Wernher von Braun arrived in El Paso, Texas, in late September 1945 with his army shadow, Maj. Jim Hamill. Neighboring Fort Bliss, headquarters of the army’s new Research and Development Division Sub-office (Rocket), would be his home. Col. Ludy Toftoy at the Pentagon had named Hamill as commander of that sub-office and overseer of the 118 German missile experts being relocated there under the still-secret Operation Paperclip. Von Braun was given the civilian title of project director, under Hamill.
Von Braun was ill with hepatitis when he reached Fort Bliss and was placed in an army hospital filled with American soldiers wounded in the war. Hamill, fearful the men would harass the former enemy missile man, cautioned him not to reveal his identity. “But I couldn’t conceal my still-broken English,” von Braun recalled. “The GIs sized me up with uncomfortable accuracy, and began calling me ‘The Dutchman.’ But they also invited me to join their blackjack poker games!”1
While in the hospital, von Braun was “happily surprised” to receive a visit from Toftoy, who had flown down from Washington to discuss plans for work to be tackled in the coming months, after von Braun’s recovery.2
The German rocketeers were under one-year contracts—unless the U.S. government opted to cancel after the first six months and send them packing. They were in the United States officially as “DASE”—Department of the Army Special Employees—and were, according to the government, “wards of the Army.” They had not passed through immigration and possessed neither passports nor visas. They went to work at Fort Bliss and the nearby Connecticut-sized White Sands Proving Ground (later Missile Range) in New Mexico. They worked first as rocket consultants to the U.S. military and then as technicians and teachers in the assembly and launch of the captured V-2s. For more than a year, their presence was kept secret from the American people.
Housed in surplus barracks, and later in a former annex to Beaumont Army Hospital at Fort Bliss, they could not leave the post without military escort. Their mail was screened and censored. While the Germans were referred to cryptically as the “paperclip specialists” and army “special employees,” von Braun and others dubbed themselves “POPs” (for prisoners of peace) rather than POWs.
Early in their stay on the army base, the Germans assumed that the nearby Rio Grande was a mighty river that lived up to its name. The men at night heard what some said must surely be “ships’ horns blowing” from that broad river, Dorette Schlidt (née Kersten) recalled being told after she arrived in April 1947 (as the spouse of scientist Rudolf Schlidt). Some time passed before the Germans saw the trickle that was the Rio Grande at that point in its course and realized they had been hearing the blaring horns of steam locomotives.3
Confined to the base with little money, no family members around, and no contact with El Paso’s residents, von Braun and his young team had few diversions to fill off-duty hours. To relieve boredom and blow off steam, they often staged nighttime battles pitting one barracks against another, using such weapons as fire hoses, sandbags, water bombs, and pillows. Von Braun usually led his barracks’ brigade in the skirmishes.4
Most kept physically active playing soccer, volleyball, and softball, or swimming. Some gardened or built furniture. Others converted a shack into a clubhouse and lounge, complete with a bar they built and stocked with beer, whiskey, gin, rum, and tequila. Saturday night parties were held around the bar, “where all ‘shots’ were successful,” as the rocket men enjoyed recalling later.5
After a while the Germans—traveling once a week in groups of four, each with an army noncom as escort—“were allowed to go shopping in El Paso, then to have dinner in a restaurant, to see a movie, and to return to the barracks,” recalled Ernst Stuhlinger.6
Von Braun and most of the team enjoyed Sunday afternoon classical music concerts courtesy of an old phonograph. Later there were Sunday group excursions aboard military buses into the nearby mountains and desert. Stuhlinger remembered that some of the missile men would slip through a hole in the fence surrounding their barracks area and take desert walks under the stars, “to contemplate the universe.” Major Hamill later contended he knew all about these escapades and quietly tolerated them, but had the men “watched.”7
Von Braun and his teammates received modest pay, none of which they saw during their first year or so. Von Braun’s salary, about $6,000 a year, was the highest. The salaries went to cover the army’s cost of taking care of the Germans’ dependents—including wives, children, parents, and others—in Bavaria, or the money was held in escrow. The missile men got a small daily allowance. Out of their $6 per diem pay, recalled then-Sgt. Maj. Gilbert Appler, “the government held out $1.20 for food. The net was . . . a lousy $4.80!”8 With part of that, they sent monthly packages of food, clothing, sewing and knitting items, and the like back to their family members at Landshut.
At Fort Bliss many of the rocketeers continued to address von Braun as “Herr Professor,” something they had begun doing in Germany after Hitler awarded him the honorary title of “Research Professor” for the V-2 successes. It was honorary because “professor” was normally reserved for a university teacher, and von Braun had never formally taught. Nonetheless, he had been proud of the title—a more exalted rank than Doktor—and had used it on his letterhead at Peenemünde. That changed after the Germans had been at Bliss a while. Konrad Dannenberg recalled that von Braun advised him, “Just call me ‘Wernher.’ Forget about the ‘professor’ now that we are in the United States.”9
Eternal optimist von Braun also urged his colleagues to learn English, despite the short-term U.S. commitment. Their fluency improved as contacts with Americans at the post and in El Paso widened. As Hamill put it: “They learned English with a Texas twang.”10 The youngest member of the group, Walter Wiesman, later joked that he learned most of his English from watching Zorro movies in El Paso, hence the “Sí, sí, señor” flavor of his fluency. Stuhlinger had another slant on the subject: “Those of us who had learned English at school taught those who had not, with the result that a made-in-Germany accent will prevail in the English of the ‘Paperclippers’ for the rest of their lives.”11
Although von Braun had not been an enthusiastic student of foreign languages in his youth, he now studied English intensely. Within a few months he learned the language well, including the technical vocabulary of rocketry and many American idioms. Unfortunately, he picked up much of the slang from American soldiers in the Germans’ compound. When he gave one of his first presentations to officials in Washington, he was puzzled when they occasionally laughed at the wrong places in his talk. Stuhlinger recalled that later Hamill told von Braun: “Wernher, before you give your next talk, let me go over your manuscript. You just cannot use those GIs’ slang expressions with decent people!”12
As the Germans began teaching their new U.S. partners all about the V-2 and how to assemble, handle, and fire dozens of the rockets, von Braun strove to keep alive his team’s space aspirations. Peenemünde veteran Hans Klein, in a letter written years later, reminded von Braun of his role back then:
In the early Fort Bliss days your interest and encouragement produced what I believe was the first moon-flight trajectory by hand calculations and vector diagrams. We had a lot of fun doing it and, needless to say, we widened our horizon under your tutelage. . . . I do not forget your motto for success during some of the more frustrating days at Fort Bliss: “Man muss sein Herzüber den Graben werfen.” [Literally, “Throw your heart over the ditch”—adapted from a World War I cavalry expression that exhorted men to be brave and aggressive in overcoming obstacles.]13
Werner Gengelbach recalled another occasion from late 1945, when the team once again stirred their dream of space travel.
[At] a little social event . . . during our first Christmas in this country shortly after our arrival in Fort Bliss . . . some of our friends of the Paperclip group decided to brighten our otherwise lonesome holiday by some self-generated entertainment.
Your younger brother, Magnus, composed and presented a story, a reporter’s account of the first take-off of man into space. He gave a very lively description of what took place. There was an old gentleman with a long white beard, supporting his somewhat weakened body by a cane, excitedly watching the space vehicle which took off from White Sands on its uncertain journey. It was Wernher von Braun in the year 2000, who had reached the biblical age of eighty-eight years.
At this time we believed this was a keen prediction and an optimistic target, and we wondered how in a short fifty-five years we could get there.14
Buoyed by von Braun’s optimism and enthusiasm, his countrymen put in long hours training the Americans in handling and firing the first of the captured V-2s—even if the Germans yearned to be tackling a new, more challenging project instead. The team of Americans with whom the German experts worked at Fort Bliss/White Sands included some 125 employees of the General Electric Company. The contractor group was formed and managed by GE’s Richard Porter, one of the main scientist-interrogators of von Braun and his key associates in Germany. Rounding out the work team at White Sands was a contingent of U.S. soldiers—enlisted men, mostly draftees—who had engineering and scientific degrees.
When the German-U.S. team launched the first V-2 from the White Sands range in May 1946, von Braun was positioned at the “emergency cut-off station.” With him was missile engineer Wolfgang Steurer, who recalled that the station “consisted of a little sand dune and a single button at the end of what seemed to be an old telephone wire.”
Decades later, Steurer shared his recollections of that day: “Upon lift-off the bird went up all right, but tumbled happily in all directions like performing a dance. I looked over to you and saw to my surprise that you obviously enjoyed the spectacle. After pressing finally—and reluctantly—the emergency button, you were all of a sudden all business again: ‘Herr Steurer, that was one of your lousy jet vanes! You materials people have to do everything in a destructive way!’”15
A few days after the V-2 misfire, von Braun intercepted Steurer back at the Fort Bliss barracks: “Herr Steurer, may I borrow your sunglasses? I have to return to White Sands.”
“I am sorry, Herr Professor, but I have apparently lost them,” Steurer lied, leery of von Braun’s legendary forgetfulness about returning borrowed items. Steurer had left the sunglasses in his room, fortunately. Von Braun strode away, but returned in a few minutes—grinning and holding up Steurer’s sunglasses. “Aha!” he exclaimed. “I have found your sunglasses, and thank you very much!”
Several days later Steurer bumped into von Braun and asked for the return of his sunglasses. Much to his surprise, von Braun pulled them out, saying, “Here they are; thanks.” Steurer put them on. They didn’t fit. “I realized I had some sunglasses, but not mine. What I had was very likely the result of a series of exchanges.” And it was, suggested Steurer, just such a knack for “pulling a fast one” that was “so successfully employed by a certain individual in the ensuing years to keep our programs alive.”16
The first successful V-2 launched at White Sands occurred in June 1946. Reaching an altitude of sixty-seven miles, it carried a scientific instrument package for upper-atmospheric research. (Arthur C. Clarke, veteran of World War II RAF service and future von Braun friend, had proposed in February 1945, before the war’s end, that any leftover V-2s be used for ionospheric research.17)
The Germans’ first year in the United States could be summed up as follows: train the Americans, launch more V-2s, putter with technical improvements, meet a few U.S. scientists, assist in high-altitude research projects using V-2s, undertake no new rocket projects, and do space thinking and planning on their own. “Once it had them, the U.S. hardly knew what to do with the German rocketeers,” Time magazine later said of that year.18
Looking back in 1962, von Braun recalled that his team’s first year in Texas was
a period of adjustment and professional frustration. We were distrusted aliens living in what for us was a desolate region of a foreign land, and for the first time we had no assigned project, no real task. Nobody seemed to be much interested in work that smelled of weapons, now that the war was over, and space flight was a concept bordering on the ridiculous. We spent our time in study and teaching, and assisted with the V-2 evaluation firings in White Sands.19
The army’s code name for assembling and firing the V-2s at the desert range was Project Fire-Ball. The Germans had another name for it. “We called this period ‘Project Icebox,’” Walter Haeussermann recalled. “The Americans had no long-range plans for us; they just kept us on ice.”20
This early period in Texas produced a tale that quietly persisted among surviving original German rocket team members for more than half a century. It was said that von Braun’s brother Magnus had brought a quantity of platinum from Germany. One version said the undeclared metal—more precious than gold—was a simple platinum bar; another, that it had been secretly cast as a set of mechanic’s tools, twice as heavy as steel. As other Peenemünders remembered it, Magnus went to an El Paso jeweler and sold the platinum, or part of his stash. Before long, the story goes, he was questioned by the FBI and later fined, perhaps $100 or so. All of that has remained unsubstantiated.21 What is a fact, said rocket team old-timers, is that Magnus was the second German at Fort Bliss to buy a car. Wernher could not afford his own used automobile until later.22
Although the Germans’ one-year contracts were set to expire in November 1946, the U.S. Army realized that they knew a great deal more about ballistic missiles than the Americans had yet learned. New, five-year contracts were drawn up, merging the former enemies into the army’s rocket activities. No new rocket program was begun. The new contracts gave the Germans salaries comparable to civil service pay, with annual compensation ranging from $4,300 to $6,800. Von Braun got a raise to $7,500 a year.23
Largely through the efforts of Colonel Toftoy at the Pentagon, the army also gave the Germans the welcome word that they could bring their families to America. That December the first of the families arrived from Bavaria. Mostly wives and children, they were housed in the former hospital annex at Fort Bliss where the missile men had been moved two months earlier.
December also brought the first public revelation of the German rocket experts’ presence stateside. Although Toftoy had issued a Pentagon news release the previous May about plans to test launch V-2s from White Sands, it downplayed the von Braun team. On December 4, however, the El Paso Times published a front-page photograph and story on the Germans, a scoop. Walter Riedel, von Braun’s chief design engineer, raised eyebrows among his countrymen with his quoted gripes about army food. For a year they had made a point of never airing complaints about anything. Von Braun brushed it off in a spirit of “It’s a free country.”
The Germans were ideal alien residents. Maj. Joseph Sestito, U.S. Army, security officer to Major Hamill, later observed: “They seemed to have a group spirit, based on the idea that on each one’s model behavior rested the glory of the Reich. Also, they may have figured they’d be sent back to Germany if they showed any resentment” of their initial spare lifestyle.24
The El Paso Rotary Club invited von Braun to speak in January 1947. The army said it was all right, and he accepted. In his talk on “The Future Development of Rocketry,” he addressed the question of rockets first being used as an instrument of war: “It seems to be a law of nature that all novel technical inventions that have a future for civilian use start out as weapons.” He looked ahead to an era of large launch vehicles, Earth satellites, astronauts and the “queer sensation” of floating weightlessly, manned orbiting space stations, flights to the nearest celestial bodies, and other futuristic developments. When he sat down, the El Paso Rotarians gave the former enemy scientist a standing ovation.25
Going public with the news that the former Peenemünders were in America had its downside, too. Democratic Congressman John D. Dingell of Detroit labeled the army “nuts” for bringing in the V-2 villains, adding: “I have never thought that we were so poor mentally in this country that we have to go and import those Nazi killers to help us prepare for the defense of our country. A German is a Nazi, and a Nazi is a German. The terms are synonymous.”26
Undeterred by such criticism, von Braun pressed on with his work at Fort Bliss. He did disappear from the base for a couple of weeks in February 1947, although there was hardly anything sinister about it. With army approval, and escort, he had quietly returned to Germany to be married. A few months before, he had decided to ask his teenage first cousin, Maria Louise von Quistorp, to be his wife. While most Americans regard such unions as too close for procreative comfort, marrying blood kin was anything but uncommon within the old European aristocracy. And von Braun was in love, and clearly intent on marrying a noblewoman. Their age difference—Wernher was almost thirty-five, Maria just eighteen—was similarly not unusual for European couples.
The cousins had not seen each other for almost two years, and Maria would have to leave her family, friends, and homeland. Wernher had known her all her life and recalled how, at age seventeen, he had held Maria at her christening. But now, not sure of her answer, he decided to write to his father in Germany and ask him to inquire discreetly of Maria’s feelings in the matter.
The baron, as von Braun later discovered, used “the subtlety of a bulldozer.” After receiving his son’s letter, the elder Magnus immediately confronted Maria, waved the letter, and announced: “I am supposed to find out if you will marry Wernher. What shall I tell him?” Maria then wrote to her suitor in America: “I told him [the elder baron] that I’d never thought of marrying anyone else.”27
“[Von Braun] said there were two estates of relatives his family visited” in Pomerania, recalled Dorette Schlidt, “and that he was always glad to learn they were going to visit Maria’s, rather than the other, which he didn’t care for.”28 Toward the end of the war, whenever he could briefly escape his duties at the Baltic rocket center, Wernher had visited the von Quistorps at their nearby estate. The fact that his cousin Maria was fast becoming a lovely young woman had not gone unnoticed. “I told her that I came for the food,” von Braun recalled years afterward. “And she still tells me that this was my prime reason for hanging around the house. This is one of those arguments that married people who take joy in each other shouldn’t try to settle.”29
After their Bavarian wedding, which took place March 1, 1947, in Landshut, the rocketeer and his eighteen-year-old bride anticipated honeymooning there—alone, naturally—for several days. Arriving at their small apartment, they discovered that two U.S. military policemen had moved in to prevent a possible snatching of the scientist by “the other side.” “Just pretend we’re not here,” one of the guards suggested. “If you need us, we’ll be in the kitchen.” The newlyweds had no choice but to accept their round-the-clock houseguests.30
When the time came for the young couple to sail for America aboard a military vessel, they thought: “Ah, we’ll spend our honeymoon at sea!” But all the men were quartered on one deck, the women on another.
After a year in makeshift quarters at Fort Bliss—in what had been a mental ward at the former hospital annex—the von Brauns finally took their honeymoon. Wernher bought a used Nash sedan on credit in El Paso. The car had special seats that converted easily into beds for economy-minded tourists. After unfolding highway maps of the West, Wernher asked Maria, “How about a honeymoon trip?” Maria replied, “It’s about time.”31
On his return from Germany, von Braun had brought with him not only his young bride—“a sensitive person . . . a Dresden doll,” as Major Hamill remembered32—but also his aging parents, who had lost everything they owned in the war. Baron Magnus and Baroness Emmy adjusted to their new life as best they could. They became fascinated with American Indians, among other aspects of life in the United States.
Von Braun encouraged other single members of his team at Fort Bliss to marry and start families in what inexorably was becoming their adopted country. One ploy he used was to include selected bachelors among the guests he and his bride invited to the small dinner parties hosted in their quarters to expose the single men to the newlyweds’ domestic happiness.
One such bachelor was aerodynamics expert Werner Dahm. One day he received a telephone call inviting him to dinner. The caller did not identify himself, but Dahm was sure it was his supervisor, Ludwig “Lutz” Roth. It wasn’t. The bachelor showed up at the Roths’ personal quarters on time only to learn there was no dinner party. It was von Braun who had called, and Dahm had been a no-show for dinner with Wernher, Maria, and other invited guests, he recalled years afterward. “How embarrassing! My older colleague Fritz Kraemer gave me sage advice, which I have never forgotten: ‘Get some nice flowers and apologize to Mrs. von Braun.’” The peace offering worked. A second invitation led to a pleasant supper at the von Brauns’ quarters.33
As the 1940s wore on, the army relaxed its restrictions on the German rocketeers. They were free to mingle with the townspeople of El Paso, where they not only encountered little hostility over the war but found an easy acceptance from their former enemies. “In America you don’t seem to carry grudges, as do many Europeans who have been enemies,” von Braun said.34
Some of the Germans became intrigued with the West. They wore sombreros or cowboy boots and hats. They were also free to travel out of state without escorts, as long as they kept the army posted on their itineraries. Beginning in 1948, von Braun was allowed to attend scientific conventions and present technical papers—but in the United States only. His first paper was on Earth satellites.
Proposals by von Braun and Colonel Toftoy to launch new, larger rocket development projects—some with space-exploration aspects—were shot down by the Pentagon. But operating on “a shoestring budget and with makeshift facilities,” the team did manage to take on several challenges beyond the repetitive V-2 launchings at White Sands.35 Their initiatives included work on a winged ramjet missile and several new versions of U.S. Hermes missiles for antiaircraft and other purposes. One effort involved putting a U.S. Wac Corporal rocket on top of a V-2. The two-stage result, called Bumper, scored several “firsts” in rocketry: a record altitude of nearly 250 miles, far out into airless space; a top speed of more than five thousand mph; the first animal trips into space, with monkeys; and the first television transmission from a high-altitude rocket.
Von Braun and his colleagues also participated in a project that finally took the V-2 to sea and brought a kind of closure to the team’s abortive wartime effort to have a U-boat tow the missiles across the Atlantic for bombardment of New York City. The postwar project was a test launch of a V-2 off the deck of an aircraft carrier, the USS Midway, in 1947 near Bermuda. All did not go well after liftoff, as Capt. William C. “Bill” Fortune, U.S. Navy, who was present, reminded his friend von Braun many years later. “The launch was a success, giving credence to Admiral Dan Gallery’s premise that the Navy should get into space. Some weren’t so sure immediately thereafter, when the V-2 veered toward the bridge, with admirals, generals and the rest of us trying to dig foxholes in the steel decks.”36
The seagoing V-2, nicknamed “Sandy,” broke apart early in its wayward flight. Still, it helped prove the feasibility, after a fashion, of naval launches of large ballistic missiles—from future giant Polaris nuclear submarines, for instance.
In all, the von Braun team and its American partners launched some seventy V-2s from White Sands between 1946 and 1951 for training and research purposes. More than two-thirds of the shots were rated successful. Some of the failures were spectacular. Survivors of that era will always remember one especially wayward missile. Shortly before seven o’clock one evening, the V-2 blasted off on a trajectory that should have taken it north, over the desert. It rose beautifully and turned smoothly, to everyone’s horror, in a southerly direction, toward Mexico. The missile was responding perfectly to the guidance commands of its gyroscope, which had been installed backwards!
One of the top scientists in the group, Ernst Steinhoff, forcibly restrained an engineer who wanted to push the “destruct” button before the errant rocket had exhausted its explosive fuel supply. Fifty miles away, it roared over the heads of fiesta dancers in Juarez—and crashed harmlessly at the edge of a nearby cemetery. Fort Bliss and White Sands commanders made immediate apologies to the Mexican authorities.
“But by the time American officials got over there,” Steinhoff reveled in telling, “some enterprising Mexicans had set up a souvenir stand near the cemetery and were selling the missile pieces to tourists!” The missile engineers who went from White Sands to Juarez to inspect the impact crater, the story goes, found that the total weight of the rocket parts offered as “genuine” souvenirs equaled that of at least three V-2s.37
The years at Fort Bliss held a combination of happiness and disgust, of hope and despair. In 1947 and 1948, for example, von Braun wrote a story of the first manned, large-scale, international mission to Mars as an essay with voluminous technical appendixes. Dorette Schlidt typed the “Mars Project” manuscript. It was first sent to a New York publisher in 1948. No sale. Eventually, eighteen U.S. publishers rejected it. Only parts of it were ever published here and abroad, beginning in 1952. Another writer turned it into a novel, with which von Braun disavowed any connection.
December 9, 1948, brought happier news: the joyful birth of the von Brauns’ first child, daughter Iris Careen.
The next summer, in a surprising move so soon after the war, the British Interplanetary Society invited von Braun to become an honorary fellow “in recognition of your great pioneering activities in the field of rocket engineering.” Unable to appear in London in person, von Braun nevertheless sent his grateful acceptance. He noted both his “regret” that his life’s devotion to the “noble cause” of rocketry had increasingly found “military application,” and his little-known ties to England, adding, “You may imagine that the wartime abuse of our V-2 baby against the country I am connected with by so many links has been one of the most disappointing experiences in my life.”38
It was several years after he began his new life in the American southwest before von Braun experienced the land of cowboys, horses, and ranches. He had enjoyed horseback riding in his homeland as a youth, and he had continued riding as a college student in November 1933 with—purely because of the convenience of the stables, he later explained—the SS equestrian organization, SS-Reiterstrum I, at Berlin-Halensee. In 1949 he seized the chance to play cowpoke on a Texas ranch. That year, Dr. Hubertus Strughold, an aviation medicine specialist at an air force school in San Antonio, invited von Braun to come lecture there on the past and future of rocketry. Von Braun accepted. Professor Strughold, ultimately hailed as the “Father of Space Medicine,” reminded the rocket leader years later about what happened next:
At the end of our dinner, you said to me: “I have seen so many Western movies and heard so much about Texas ranches—but I never have been on a Texas ranch!” The next day, late in the afternoon, we rode in my car to a famous ranch near New Braunfels. At the ranch we were shown some dozen horses wearing the colorful Western-style saddles. You even made a tour on a horse around the ranch and were very pleased.
Then the young von Braun returned to work on his rockets and what Strughold noted as a very different breed of “horse powers.”39
Von Braun continued to be thwarted by the lack of any major new project to advance rocketry and space exploration, and by the lack of scientific research facilities and other resources for his team. Stuhlinger recalled that an impatient von Braun in those days “used to say [to his German associates] it would be a mistake to think only about space. He told us, ‘Space isn’t our problem. Our problem is time.’”40 The idled team was not getting any younger, and its goals were no closer to realization.
Von Braun later referred to that period as their years of wandering in the wilderness. The less than blissful El Paso/White Sands era was “irretrievably lost” in the postwar development of more potent rockets.41
Another problem at Fort Bliss, as von Braun and his team saw it, was the relationship with Jim Hamill. The gangly officer, still in his twenties when given the command, held the difficult job of military commander of these recent enemies throughout their stay in Texas. Although they respected his military rank and position, they cared little for his command style. They found him too authoritative, short-tempered, and often cool to their concerns. Moreover, Hamill tended to ignore von Braun’s written complaints, requests, and even threats to resign. Some attributed it to Hamill’s hammering home the point that he was in charge, that the German team was under him, not von Braun.42
At low points during this period, von Braun—the natural optimist, the tireless cheerleader—did consider quitting and joining industry. But encouragement from several key people, including then-Capt. William E. Winterstein, U.S. Army, coupled with his conviction that only government could undertake a space program, led him to stick it out.
Reflecting von Braun’s deep frustration, one letter of resignation in January 1948 stood out in a collection of his personal papers more than two decades later. In the four-page handwritten letter he complained of being bypassed and ignored by Hamill to such an extent that it forced him to conclude, “I do not have your full confidence anymore.” He cited several specific incidents. Unless Hamill could show “unlimited confidence” in him, von Braun would step aside for a lesser role. He suggested that Ludwig Roth replace him as head of the German group.43
Von Braun later recalled being “irritated” then and acknowledged having written the letter, but added he may never have given it to Hamill. “I apparently wrote the letter, slept on it, and then decided not to send it,” he speculated to me.44 (Or just as easily, it could have been his handwritten duplicate of a letter he wrote and delivered; or Hamill could have returned the original to von Braun in rejecting his ultimatum.)
“Whether he wrote it and then put it in his pocket and never sent it, or whether he did send it, I really can’t recall,” Hamill said nearly a quarter century later. “Anyway, he did that [threatened to resign] every two weeks. We parted company many times—not really, of course. But, as Dr. von Braun himself used to say, ‘You don’t make progress without friction.’ Well, we made progress, and of course there was some friction.”45
Ever the diplomat, von Braun took pains even decades later to tell me: “Jim Hamill handled his very difficult job in a splendid fashion. I would not want this letter to indicate that I felt he had done his job clumsily or that he had almost broken up our team, because that certainly was not the case.” Nevertheless, the letter clearly reflects that such was the case from von Braun’s perspective at the time.46
If the years from 1945 through 1948 largely had been a period of professional gloom for von Braun and his team, a series of events in 1949 changed everything. The Soviet Union tested atomic weapons, and intelligence reports revealed significant progress in its ballistic missile development efforts. It became clear that what Winston Churchill two years earlier termed an “Iron Curtain” had indeed fallen across Europe, delineating the Soviet-dominated Communist bloc and launching what came to be called the Cold War. At the same time, very real war clouds loomed over a politically divided Korea.
That year, a Pentagon that had vetoed Colonel Toftoy’s earlier proposal to develop a missile with nuclear capability and a range of five hundred to one thousand miles suddenly embraced a form of the idea. It ordered the army and its German rocketeers to invent a two-hundred-mile, nuclear-capable missile on a high-priority basis, to be followed by longer-range ballistic weapons.
On August 1, 1949, Toftoy got word that his request for expanded facilities at Fort Bliss for the escalated rocket program had been denied. More of the base was now needed for the threatened Korean conflict. Two weeks later, Toftoy visited North Alabama to check out a pair of mothballed World War II army arsenals. Overcoming early opposition, he won the Pentagon’s approval to combine the Huntsville and Redstone Arsenals as a home for the newly minted Army Ordnance Rocket Center and a corps of several hundred U.S.-born and imported German rocket specialists from out West.
Word of the impending relocation reached the von Braun team in an offhand way. Hannes Luehrsen, chief architect at Peenemünde and the rocket team’s lead architect-planner at Fort Bliss, recalled that he was at work one day when Major Hamill “came in my office, tossed some drawings and maps on my desk, and said: ‘Here’s where we’re going!’” Hamill explained to a startled Luehrsen all about Redstone Arsenal. “Does von Braun know this?” the planner asked. “No,” replied Hamill. “I’ll tell him tomorrow.”47 Although von Braun may well have already been told of the plans by Colonel Toftoy, Hamill’s nonchalance further illustrated how things stood between the two men.
The U.S. government had begun thinking the year before about the Germans’ irregular resident status in America and what to do about it. Matters came to a head in 1949. With their multiyear work contracts and the plans to move to Alabama the next year, von Braun, his Peenemünde veterans, and their families heeded advice to start the U.S. citizenship process. A small problem developed with the INS (Immigration and Naturalization Service) bureaucracy: Because the Germans had entered the country in 1945 as “special employees” of the army and had bypassed the INS, they were technically illegal immigrants.
The government decided that the alien group must physically reenter the United States as legal immigrants so that the five-year waiting period for citizenship could commence. The solution: walk across El Paso’s Rio Grande Bridge into Juarez, Mexico, then turn around and immediately return to U.S. soil—a distance of two blocks.
“On my immigration papers,” von Braun enjoyed later recounting, “where the ‘Vessel of Entry’ column normally would have a romantic name such as ‘Queen Mary’ or ‘Isle de France’ or ‘Mayflower,’ it states: ‘Entered at El Paso, Texas—via Streetcar’! . . . We called it our ‘Streetcar named Desire.’ The fare was five cents, and it was the most valuable nickel I have ever spent.”48
In northern Alabama, the German-U.S. rocket team would have a new workshop and a secluded, spacious playground. Dorette Kersten Schlidt remembered von Braun’s return to arid Fort Bliss after a first visit to Huntsville and the nearby forty-thousand-acre Redstone Arsenal in the Appalachian foothills in Tennessee River country. She recalled his excitedly telling his German compatriots: “Oh, it looks like home! So green, green, everything is so green, with mountains all around!”49
One of the American civilians who had signed on with the army’s expanded rocket team at White Sands, Ramon Samaniego, remembered von Braun’s enthusiasm over the move. “Dr. von Braun came and personally talked to me about going [to Alabama]. ‘We are going to make history,’ he told me.”50