Kennedy, von Braun, and the Crucible of World War II
Only a pure determinist could designate the V-2 a sine qua non of the origins of the Space Age in our time. What the German engineers did, with their clever fabrication of what seemed even in World War II a “baroque arsenal,” was to prod their enemies to the East and West into premature fear and rivalry and to make themselves and their blueprints the most prized spoil of the war.
—WALTER A. McDOUGALL, THE HEAVENS AND THE EARTH (1985)
As 1930 began, twelve-year-old John Kennedy was living at his parents’ home on Pondfield Road in the suburb of Bronxville, in Westchester County, New York. Jack was a good-natured boy with green-gray eyes and a Huck Finn cowlick, admired for his quick wit and beatific smile. With both his father and mother traveling extensively, sometimes away from the household for months at a time, it was Jack’s older brother, Joseph Jr., who served as the day-to-day model of everything Jack both did and did not want to become. Blessed with a deft intellect and preternatural drive, Joe was self-contained, slender, vigorous, a bit humorless, and a natty dresser with a distinctive aura of future greatness. On the downside, he also had a notoriously quick temper and could be brusque when under pressure.
As a youth, Jack held none of these attributes.
From a distance, Jack was a fortunate son, living in the lap of luxury even as most American children were beginning to suffer the grips of the Great Depression. Money was tight as banks foreclosed at an alarming rate. Privileges for the Kennedy kids came in droves. But Jack’s affluence came with its own complications and challenges. Determined not to raise carefree children, his parents were hard on him, and the constant obligation to be as tough and resilient as Joe Jr. also bore down. Once, when Jack was a boy, he and Joe engaged in a game of chicken on their bicycles, pedaling into each other. Joe was barely hurt, while Jack had to get twenty-eight stitches. After that incident, Jack resisted any expectation that he be like his older brother, developing a distinct personality of his own rather than emulating Joe’s. Confronting the mores of the high and the rich, he adopted an air of amused, slightly sardonic detachment, as though he were a social scientist clinically observing an esoteric subspecies of man from afar. Yet he did so with such confidence and goodwill that most were charmed rather than offended. Burdened with high expectations, he met them in a charismatic and exemplary way that would one day enter the language: Kennedyesque.
As Jack was learning to negotiate his formative years, a new, wildly popular cartoon and radio character appeared to help those of his generation escape to the stars, if only in their imaginations. Buck Rogers, originally a short story by Philip Francis Nowlan, debuted as a comic strip in January 1929 and achieved enormous popularity through syndication in the early 1930s. In each strip, the eponymous hero, an earthling of the twenty-fifth century, roamed the stars in search of adventure. By 1932, a Buck Rogers radio show was airing on CBS, bringing the concept of space exploration to millions. To capitalize on the craze, futuristic Buck Rogers toys, such as the ZX-31 Rocket Pistol and the XZ-44 Liquid Helium Water Pistol, were rushed to the market, where they pushed aside cowboys-and-Indians playthings and sold like hotcakes to children of all ages.
Capitalizing on the popularity of Buck Rogers, other newspaper syndicates unveiled their own original science-fiction comics. Flash Gordon debuted in 1934 and was centered entirely on interplanetary travel in rockets. Becoming even more famous and successful than Buck Rogers, Flash Gordon took place contemporaneously, in the early 1930s, starting when Flash, a handsome polo player and Yale graduate, meets a scientist working in isolation on a space rocket. If that smacked a bit of what Americans already knew of their real-life rocket scientist, Dr. Robert Goddard, the story continued from there with everything that the wizard of Roswell couldn’t yet supply: a trip into outer space and the cosmic, gravity-defying feat that Americans craved. Although Kennedy, in his teen years, was now more interested in novel-length adventures such as Treasure Island and Robinson Crusoe, Buck Rogers and Flash Gordon were making his generation believe in space as the next frontier.
After earning a mixed report card at his private day school in the Riverdale section of the Bronx, Jack Kennedy, having relocated to New York with his family, spent the summer of 1930 preparing to leave for boarding school. He expected to follow his brother to the elite boarding school Choate, in Wallingford, Connecticut, but at the very last moment, at his mother’s insistence, he enrolled instead at a different Connecticut school: Canterbury, in New Milford, which reflected his family’s Roman Catholic values. Attending Canterbury in 1930–31, he felt isolated and was undoubtedly homesick, but he didn’t complain. “Please send me the Literary Digest,” he implored his father in a letter. Although Jack suffered an attack of appendicitis at Canterbury, he kept a stiff upper lip. As Rose Kennedy put it, the family was “accustomed to the idea that every now and then he would be laid up by some disease or accident.” While different from his father, by late adolescence Jack exhibited the same dauntlessness, the absolute belief that complaints were a bore and a nuisance to those within earshot.
In 1931, Jack transferred to Choate, in part because it functioned as a direct conduit into Harvard. However, the teenager didn’t fit into the old-money mold that dominated the school. A Catholic in a WASP milieu, restless and unfocused, he was inattentive and couldn’t master his schoolwork, plan his days, keep his possessions in order, stand out in sports, or manage his spending money, much less gain the respect of his teachers. Jack was more of an undisciplined big boy, popular but unfocused. During his Choate years, he veered toward flirting and frittering around. “Jack has rather superior mental ability without the deep interest in his studies or the mature viewpoint that demands of him his best effort all the time,” the Choate headmaster wrote of Kennedy at eighteen. “We have been and are working our hardest to develop Jack’s own self-interest, great enough in social life, to the point that will assure him a record in college more worthy of his natural gifts of intelligence, likeability, and popularity.”
In a more relaxed, less competitive family and school, Jack might have been judged an above-average teen with good manners. But as a Kennedy and Choate student, he relied on whimsical irony and unrivaled charm to excel. Blessed with a fine winning smile and coolheaded demeanor, he was liked for his insouciance and good cheer. At the same time, he was constantly plagued with bouts of illnesses, was thin as a rake, and in 1934 was struck by a digestive disorder that caused fatigue, weight loss, and spells of pain. Physicians at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota, determined he had colitis. He spent the spring semester of that year in a hospital room filled with books, magazines, newspapers, and, somewhere underneath it all, a phonograph to play Bing Crosby records.
As he approached commencement in 1935, graduating 65th in a class of 110, the mere fact of his attendance at Riverdale, Canterbury, and Choate practically guaranteed admission to the Ivy League, whose schools were weathering the Great Depression by accepting nearly every applicant with an elite prep school on his résumé. In the fall he began studies at Princeton, but had to withdraw during his first semester due to illness. Upon his recovery, he set his sights on Harvard, his father’s alma mater.
In the mid-1930s, the president of Harvard described his method of “fishing” for students from families with an annual income above five thousand dollars—this at a time when Jack himself would soon be receiving as much as fifty thousand dollars per year from a trust fund set up by his parents. But even if his prep school background and income hadn’t made Jack a shoo-in, his father’s new position as chairman of the Securities and Exchange Commission under President Franklin Roosevelt probably would have. It couldn’t have hurt, too, that one of the reference letters submitted with Jack’s Harvard application was written by Harry Hopkins, one of FDR’s closest advisors. “I feel that Harvard can give me a better background and a better liberal education than any other university,” Jack wrote in his application. And in fact, Harvard accomplished both those goals.
Kennedy started at Harvard in the fall of 1936, and by his junior year his innate interest in history had led him to studies in government, political science, and foreign relations. Yet still he rebelled against leading too proscriptive a life. Life in Cambridge was a steadying influence, but the prankster playboy ways Kennedy had developed at Choate still occupied his weekends, when he would typically journey to New York City for parties and nightclubbing. By this point, his family had created a new home base, in the town of Hyannis Port, a village on Cape Cod, in Massachusetts. Jack thrived on that peninsula during the summer months, swimming and sailing, or driving along the Atlantic coast in a convertible with other hellcats from the wealthy towns nearby.
DURING KENNEDY’S SCHOOL years, rocketry was a popular fad in Germany—in comics, in novels, and in cinema. In the German public’s imagination, it seemed that it would be just a matter of time before space travel became an empirical reality. Yet for all the optimism about rockets, there was a creeping concern within Weimar Germany that the nation was leaning increasingly toward fascism, particularly after the 1930 election.
In 1930, eighteen-year-old Wernher von Braun arrived at the Technische Hochschule Berlin, enrolling in the college’s engineering school but focused entirely on studying mechanical engineering, with an eye on rocketry. His hero was Dr. Hermann Oberth, a high school science teacher in Romania and rocket theoretician who had made a splash in the Central European media. “Oberth was the first, who when thinking about the possibilities of a spaceship, grabbed a slide-rule and presented mathematically analyzed concepts and designs,” von Braun recalled. “I, myself, owe to him not only the guiding star of my life, but also my first contact with the theoretical and practical aspects of rocketry and space travel.”
Von Braun met Oberth a couple of times in 1930. The rocketry concepts developed by Oberth would remain imprinted on von Braun’s spongelike mind even as he diverged from his hero over one of the most important issues facing their scientific community: the militarization of rocketry by the German government.
In January 1933, Adolf Hitler, an Aryan racist genocidal provocateur against Jews, Slavs, and countless others, was appointed chancellor of Germany and quickly consolidated power. In this charged atmosphere, the rocketry community was divided. Some distrusted Hitler’s Nazi Party outright. But the young von Braun led a contingent that saw full-bore cooperation with the military as the path to space rocketry success. With Oberth having returned to his home in Romania, von Braun entered enthusiastically into the German Army’s new rocket program. On December 18, 1934, von Braun launched two advanced A-2 rockets, named Max and Moritz (after German comic characters), to altitudes of 6,500 feet.
Both Kennedy and von Braun were primed with an inevitable sense that they would be called to military duty if World War II erupted. Each was patriotic and wanted to serve his country. By the late 1930s, global events were setting the stage for a cataclysmic conflict between fascism and democracy. The difficult, somber early years of the Great Depression were giving way to a gathering crisis in Europe, as the world careened toward the measureless suffering of another Great War. Recognizing that the United States might soon be drawn into the European conflict, and also yearning for government funding, Robert Goddard tried to interest President Franklin Roosevelt’s top generals and admirals in the development of long-range military rockets, but most of America’s military leaders considered his ideas marginal or even crackpot. Even the engineers at the NACA, in Hampton, Virginia, had to abandon more visionary aerodynamic experiments in favor of practical military aviation advancements. However, when a NACA delegation toured Germany in 1936, they were flabbergasted by the sophistication of the Third Reich’s aeronautical technology and enthusiasm for rocketry.
Major Jimmy Doolittle was also aware of Germany’s daunting aviation hardware. Born in Alameda, California, in 1896, Doolittle became interested in space science as a boy. By the time of World War I, Doolittle was an accomplished U.S. Army Air Corps pilot, serving as a flight instructor in Ohio. After the war, he flew a de Havilland DH-4 in the first cross-country flight, from Jacksonville Beach, Florida, to San Diego. Besides being a brave pilot, Doolittle was a master of aviation technology, having earned a doctorate in aeronautical engineering from MIT, and helped develop new flight instruments that let pilots navigate through fog, cloud banks, darkness, and rainstorms. He was also the first U.S. pilot to recognize the psychological effects of flight, especially how a pilot’s hearing and vision were affected by high altitudes. As a civilian in the 1930s, he routinely shattered aviation speed records.
In 1937, Doolittle went to Germany on Shell Oil business and was stunned to learn that Hitler was mass-producing modern fighter planes and bombers at a frightening rate. Touring airplane factories such as Junkers, Heinkel, Dornier, Messerschmitt, and Focke-Wulf, Doolittle realized that the United States was way behind the Germans. Once back in America, he met with Army Air Corps leaders, sounding the Paul Revere–like alarm. In October 1938, Doolittle traveled to the New Mexico desert to discuss rocket propulsion with Goddard. While other military men held a low opinion of rocketry, Doolittle wrote a memo praising Goddard, detailing how a rocket could be used in warfare. The memo ended with a reference to Goddard’s spaceman reputation, admitting that while “interplanetary transportation” was a dream of the very distant future, “with the moon only a quarter of a million miles away—who knows!”
For the most part, Goddard was protective of his work during the 1930s. Frank Malina from Caltech tried to convince Goddard to join a rocketry project at his university, but he refused. In a September 1936 letter, Goddard wrote disparagingly of Malina to Caltech’s Robert Milikin. Goddard commented that he had tried to help Malina with some of his questions, but “I naturally cannot turn over the results of many years of investigation, still incomplete, for a student’s thesis.”
IN THE SUMMER of 1937, just before his sophomore year at Harvard, Jack Kennedy traveled through England, France, Italy, Austria, Germany, and the Netherlands in an automobile with a school friend named Lem Billings. Avoiding first-class travel to accommodate Billings’s modest budget, the two met and mingled with people from outside Kennedy’s typically upper-crust milieu. To speak with people beyond the tourist areas, Kennedy insisted that they pick up hitchhikers, especially in countries where publicly conversing with an American was deemed a bit risky. Seeking libertine pleasures was also built into the itinerary.
In Germany, the rise of fascism intrigued both Jack and Lem.
Despite newspaper reports on the human rights abuses of Hitler’s government and the overt militarism that fueled German economic growth, admiration for the Nazis was common among the U.S. and British upper classes in the mid- to late 1930s. Many American intellectual-corporate elites believed Hitler’s rule had led to efficiencies in business and factories and to social stability. Both Joe Kennedy Sr. and Jr. shared these views. Joe Sr. was astonished that the hyperinflation of the early 1920s, which left the German market shattered in economic depression, had been replaced in the 1930s by robust economic growth. An equally impressed Joe Jr. thought that Germany had bested the United States in railways, aviation, medicine, forestry, and, quite ominously, social engineering.
One reason for Jack’s European trip that summer was to judge for himself the situation in Germany since Hitler’s rise—an admirable independent-mindedness, considering his father’s and Joe Jr.’s strong opinions. Arriving in cities such as Berlin, he immersed himself in local culture, observing closely and jotting down impressions in his diary. By the time he and Lem arrived in Munich in August, trade unions and all political parties other than the Nazis had long since been dissolved. By rebuilding the military, including the Luftwaffe (air corps), and moving German troops into the disputed Rhineland, Hitler had abrogated the Treaty of Versailles. Meanwhile, military pacts were being formalized with Italy and Japan. The Dachau concentration camp was already in operation. Jews were being segregated and stripped of their most basic rights, and Romanies (Gypsies), Slavs, Jehovah’s Witnesses, and homosexuals faced daily persecution. Hitler was actualizing the Aryan supremacy theories first spewed in his book Mein Kampf, which he wrote while in jail for treason.
During the trip, Jack was amazed by the quality of Germany’s new roads, train depots, and dams but he scorned the outward trappings of Nazi fanaticism. Fueled by German beer, he and Lem mocked their way through the Nazi “Heil Hitler” as they made their way across the country. On one occasion, traveling near Nuremberg, Jack “had the added attraction of being spitted on” for his antics. Nevertheless, his overall impression was positive. “The Germans really are too good,” he wrote in his journal. “It makes people gang up against them.” Lem, in his own diary of the trip, recounted the conclusion drawn by two Ivy League travelers while speeding down the autobahns in their Ford Cabriolet: that the broad new highways had a military purpose first and foremost. They knew increasingly, in their guts, that another world war was likely.
Back in the United States, fierce debates were erupting between internationalists and isolationists. President Roosevelt had no inclination to think about rockets as ballistic missiles—the whole concept seemed remote and ridiculous. The isolationists, including Charles Lindbergh and carmaker Henry Ford, were a diverse group, loud and well organized, and encompassing those who acutely remembered the horrors of World War I and those who hoped for German domination of Europe—which, by 1938 and early 1939, seemed more than possible. In March 1938, Roosevelt appointed Joseph Kennedy Sr. as ambassador to the Court of St. James’s, hoping that America’s most famous Irish-Catholic businessman could influence millions of Irish Americans to drop their ethnic enmity and support Britain in the European conflict to come. More selfishly, FDR thought Kennedy could be an asset for his own reelection bid in 1940 (for an unprecedented third term).
As Jack Kennedy’s interest in foreign affairs deepened, the timing of his father’s appointment couldn’t have been better. On July 4, 1938, the Harvard undergraduate sailed to England with brother Joe Jr., staying and working at the American embassy in London. There, Jack learned in a visceral way how European nations responded to Hitler’s aggression against smaller countries such as Czechoslovakia.
After spending the fall semester of 1938 back at Harvard, Jack left for an extended overseas tour early in 1939. For the next few months, his experiences traveling in western Europe, the Balkans, and the Middle East, as well as working at the American embassy in London, would substitute for his Harvard coursework. By the time he arrived in London, his father’s ambassadorship was tenuous. During his early tenure, Joseph Sr. had often expressed isolationist sentiments under the guise of arguing for peace. In at least one case, the State Department had felt compelled to intervene, quashing his remarks before they went public. The Roosevelt administration was aghast. Joe Sr. apparently failed to understand that any opinions he expressed as ambassador had to remain within the bounds of the Roosevelt administration’s foreign policy—a policy that was then walking a fine line. Given the strength of isolationist sentiment in America, official policy on developments in Europe remained guardedly neutral. But this was not the position of the president, who privately believed that the United States could not hope to remain aloof from a European conflict and who was working to subtly shift public opinion. Nazi-appeasing rhetoric from the American ambassador to Great Britain could do real damage, convincing fascist leaders that the United States would remain on the sidelines. To the surprise of some in the administration, FDR chose to retain Kennedy in his post. Among other things, he was reluctant to overreact: European diplomatic matters were delicate enough in the late 1930s without the turmoil that would ensue from the removal of a high-level appointee. In 1940, however, Joe Sr. went too far yet again, and FDR fired him.
While working unofficially on minor assignments at the London embassy, Jack made two visits to the Continent, including to the Soviet Union, Germany, and Poland—traveling to the last just a few weeks before the Nazis invaded it. He also attended the coronation of Pope Pius XII in Rome, where his family was granted a private papal audience. These experiences, aided by Joe Sr.’s State Department connections, proved a vitally important part of Jack’s education, but it was clear he was already in his element. Friends of the family were impressed by how much he knew about Hannibal, Caesar, Napoleon, and the rise and fall of great powers. U.S. ambassador Charles Bohlen, Jack’s mentor while in Russia, noted, “We were all struck by Kennedy’s charm and quick mind, but especially by his open-mindedness about the Soviet Union, a rare quality in those pre-war days. . . . He made a favorable impression.” That September, Kennedy was in the Visitors’ Gallery in the British House of Commons as Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain announced war on Hitler’s Germany for attacking Poland with planes, tanks, and infantry. “For a twenty-two-year-old American,” historian Richard Whalen wrote, “it was a unique opportunity to look behind the scenes as the stage was set for the Second World War.”
Back at Harvard that same September 1939, Jack was fully engaged intellectually with regard to a Europe on the brink. Initially, he struck an isolationist posture like that of his father, authoring an unsigned Harvard Crimson editorial, “Peace in Our Time,” which implored the United States not to overreact to the Polish defeat by entering the hostilities. Especially problematic was his naïve belief that Hitler would disarm if allowed to run a puppet Poland and have a free hand in Eastern Europe. But as he worked on his honors thesis, “Appeasement in Munich,” which detailed Neville Chamberlain’s failed policy toward Hitler, his thinking shifted decisively.
In June 1940, Jack graduated cum laude with a bachelor of science degree. Later that year, his thesis was published in book form under the title Why England Slept, with a glowing introduction by Henry Luce, the Time magazine publisher, who was a close friend of Joseph Sr. With help from other family friends, it became a bestseller. For Jack, the book marked the start of an unending process of edging away from his father politically while continuing to benefit from the massive help Joe Sr. could provide. In this political realignment, Jack, the new interventionist, was not alone: with disdain for Hitler’s aggression on the rise, American isolationism was ebbing, and it was Jack, not his statesman father, who had correctly read the tides of history.
WHAT JACK HAD learned during his European trips in the 1930s was that military technology was a priority for the Nazi regime, and so was secrecy about the many projects undertaken. The disarmament provisions of the Treaty of Versailles meant that the German military had mastered the art of both concealment and opportunism, seizing on the treaty’s catastrophic omission of rocketry to leapfrog their enemies technologically.
Future American president John F. Kennedy sits at a typewriter in 1940, holding open his published Harvard thesis, Why England Slept.
Hulton Archive/Archive Photos/Getty Images
After World War I, several nations were vying to see who could develop and test the first jet airplane. Italy won with its successful prototype in 1940—or so it thought. Unknown to the Italians, a German Heinkel jet had already been flying for a year. Equal secrecy was accorded to the German Army Ordnance’s rocket development group, headed by Dr. Walter Dornberger, a hardworking artillery officer who had been captured by U.S. Marines during World War I and spent two years imprisoned in France. After the war, he studied mechanical engineering in Berlin as a junior officer. In April 1930, Dornberger was appointed to Weapons Testing of the German Army (Reichswehr) specializing in ballistics and munitions, tasked with clandestinely designing a solid-propellant rocket that could be mass-produced and transcend the range of traditional artillery.
One of Dornberger’s primary assistants was the young Wernher von Braun. Years later, Dornberger recalled how impressed he was by von Braun’s opportunistic zeal, calculated shrewdness, and “astonishing theoretical knowledge.” Von Braun was soon leading Dornberger’s research team at the German military’s rocket artillery unit at Kummersdorf, about thirty miles south of Berlin. It was here that von Braun began developing and testing the first of his Aggregat series of rockets, the A-1 and A-2.
By the mid-1930s, Dornberger and von Braun’s rocketry work had attracted the support of the Luftwaffe, Nazi Germany’s newly formed air force. And the project enjoyed support from the top ranks of the army. In 1936, Colonel Professor Dr. Karl Becker, head of the Research and Development Division of the German Army’s Ordnance Department and a longtime rocketry supporter, gave Dornberger some advice: “If you want more money, you have to prove that your rocket is of military value.”
Dornberger and von Braun drew up the specifications for a game-changing ballistic missile. Their description was based on an extra-long howitzer, like the monumental German weapon used against Paris near the end of World War I. Then the longest-range artillery weapon known, it was capable of lobbing massive shells to a target eighty miles away. Looking for even more destructive capability, Dornberger and von Braun planned a single-stage rocket-propelled missile that would be launched vertically and then programmed in flight to an elevation angle of forty-five degrees. The rocket they envisioned would carry nearly one hundred times the weight of the explosives in one of the advanced howitzer shells and have a range twice that of the big gun. Designed for “arrow stability,” the rocket would be limited in length to not more than forty-two feet, which would allow it to be transported in a single piece, either by truck on normal roads or on a single railroad car; also, its over-the-fins diameter needed to be below nine feet, so it could fit through all European railroad tunnels. It was quickly calculated that a burnout speed of 3,600 miles per hour would be required for the rocket to achieve its military objectives.
Colonel Becker authorized the rocket’s development, but the Kummersdorf base was deemed both too small and too close to population centers to guarantee secrecy. In the fall of 1937, following the advice of Dornberger and von Braun, the Third Reich founded an enormous top-secret war rocket facility at Usedom, an island off the coast of the Baltic Sea. Christened Peenemünde after a small fishing village nearby, the Heeresversuchsanstalt (Army Research Center) officially separated from the Luftwaffe in 1938, around the time of Jack Kennedy’s happy-go-lucky summer tour of Germany, and soon became the most modern rocket research-and-development station in the world. With von Braun and a staff of about three hundred drawn mainly from military ranks, Peenemünde brought the full weight of German rocketry expertise under one roof, with the manpower and facilities to build and test the weapons that would give Hitler control of the skies. When the facility was at peak production, thousands of soldiers, employees, foreign laborers, and prisoners toiled to build German rockets there.
Secrecy reigned at Peenemünde. Even within the German Army, very few people were aware of the effort to turn rockets into long-range military weapons. In the project’s first years, regular rocket launches accelerated the research, but required additional staff. The army began to siphon top talent from other army programs and universities and send them to the remote Baltic base (which, in addition to rocket development, also hosted units developing a winged cruise missile eventually called the Vergeltungswaffe 1, or V-1). Between 1937 and 1941, von Braun launched more than seventy next-generation Aggregat rockets there, including the A-5, a scaled-down test model of the proposed A-4, which would soon be known to the world as the V-2, an abbreviation of Vergeltungswaffe 2, or “Vengeance Weapon 2.”
Rocketry’s destructive potential was the overriding goal, but its greater potential was never far from von Braun’s mind. On one occasion he interrupted a presentation for Colonel Becker on the progress of armed rockets to talk enthusiastically about breaking gravity’s grasp on mankind and “going to the moon.” And it was true: the same V-2 rockets that were being developed as long-range artillery could conceivably be adapted to spaceflight. But Becker and Dornberger’s willingness to indulge von Braun’s enthusiasms went only so far. Afterward, von Braun’s superiors, with faces that looked carved out of stone, sternly forbade him from talking about space travel in front of other officers—and especially in front of Hitler, with whom he occasionally interacted. Von Braun was ordered to channel his moon enthusiasm into helping the Third Reich control Europe by developing military rockets.
There is currently a debate over how enthusiastic the Nazi rocketeers were in supporting Hitler’s war machine. Some were supportive, it seems, while some were enthusiastic, others were opportunistic, and a few were opposed. Biographer Michael Neufeld says that von Braun fell into the opportunistic camp. The rocket engineers who truly opposed the Third Reich (such as Willy Ley) left Germany. Hitler, preoccupied with Germany’s hegemony in Europe, wasn’t much interested in space research on any level. His initial indifference toward von Braun’s project stemmed from disappointments with such wizard weaponry during World War I. One blustery spring day in 1939, Hitler arrived in Kummersdorf accompanied by Field Marshal Walther von Brauchitsch, General Becker from Army Ordnance, Deputy Führer Rudolf Hess, and Martin Bormann, Hitler’s personal secretary. This Nazi leadership squad had come to tour the facility and witness test engines. Smiling happily, full of bravura, and eager to show off his wares, von Braun tried to sell the Führer on the prototypes of his liquid-fuel rockets, touting their potential as weapons that could, in a year, be unleashed on France and Britain. On one level, Hitler was dismayed by von Braun’s fantasy weapons. (“Even now I still don’t know how a liquid-propellant rocket can fly,” he said. “Why do you need two tanks and two different propellants?”) On another, he was frustrated that even though Peenemünde and Kummersdorf were the leading rocket research centers in the world, progress was coming only in fits and starts.
Von Braun was disappointed that Hitler didn’t realize that at Kummersdorf and Peenemünde the Germans were inventing the ballistic missile future, and that budgetary restrictions were their largest obstacle. “There were thousands of major problems for which there was no answer at that time,” Dornberger later recalled of the work at Peenemünde and Kummersdorf. Over the first two years at Peenemünde, the team made steady but slow advances toward its goal of having ballistic missiles ready by 1943, but considering the state and pace of their research-and-development efforts, that deadline did not seem possible. Nevertheless, on September 5, 1939—four days after the Nazi war machine invaded ill-prepared Poland, and Jack Kennedy heard Neville Chamberlain declare war on Germany in the House of Commons—Dornberger promised a finished rocket for 1941.
It was a risky gamble, but the payoff was worth it: an order from Field Marshal von Brauchitsch preserved the Peenemünde program’s funding and protected key personnel from transfer to military units. At the end of October 1939, von Braun successfully launched his A-5 rocket. The time for mass production was near. As for any true engineer, one test result for him was worth one thousand opinions. “It was an unforgettable sight,” von Braun recalled. “The slim missile rose slowly from its platform, climbing vertically with ever-increasing speed and without the slightest oscillation until it vanished in the overcast.”
STARTING IN SEPTEMBER 1940, Jack Kennedy took classes as a Stanford University graduate student in business, economics, and political science, but his mind was on the war in Europe. As of May 1940, when Chamberlain resigned as Britain’s prime minister, Kennedy’s new all-seasons hero was Winston Churchill, who had formed a coalition government. By the time Hitler invaded the Netherlands and assaulted France, Kennedy was firmly in favor of U.S. intervention. By that summer, almost all of western Europe had fallen to the Nazis, and only Great Britain remained. From August through October, the Luftwaffe unleashed wave after wave of Junkers and Heinkel bombers, guarded by Messerschmitt fighters, on a systematic campaign against British towns, cities, fleets, ports, airfields, and radar bases. “The shocking German success and the dire threat to England forced Jack,” biographer Michael O’Brien wrote, “like many Americans, to revise his thinking about the war and America’s role in it.”
Hitler had put his faith in the Luftwaffe and its proven aircraft to destroy Britain’s Royal Air Force (RAF), paving the way for British surrender or, as a last resort, an invasion by German troops. The theory was sound, except for one thing: in the face of relentless attacks, the British and their airmen grew tougher, not weaker. As the campaign ground on, Hitler became impatient, directing the Luftwaffe to switch gears from engaging the RAF in aerial showdowns to bombing civilian targets in London, Coventry, and other large cities. But the Blitz, as it became known, only strengthened Britain’s stoic perseverance.
Frustrated, Hitler shocked the world in June 1941 by turning his attention away from the British campaign and toward the east, attacking Germany’s supposed ally the Soviet Union with a lightning-fast blitzkrieg offensive involving more than 3.5 million German, Finnish, and Romanian troops and 3,500 tanks—the largest invasion force in history. Virtually all German bombers were redirected from Britain to the USSR. Initial Soviet losses were so devastating that Hitler and his high command began confidently planning their next move, prioritizing conventional air and naval resources for a renewed push against the British. In a war economy riven with infighting, conflicting priorities, and raw materials shortages, this meant fewer resources for rocket development.
One of the problems Dornberger and von Braun faced in this competition was that Hitler’s support for their rocket program was erratic. Germans faced steel shortages and other economic demands that stunted the fast growth of the rocket program. According to most sources, Hitler was skeptical of Germany’s being able to launch full-blown rocket attacks on other European countries from the safety of the homeland. Faith in missile rockets meant no pilots, no soldiers, no ships, and no sailors—a strange new reality that was hard for him to fathom.
In this make-or-break moment, Dornberger and von Braun tried a new tactic to persuade Hitler of rocketry’s military efficacy, arguing for its effect as a psychological weapon. In a meeting with Hitler on August 20, 1941, they made the case that their planned rocket could succeed where hordes of Luftwaffe aircraft had failed, and finally break the morale of the British people. Traveling at 3,500 miles per hour, the rocket would appear seemingly from out of nowhere, they argued. By the time anyone on the ground saw it coming, only seconds would be left before it slammed thousands of pounds of explosives into a crowded neighborhood, destroying blocks. Dornberger and von Braun sweetened their pitch by promising cooperative projects with the Luftwaffe and, significantly, rockets for even more distant targets. The stabilizing wings and two-stage propulsion they envisioned would enable a rocket to reach the big eastern cities of America. Hitler was adequately convinced, by both the A-4’s destructive capabilities and its potential to instill terror in the British populace, and gave the project his lukewarm backing, subject to final testing. Despite the cost (far higher in both manpower and resources than more conventional weapons), the A-4 appealed to Hitler’s sense of his own mythic power and Germany’s technological superiority. “The Führer,” wrote Dornberger after the meeting, “emphasized that this development is of revolutionary importance for the conduct of warfare in the whole world.”
OVER THE COURSE of a half century, American, German, and Soviet dreams of putting a human on the moon threaded past numerous vital turning points. World events, both large and small, accelerated rocket engineering at an astonishing rate. As the complexity, scale, and malevolence of Hitler’s drive for world domination became manifest, his August 1941 turn on the subject of rocketry was a critical pivot point. No other nation at the time had Germany’s momentum in the field, paired with a dedication to leveraging new science for secret weaponry. Although the connection wasn’t fully understood at the time, Hitler’s commitment to the V-2 advanced the pursuit of a moonshot by perhaps decades. Though Hitler had no expressed interest in reaching the moon, the uncomfortable fact is that the darkest shafts and foulest backwater of human savagery helped bring this loftiest of human dreams to reality. Indeed, the engineers at Peenemünde were solving essential questions about celestial navigation and mechanics, about how to innovate easily applicable ways of determining position and velocity when away from Earth’s surface, which would prove all-important in future U.S. lunar voyages. German ballistic missile technology—built to kill people—laid a foundation for spaceflight.
Had Hitler demurred in the August meeting and continued only a halfhearted accommodation of the strange new technology, the course of World War II might have changed. According to many senior Nazi officers at the time (and some military historians since), Hitler’s commitment to the V-2 actually decreased Germany’s chances of winning the war. The voracious appetite of the Peenemünde project drew off resources when an accelerated program for conventional weapons and Luftwaffe aircraft might have made for a stronger German military machine. But to Hitler, the V-2’s perceived value went beyond dollars and cents. Over the following years, as the tides of war shifted, he came to see it as a superweapon that could finally deliver German victory over the Allied nations.