Two adjoining, shuttered World War II Army Ordnance and Chemical Corps weapons-producing arsenals in agricultural northern Alabama were combined to form Redstone Arsenal, the army’s new rocket development center. Along with the existing buildings and wide-open spaces came cheap, plentiful electrical power from the Tennessee Valley Authority, access to the navigable Tennessee River, and thus a connecting water route clear to the Gulf of Mexico.
Beginning in the spring of 1950 and continuing through that year, von Braun and his team of peripatetic rocketeers moved with their families to their new verdant “homeland.” The contingent consisted of several hundred General Electric Company contractor employees; a small corps of young U.S. Army draftees with engineering, science, and math degrees; army civilian workers; and about 115 German missile men under contract. They set up shop at the sprawling base of almost forty thousand acres. Of von Braun and his team, future Redstone public information chief David G. Harris later observed: “They arrived with the U.S. space program in their briefcases, only we didn’t know it then.”1
Huntsville, with a population of fifteen thousand, was then the self-proclaimed “Watercress Capital of the World.” It was also known as the birthplace of actress Tallulah Bankhead and home of LeRoy Pope Walker, the Confederate Secretary of War who issued the fateful April 1861 order to fire on Fort Sumter. But at mid-twentieth century it was primarily a community where King Cotton reigned, both in the surviving textile mills and in the white-dappled fields covering the countryside. During the war, a workforce of more than fourteen thousand had earned paychecks by making poisonous gases and other “chemical munitions” at one arsenal, while at the other they loaded the stuff into shells and also prepared conventional artillery shells. Then, after peace broke out, the jobs nosedived to zero. Although economically deflated in the postwar period, Huntsville’s response to the late-1949 news of the German rocket team’s imminent coming was mixed. Not all the smattering of negativism reflected hostility toward the wartime enemies of just four years earlier. Before the announcement of the reopening of “the Arsenal” for rocketry research and development, Huntsville had been considered for a big new air force wind-tunnel facility. That plum would have required a workforce of 3,500 for construction and another 3,500 for operation. A hungry Huntsville lusted after the facility. Alabama’s junior U.S. senator, John Sparkman, who lived in Huntsville and was born in Hartselle in the next county, had been lobbying hard for it, as had Alabama’s senior senator, Lister Hill.
But the senior—very senior—senator from Tennessee, Kenneth D. McKellar, had more clout. In the fall of 1949, the eighty-year-old McKellar, serving in his sixth six-year term, was chairman of the omnipotent Senate Appropriations Committee. He was not requesting, he was demanding that the wind-tunnel facility go to Tennessee rather than to the air force’s preferred Huntsville location.2 Tennessee’s junior senator, Estes Kefauver, carried some pretty fair clout of his own as well.
So the coveted wind tunnel, which became the U.S. Air Force Arnold Engineering Development Center, went to a remote wooded site near Tullahoma in the Tennessee hills a little more than an hour’s drive northeast of Huntsville. Soon afterward, it was announced that the Germans were coming to Redstone. The development was widely seen as a consoling bone tossed to the Alabama interests. Huntsville native Patrick Richardson, then a law student at the University of Alabama in Tuscaloosa but later von Braun’s personal attorney, summarized half a century later the reaction of the disappointed community: “They’re getting seven thousand workers [in Tennessee], and we’re getting a hundred Krauts.”3
Whether because of the town’s economic hunger or simple good manners, or both, open enmity toward von Braun and his band of German missile men was minimal. Isolated instances included a gas station owner, still grieving over the loss of a loved one in the war, who posted a sign announcing that Germans were not welcome as customers. That sentiment was understandable. “The last time our boys had seen Germans, they were shooting at them,” one townsman later remarked of the coolness.4
But in general the von Braun team found a wait-and-see attitude among the people of the area. “The local natives,” von Braun soon observed, “at first were as skeptical about us as we were curious about them.”5 One of his top men, Karl Heimburg, could smile nearly two decades later in a wry recollection of the townspeople’s period of adjustment: “It took them a while to accept us. About five or ten years.”6 The city’s popular mayor at the time, Robert B. “Speck” Searcy, later admitted, “At first we thought they were a bunch of crazy rocket men.” That applied in spades to their leader. “I thought Dr. von Braun was a nice fellow when I first met him, but I thought he was crazy,” Searcy confessed in 1962. “Now I’m willing to believe anything he tells me, and if he says we’re going to visit the planets and the Moon, then that’s what we’re going to do.”7
Moving to North Alabama was much less of an adjustment for the Germans than coming to El Paso had been. “As Germans, we felt much more at home here [in Huntsville],” remembered von Braun’s head architect-planner Hannes Luehrsen. “Everything was so green and beautiful. I remember smelling the fresh-mown hay at Redstone. And the trees! At Bliss we had had to drive two hundred miles to see five trees together!”8
But what of the Deep South’s history of racial troubles? Especially Alabama, the self-proclaimed “Heart of Dixie,” its capital the proud “Cradle of the Confederacy”? Would the Germans find cross-burnings and lynchings still being perpetrated?
Scientist Werner Dahm and his German compatriots were not far removed in time from the Third Reich’s genocidal Holocaust. “We had some concerns here,” he recalled, “not so much about segregation” as about possible open strife between whites and “coloreds.” He said, “We were quite relieved when we found it wasn’t that bad here, at least the signs we could see.” He remembered heading to work on one of his first mornings at Redstone Arsenal in 1950 and seeing a pickup truck with a white worker and a black worker in the back engaged in a lively discussion. Dahm thought it was a positive sign.9
Von Braun was thirty-eight when he moved to Alabama. He wasted little time carrying his gospel of space exploration to the folks of Huntsville, Madison County, and the surrounding area. His first speech to the local Kiwanis Club included a slide presentation showing his step-by-step plans for putting a man on the Moon, the space shuttle, and other things he had in mind, the then-general manager of the local Chamber of Commerce later recalled. He added, “I remember one of our well-known farmers remarking to me: ‘The day a man lands on the Moon, I’ll fly a bale of cotton to Washington and back with wings strapped to my back!’”10
Another community leader, lawyer Louis Salmon, recalled a presentation the scientist gave on past and future rocketry at a current affairs seminar for the fledgling University of Alabama-Huntsville Extension Center in 1951. The attorney found the review of the past “fascinating,” but the futuristic part struck him as completely “incredible.”
He later reminisced with von Braun: “You spoke of such senseless things as weightlessness, walking in space, space stations, and concluded with the forecast that with funding we could have a man on the Moon in ten years. Charlie Shaver [a lawyer friend] and I walked out of the meeting together and agreed you belonged in Tuscaloosa—Bryce Hospital [the state mental asylum], not the University.”11
With equal candor, M. Beirne Spragins, then-chairman of the board of Huntsville’s dominant bank, later reminisced with von Braun about their early days together. “I was always interested in missiles, but when you were quoted to me as saying that you were going to the Moon, I said ‘the damn man is crazy!’ Later, when I got to know you better, I told you what I had said and we both enjoyed it.”12
In those early years in Huntsville many thought von Braun was not only “teched” in the head but godless, too. His file of “religious mail” included one note from a woman beseeching him to forget all this irreverent space talk and just “stay home and watch television like the Lord intended!”13
Few then knew that the man of science and technology had a strong spiritual side—and extensive knowledge of the world’s religions. Von Braun used his familiarity with the Old Testament to good advantage one evening in the 1950s when he faced a fundamentalist religious group at a dinner meeting. A church deacon there challenged him: “This drought we’ve had in Alabama these past two years has ruined our crops! When are you going to stop punching holes in the clouds with those rockets and drying up the rain?”
Scattered applause broke out, and von Braun stood to respond to the deacon. “I know you are familiar, sir, with the Bible and with the story of Jacob’s ladder. The angels are ascending and descending the ladder. So are we. If the good Lord does not want us to go up and down His creation, all He has to do is tip over the ladder.”
“The applause was deafening,” recalled army information officer Reavis O’Neal Jr. “That day Wernher von Braun became Huntsville’s own personal angel!”14
It was banker Spragins who helped von Braun build his first home in America. Not long after the rocket team’s arrival, the banker promoted a meeting at the burgeoning town’s Russel Erskine Hotel to seek FHA (Federal Housing Administration) financing for much-needed homes for the new arrivals. At the head table with Spragins were Ludy Toftoy (now a brigadier general at Redstone), von Braun, an FHA official, and several other luminaries.
“Things were going so good,” the banker later reminded the rocket leader, “that you leaned over and asked if it would be okay if you asked about financing your residence. This was immediately agreed to during the meeting.” But a small hitch developed for von Braun, who was renting a home for his family and a nearby apartment for his parents: he lacked the required cash down payment for the home loan. No problem. Five new friends made him an unsecured loan so he could qualify for the FHA-backed mortgage. “Needless to say,” remembered his banker friend, “the house was built, the loan repaid,” and all ended well.15 The von Brauns’ mortgage payment for the three-bedroom home at 907 McClung Street, a few blocks from downtown, was $61a month, taxes and insurance included.16
Several other German families soon pooled their resources, passed the cash around from account to account, obtained FHA loans, and built starter homes near the von Brauns’ on a knoll quickly dubbed “Sauerkraut Hill.” Other ex-Peenemünders jointly bought a sizable parcel of land atop Monte Sano (“Healthful Mountain”), a junior-sized alp rising a thousand feet above the city at its eastern edge. They subdivided the parcel into lots and built homes in a cluster there, which some townspeople called “the German Colony.”
Hans F. Gruene, one of von Braun’s Sauerkraut Hill neighbors and colleagues, later shared with his boss the story of an incident involving a workman who apparently didn’t realize Gruene was one of those crazy German rocket scientists. “When you had your first paint job done on your house at McClung,” Gruene related, “the painter came to me in the backyard and told me point-blank that he was not too happy to work for ‘a nut that wants to go to the Moon despite the fact that the Bible says we could [not] and should not go.’ I did not try to match . . . Bible quotations with an Alabama handyman because I knew I would have lost, hands down.” Instead, the German scientist tried to use “pure logic” in defending notions of space travel with the workman. Gruene said he lost at that, too.17
And then there were the yelping beagles. Robert and Frances Gates Moore’s home stood on a three-acre lot directly across from the von Braun residence. Engineer Bob Moore had gone to work in 1951 at Redstone in Hans Hueter’s laboratory in the Guided Missile Development Group, of which von Braun was technical chief. The Moores at one point had a pack of six young beagles with a habit of leaving the house in the small hours of the morning to chase rabbits through the nearby fields. The yelping pups were waking up von Braun early in the morning, and he was not an early riser.
“Dr. von Braun called Mr. Hueter,” Frances Moore remembered years later, “and asked him to please ask Bob to please keep the dogs penned up until seven o’clock in the morning, because they were coming under his bedroom window about four o’clock in the morning, hot after a rabbit. He didn’t want to call Bob himself because he was afraid it would scare a young engineer to death! He was extremely considerate.”18
Von Braun’s feelings for his graceful wife matched her devotion to him, friends and associates observed. As their family grew (they eventually had three children) he encouraged Maria to avoid the hausfrau trap. While remaining, by all accounts, a devoted young mother who put her children’s interests ahead of her own, she earned a pilot’s license in Huntsville, attended horse shows in Tennessee and elsewhere, enjoyed water sports, and indulged her love of travel, attending concerts, and touring museums whenever possible.
Maria von Braun had let her husband know at the outset of their move to Huntsville that as a big-city girl, raised mostly in Berlin, she had no desire to become a rocket-and-space widow stuck in small-town Alabama. Friends said her husband kept his promise to make at least one trip each year to New York for Broadway shows, symphony concerts, art museums, fine dining, Christmas shopping, and just being with each other. In 1951 he wrote to a British rocketry colleague in London, in part to explain a lapse in correspondence: “I spent two weeks on a vacation ... at Lake Wisconsin, and I had promised my wife that there would be no rockets, no letters and no nothing even remotely reminding of business. As to the moon, her role was reduced to a device for the stimulation of romance.”19
Recognizing early that his German comrades tended naturally to be absorbed in their work and to associate only with one another away from the job, von Braun urged them to get involved in the community. Many responded by doing just that, in both large and small ways. They became active as musicians and board members with the Community Concert Association that led to the Huntsville Symphony Orchestra. They physically helped build a Lutheran church and a community astronomical observatory and planetarium. They took active roles in museum and arts groups, school PTAs, and in scout troops with their children. They taught night classes in technical courses at the new University of Alabama–Huntsville Extension Center.
“It is essential,” von Braun preached, “that the team members understand the system of government under which they work and that they maintain contact with the unscientific members of the community.... We must meet the people and learn to share their problems and their activities. Only in this way can we become real Americans instead of transplanted Germans.”20
The gregarious von Braun was quick to practice what he preached. He mixed and mingled. He became president of the local astronomical society that he, team members, and new friends had founded. He went hunting and fishing with men of the city’s business, professional, and political leadership circles. He formed close, valuable friendships with such influential people as Reese T. Amis, erudite longtime editor of the Huntsville Times, who had been an artillery captain fighting Germans in World War I; Milton K. Cummings, a wealthy cotton broker, stock trader, and Democratic Party insider; and the town’s own U.S. senator, John Sparkman. The von Brauns socialized with them and their wives. They judiciously accepted social invitations from others within the community, although they tried to avoid hosts who merely wanted to “show us off,” as Maria complained on occasion. Von Braun spoke to countless organizations. Maria took part in many of their children’s school and extracurricular activities, as did Wernher to the extent he could.
At parties and receptions in Huntsville-area homes, Wernher was an outgoing guest, an engaging conversationalist. His wife, although naturally reserved, was regarded as thoroughly charming in her own way. To attorney Patrick Richardson she seemed like a princess.21 He also remembered a small dinner party he and his wife hosted at which the von Brauns were among the guests. The mellow, after-dinner conversation turned to the question of what was truly important in life, what had lasting value, aside from love of family. Von Braun spoke of how generations of his family were raised to believe in conserving their ancestral lands, then passing them on to the next generation. They were taught that the land would sustain them, always, and that it was the most important thing in the life of the family. But then von Braun and his brothers saw their ancestral lands lost to war and political events, “and we came to realize that all one can be sure of leaving one’s children is what’s inside their heads. Education, and not earthly possessions, is the ultimate legacy.”22
In the Huntsville workplace, von Braun enthusiastically employed the same approach with the development of the Redstone missile as he used with the V-2 in Peenemünde. Akin to the U.S. Army’s traditional “arsenal system,” it called for building strong internal R&D capabilities up to and including prototype production. Pilot manufacturing of the first missiles “in-house” strengthened the agency’s hand later when they were overseeing and evaluating the production contractor—in the Redstone’s case, Chrysler Corporation.
Among von Braun’s most notable skills, observed Col. Edward D. Mohlere, U.S. Army (Ret.), in 1998, was his ability to develop a high-quality technical workforce from the available labor supply in Huntsville.
Just picture the existing technical capabilities of an extremely rural area. It’s very low on the scale. One of the remarkable things about von Braun was his taking training programs and using them to train people who had small farms in the area and who rode around in pickup trucks, and making of them a very competent, highly qualified technical workforce. They were working in dimensions and tolerances that are almost unbelievable. A millionth of an inch here and there was quite important.23
Starting in 1953, the Redstone missile, patterned in part after the V-2, was flight-tested at Cape Canaveral on Florida’s east coast. When von Braun first saw the cape he was struck by its similarity, in its “isolation and inaccessibility,” to his former seaside missile base at Peenemünde.24 An early test there produced a classic example of von Braun’s promotion of honesty in the pursuit of perfection. The rocket soared flawlessly until mid-flight and then suddenly failed. Telemetry readings confirmed the “bird” had performed well until a precise point. That enabled troubleshooters to localize the likely source. The suspected area had been checked and rechecked during many lab tests, but none of the possible explanations seemed to ring true. Finally, one was accepted as the likeliest and corrective action was ordered. Several versions of what happened next circulated in conversation and print over the years. Here is what von Braun himself wrote:
At this point an engineer who was a member of the firing group called and said he wanted to see me. He came up to my office and told me that during pre-launching preparation he had tightened a certain connection just to make sure that there would be good contact.
While so doing, he had touched a contact with a screwdriver and drawn a spark. Since the system checked out well after this incident, he hadn’t paid any attention to the matter. But now that everybody was talking about a possible failure in that particular apparatus, he just wanted to tell me the story for whatever it was worth. A quick study indicated that here was the answer. Needless to say, the “remedial action” was called off and no changes were made.
I sent the engineer a bottle of champagne because I wanted everybody to know that honesty pays off, even if someone may run the risk of incriminating himself. Absolute honesty is something you simply cannot dispense with in a team effort as difficult as that of missile development.25
It was von Braun’s “rare brand of leadership” that Col. James K. Hoey, U.S. Army (Ret.), saw as equal in importance to his “imagination and technical brilliance.” Hoey recalled that around 1951 von Braun had decided to tackle “that most traumatic of events in bureaucratic life—a reorganization—and a far-reaching one at that.” It especially affected the director’s German-born colleagues. As Hoey elaborated to von Braun on his sixtieth birthday:
You and one or two others had worked out the structure that you felt would do the job and had hung names on the various blocks. At this point, you divorced yourself from day-to-day operations for about two weeks. You could be seen slipping in or out of your office with one of the group in tow; or engaged in long and earnest conversation with some other individual in the corner of the coffee shop; or wandering for hours among the trees outside ... the old headquarters building with one or another of the more difficult personalities.
The result was that when the reorganization was finally announced, there were no surprises; the scars [were] minimal, and were exactly as predicted. The team moved on without missing a step. It was a quietly magnificent performance.26
The colonel added that the validity of von Braun’s approach was evidenced by the fact that “the resultant internal structure stood for a good many years without change.”
Von Braun’s “skill as a director and a manager of people” was the quality that George C. Bucher, an army manager at Redstone (and later with NASA), found most memorable. As a newcomer to the organization in the 1950s, Bucher got his first exposure to the rocket leader’s handling of his characteristically marathon meetings. While “entranced by the technical discussions and decision-making in [the] meetings with the [German] laboratory directors, I sometimes thought, ‘Gosh, this is getting long-winded. Every single person feels he has to speak. Why doesn’t Dr. von Braun take a strong stand, cut off discussions, and make a decision on his own?’”
Bucher years later told von Braun that he failed to realize then that he was
purposely directing the meeting in your own unique and masterful way. After giving everyone an opportunity to speak, you then skillfully synthesized the contributions so that everyone felt he had contributed to, and hence was committed to, the objective that you defined and the action you outlined. You then turned to those who had supported a somewhat different approach and asked, ‘How does this sound to you? Can you live with it?’ Invariably, the response was, ‘I’ll do my best to support it.’ When the meeting ended, everyone knew what was to be done . . . and knew every strength and every weakness, every bright spot and every dim spot, in every laboratory that was to contribute.27
The team’s liquid-fueled rockets, with their fantastic mazes of pipes and valves and pumps and tubing, required maximum engineering—his first love. Von Braun would get out into the shops and labs, seeing the detail work up close, getting his hands dirty, and schmoozing with his “coworkers,” as he referred to employees. Engineer Donald Bowden was in his early twenties when he was put in charge of operations at a test stand at Redstone in the 1950s. “I’d look up, and out of the blue there’d be von Braun coming around the corner,” Bowden remembered. “And he’d call us all by name; he’d learned everybody’s name. . . . He didn’t have any qualms about talking to everybody.”28
Around lunchtime one day in April 1952, Larkin Davis was busy at his workbench in the jig-boring room of the machine shop in Building 4711 at Redstone. He was startled to see the missile center’s technical director and another man walking toward him. Von Braun, whom Davis had not met, introduced himself and then his companion, an engineer from the Bulova watch company. The director asked Davis to brief the visitor on the work being done. Davis explained a portion of the work that involved machining extremely “close-tolerance, precision parts.” About then, “Dr. von Braun turned to the engineer and said, ‘I’m just a plumber myself.’” Added Davis, “That engineer and I almost broke up laughing.”29
No one in Huntsville worked more closely with von Braun during this period than a small-town northern Alabama woman named Bonnie Holmes. Two years after the rocket team arrived, she was twenty-one, a high school and business college graduate, and a civil service clerk-stenographer working at Redstone Arsenal. She answered a call for workers willing to change jobs at the army post. Twenty years later she wrote a letter of reminiscence to her longtime boss:
In early 1952 while I was working in the Army Post Engineer Office your intriguing article “Crossing the Last Frontier” appeared in Collier’s Magazine. It was to me a captivating and imaginative article, although there were some who didn’t think so.
Shortly after, the Personnel Office called to ask if I would be interested in being interviewed for a secretarial position in the Guided Missile Development [Division], specifically to work for you. At that time, a move from a sure position was a big decision for me, but recalling that inspirational article made it easy. My Post Engineer Office associates didn’t [agree]. . . . With looks of shock and disbelief there came the remarks “You must be out of your mind. Surely you can’t really want to work for those crazy Krauts. There is no future for you in such a business.”30
The negative talk did not deter the young clerk-steno. “My interest in space had been sparked by your writings and I was determined to go and accept the challenge,” she continued. “Ever since I have thanked my lucky stars for being selected for the position—for the opportunity to work for you and with you and with all the ‘greats’ in the dedicated team.” She called the eighteen eventful years she was his secretary “a great adventure—and the thrill persists to this day.” She could not resist adding in her 1972 letter, “I wonder what they think of ‘those crazy Krauts’ now!”31
Von Braun liked to introduce visitors to his office, famous and otherwise, to Bonnie Holmes, “the lady I work for—my real boss.”32 As the secretary he called “a phenomenon,” she handled most of his correspondence, served as office gatekeeper, scheduled all his appointments and travel, and carried out countless other duties. The rocket scientist and his wife sometimes traveled abroad under the names of the secretary and her husband for the sake of privacy and security. “Von Braun relied upon her heavily,” observed Joseph M. Jones, longtime army and later NASA public affairs officer at Redstone. “Dealing with her was tantamount to dealing with von Braun himself.”33
Of course, what brought the von Braun team and its American partners to Redstone Arsenal and Huntsville in the first place—aside from their barely suppressed space dreams—was developing new army guided missile systems. By 1951 work was under way to create the Redstone as a nuclear-capable ballistic missile, designed for a 200-mile range and maximum 6,500-pound payload capacity, and the Nike-Ajax antiaircraft rocket.
As the Redstone missile’s development progressed, first came static, or hold-down, test firings on a primitive steel-and-concrete stand built on the cheap at the arsenal by von Braun’s team—“the poor man’s test stand,” he called it. Then followed modifications based on the test results. After just three years in development, in August 1953 the Redstone underwent the first in a series of test flights from Cape Canaveral. Some were successful, some not.
Witnessing one catastrophic failure on the launch pad, von Braun’s army boss, then-Major General Toftoy, turned to him and asked, “Wernher, why did that rocket explode?” The scientist said he didn’t know, but that just as soon as he and others could check production, test, and launch data, he would try to have the answer. The general, however, continued to press von Braun for an immediate explanation—and von Braun continued to say he had none. Persisting, Toftoy asked, “Don’t you have any idea why it exploded?” His patience exhausted, von Braun fired back: “Yes. It exploded because the sonuvabitch blew up!”34
Sometimes it was what the loquacious von Braun did not say that carried a strong message. The launch—or attempted launch—of the army’s third Redstone came on May 5, 1954. Viewing the proceedings from atop an old lighthouse a mile or so from the pad were von Braun, Toftoy, Sam Hoffman of North American Aviation’s Rocketdyne Division, and several others. The missile “rose only a few feet, faltered and exploded in a white ball of flame due to a Rocketdyne engine failure,” Hoffman painfully recalled years later. The Rocketdyne chief noted that Toftoy had looked at him and asked pointedly: “You will be here for the next launch, won’t you, Sam?”
Hoffman noted that von Braun did not say a word. But his “silence spoke volumes and impressed me more than anything [he] could have said. I returned to Rocketdyne instilled with a new sense of dedication and purpose.”35
It was during such trying times that von Braun pressed his agency and contractor team even harder for the highest quality of workmanship and reliability of product. Twenty years later, Arlie R. Trahern Jr., a Chrysler Space Division executive, recalled that von Braun had disarmingly promoted missile reliability as something “which would make the target area more dangerous than the launch area.”36
In time, successful flight tests of the Redstone came with increasing frequency, eventually earning it the nickname “Old Reliable.” But even its being declared operational, put into production, and deployed in the mid-1950s did not slow engineering modifications to the weapon. The multiple design changes required issuance of a series of field “mod kits” to soldiers already deployed with the missiles. A meeting was called at Redstone Arsenal to deal with the changes continuing to emanate from the weapon’s development office, headed by veteran rocket team member Arthur Rudolph. With von Braun, Redstone production chief John C. Goodrum Sr., and others in attendance, Rudolph persisted in defending the design changes as necessary further improvements in reliability.
“Finally,” recalled Goodrum, “Dr. von Braun reached over, put his hand on Rudolph’s shoulder, and said, ‘Art, you remind me of the fellow who married a virgin and kept telling her how good it was going to be once he got it perfected.’” A design freeze soon went into effect.37
In the early days of American missilery, Gen. James M. Gavin, U.S. Army, and a technical group in Washington were engrossed in evaluating Soviet missile programs, mainly via extensive covert photography. But the experts at the Pentagon were “at a loss to understand much of the information” about the new Soviet missile sites. Gavin suggested that von Braun be brought up to examine the pictures. That idea was vetoed. “I was told that he couldn’t be allowed to see them because he didn’t have the necessary special security clearance!” recalled the general. The group was making no progress, however, so it ultimately relented and had the German scientist come up from Huntsville to see if he could help. “He came to my office, where we showed him all the photographs,” Gavin related. “At once he described the complete system, what the plumbing was, what kind of fuel they were using, where they were storing it, where the missile was fueled, and gave us the general characteristics of the missile.”38
The young metallurgist William R. Lucas, who early on joined in the development of the Redstone missile and who worked with von Braun nearly all of the latter’s twenty years in Huntsville, quickly recognized the rocket scientist’s brilliance in technical leadership. But he also soon grasped other realities about the man. For one thing, his “tremendous breadth of intellect” was more impressive than his “depth [in] any one area.” For another, when he had an idea, goal, or fixed view, “you couldn’t dissuade him from it. . . . You had to get his attention.”39
One of the scientific challenges that had drawn Lucas to rocket work was corrosion of lightweight missile materials in the environment of a subtropical seacoast launch site and corrosion caused by liquid propellants. Lucas and his boss at the time, Karl Hager, were seeking equipment and funding for a study of such corrosion. For von Braun’s sixtieth birthday book Lucas wrote:
Since you had just come from White Sands where corrosion was one of the least problems, we were meeting very little success in convincing you. Then you spent a week in Florida in preparation for a launch. Upon your return, you directed us to begin a program on corrosion immediately because in one week at Cocoa Beach, the bottom of your tooth-powder can had rusted and the salt air had attacked the chrome on your automobile bumper. White Sands was never like that. You “convinced” us that Florida was much worse and that we must do something immediately. We were delighted to implement your idea.40
Although von Braun’s work occupied much of his time and attention, he did not let it crowd out personal and family life. Wernher and Maria’s family grew during the early 1950s. For a time three generations of von Brauns resided in Huntsville. Brother Magnus also lived there until 1955, when he left the army to work for missile contractor Chrysler Corporation in Detroit. The brothers’ mother, Baroness Emmy, began teaching English classes for the wives of the other German rocket experts. Their genial, walrus-mustachioed father, Baron Magnus, regularly took walks in the community, acknowledging the greetings of residents along the way. In 1953 von Braun’s parents decided to return to Germany, where the baron had qualified for a livable government pension for his years of pre-Hitler public service. There he wrote a memoir, From East Prussia to Texas.41
In the beginning, Wernher and Maria were almost as accessible as the elder von Brauns to their fellow Huntsvillians. Their home telephone number was listed in the city’s directory—until one New Year’s Eve when a drunk called to request “a ticket to the Moon, Doctor.” Then the von Brauns got an unlisted number.
On May 8, 1952, a second daughter, Margrit Cecile, was born to Maria and Wernher, joining big sister Iris. Both girls had dual U.S. and German citizenship at birth. Wernher and Maria had begun the process of naturalization as American citizens in 1949, when long-term employment with the army seemed assured. That step had triggered a Department of Justice action and an FBI “investigation and surveillance that would last . . . decades and fill thousands of pages with facts [Nazi Party membership, SS commission, and the like], but also gossip and often frivolous innuendo.”42
On April 14, 1955, Wernher and Maria joined with thirty-eight of the German rocket experts and some seventy family members and others in renouncing their German citizenship, which was required of them to adopt U.S. citizenship. They became naturalized U.S. citizens onstage in the Huntsville High School auditorium before a crowd of a thousand townspeople and students. A broadly smiling Wernher von Braun told reporters it was “one of the proudest and most significant days of my life—almost like getting married. I am very, very happy.”
Major General Toftoy was there. He assured the new citizens that, in the ten years since he’d met with them in a schoolhouse in Germany and invited them to come to the United States, even though he “promised you no future,” this “great team of rocket engineers and scientists” had achieved much. “I am sure that the future holds even greater things for you.”43