany, Kammler insisted on stepping up production of the V-2.

  By January 1945, the Soviets were advancing rapidly across East Prussia but Kammler was slow to issue instructions to stop the team in Peenemünde from falling into enemy hands. In spite of the increased danger to the community at Peenemünde, von Braun could not readily escape without Kammler’s approval. In doing so he would be perceived as a deserter and Hitler had made clear his intolerance of deserters on the wireless:

  I expect every German to do his duty to the last and take upon himself every sacrifice he will be asked to make. I expect every able bodied German to fight with complete disregard for his personal safety … I expect all women and girls to continue supporting this struggle with utmost fanaticism …

  The very next day, on 31 January, the crisis at Peenemünde came to a head. From Nordhausen, 250 miles south from where the V-2 rockets were manufactured, an order finally came from Kammler to evacuate Peenemünde. The engineers were to carry on with their production at Mittelwerk, well away from the Allied armies. Within hours of Kammler’s order, however, an equally specific command arrived from the army chief instructing von Braun’s team to defend the area to the last. All men at Peenemünde were directed to take up arms and join the ‘people’s army’ in defending the Fatherland against the Soviets.

  Von Braun summoned his senior staff into his office. He looked at each serious face around the table. ‘Kammler has just ordered the relocation of all the most important defence projects into central Germany.’ His expression was grim. ‘This is an order not a proposal.’ Silence followed this statement. No one wanted to be first with a dangerous objection. All knew it was suicidal not to follow SS orders. And no one relished the prospect of falling into the hands of the Soviets.

  Von Braun had already raised the possibility of surrendering to the Americans with senior members of his team. Some months earlier, when it had become clear that Hitler would not win his war, they had discussed it discreetly while walking on the beach, the wind quickly dispersing their treasonable words into the vast Nordic sky. They had all agreed: only the Americans could fund a space programme. Huge sums of money would be needed to pierce the stratosphere with a rocket and travel to the moon, then the planets; but it could be done. Speaking quietly, von Braun reminded them of their own plan to get to America, impossible though it seemed at the time. ‘Gentlemen,’ he continued, ‘our choices are limited but following Kammler’s order would seem to give us the best chance of putting ourselves in the way of the Americans. Who else thinks so?’ Almost silently, each man in the room signalled his assent. The pact was made. They would follow Kammler’s orders, but their secret goal was America.

  Von Braun proceeded with great thoroughness. Decisions had to be made about who would go, and in what order. Department heads were ordered to report back in two hours on how many people they would need to move, the loading space required and, most importantly, what would be left for the Soviets. It was a massive operation to plan, hampered by the fact that they could only travel at night as Allied planes hunted down and bombed anything that moved by road or rail in daylight hours. ‘We will go as an organisation,’ insisted von Braun. ‘We will carry our administration
and structure straight across Germany. This will not be a rout.’ He decided that the safest way to cross Germany was to look as though they were on an authentic SS mission.

  After days of organization, they commandeered cars, trucks, trains, ships and barges to sail from Peenemünde harbour, mules with carts, not to mention a snowplough and fifty select horses purchased from a wealthy woman fleeing East Prussia. With the state of near-collapse in Germany, the SS were controlling major routes and had set up roadblocks everywhere. Foreseeing difficulties, von Braun had labels printed which implied that the convoy was under the direct protection of Himmler, and part of Dornberger’s agency, BZBV. However, a mistake in printing made nonsense of the large initials which emerged as the incomprehensible letters VZBV. There was no time to re-order the printing. Von Braun took a gamble and decided to use the labels anyway, on the grounds that any kind of official-looking label was better than none. VZBV would represent a top-secret agency, reporting to Himmler himself. And these letters were plastered all over the trucks and trains. If their ploy was uncovered they could face being sent back to Peenemünde or even being charged as deserters.