[What Might Have Been 03] Alternate Wars Page 20

  According to declassified White House minutes of the meeting, President Roosevelt turned to OSS director William “Wild Bill” Donovan after hearing the report on the Sänger project. “So, Bill, who’s in charge of our rocket program?” he asked.

  “We don’t have a rocket program, Mr. President,” Donovan replied. “All right,” Roosevelt said calmly, “then who is the leading rocket expert in America?”

  “I don’t know if there is one,” Donovan said.

  “Yes, there is,” answered the president. “Somewhere out there, there’s got to be someone who knows as much about these things as von Braun. Find him. He’s now the most important man in the country.”

  The man they found was Robert H. Goddard, and he didn’t feel like the most important man in the country. He was only a brilliant scientist who had long since become fed up with being called a crackpot.

  Goddard had been obsessed with rockets since reading H.G. Wells’s The War of the Worlds as a youngster. Born in Worcester, Massachusetts, in 1882, Goddard had pursued his obsession throughout his life; he earned his bachelor’s degree in engineering from Worcester Polytechnic Institute and shortly thereafter became a professor of physics at Clark University. Goddard’s secret dream was to build a rocket capable of landing men on Mars. It was a wild idea that would drive the scientist throughout his life, and also earn him as much trouble as encountered by predecessors such as Galileo Galilei and Percival Lowell.

  In January 1920 the Smithsonian Institution, one of Goddard’s sources of funding for his early rocket research, published a sixty-nine-page monograph written by him. Titled “A Method of Reaching Extreme Altitudes,” it mainly described how liquid-fuel rockets (themselves still only a theoretical possibility) could replace sounding balloons for exploring the upper atmosphere. The paper was mostly comprised of equations and tables and thus would have escaped the notice of the general public had it not been for brief speculation at its end of how such rockets, perhaps someday, in the future, could be used to reach the moon. Goddard wrote that a rocket could crash-land on earth’s satellite and explode a load of magnesium powder that would be visible to astronomers on Earth.

  Compared to Goddard’s real objectives of manned space exploration, this was a rather modest proposal, but the press didn’t see it that way. Newspapers reported Goddard’s speculation with little accuracy and less respect. He was either scoffed at from such pinnacles as The New York Times (which claimed that rocket propulsion was impossible in outer space because there was no air for rockets to push against) or treated as wild-eyed fantasy by papers such as the local Worcester Telegram (whose headlines speculated that passenger rockets carrying tourists into space would be possible within a decade). Few newspapers took Goddard seriously; for the most part he was regarded as a crazy college egghead.

  Goddard, a shy and soft-spoken person, was appalled by the press attention and embarrassed by the ridicule. He henceforth took his research underground, particularly his experiments with rocket design and his efforts to launch a liquid-fuel rocket. Although he continued to devise means of sending rockets into space—including his own design for a rocket plane—he carefully hid his notebooks in his laboratory file cabinet, in a folder ironically marked “Gunpowder Experiments.” There were no reporters present in the hilltop farm field in nearby Auburn, Massachusetts, on the cold morning of March 16, 1926, when Goddard successfully fired the world’s first liquid-fuel rocket.

  By 1942, though, Robert Goddard was no longer in Worcester. Following the explosion of one of his rockets, the Auburn town council outlawed all types of “fireworks” within city limits. Following a brief series of experiments at the U.S. Army’s Camp Devens in nearby Ashby, Goddard went on a sabbatical from Clark University in 1931 and moved his residence and rockets to Roswell, New Mexico. There were a couple of contributing reasons for the move besides the unacceptability of rocketry in Massachusetts. Throughout his life, the professor had battled tuberculosis, which the damp New England climate scarcely helped, and the arid southwestern desert also was a better site for rocket tests. In this sense, rural New Mexico was a fair trade for urban Massachusetts. He broke the sound barrier with a rocket in 1936, and by 1942 Goddard rockets were reaching record altitudes and achieving greater sophistication. Although largely unpublicized, his rocket experiments were on a par with the A-series rockets being developed in Nazi Germany. Few people knew about the feats that Goddard rockets were performing over the New Mexico high desert.

  Yet Goddard’s fortunes had also suffered, largely because of the bad press he had already endured. Although he continued to receive grants from the Guggenheim Foundation and from one of his admirers, Charles A. Lindbergh, the Smithsonian Institution had stopped funding his research. And though he had already developed solid-fuel ordnance such as the bazooka for the U.S. Army, the war department had expressed no interest in his liquid-fuel rocket research. Obscurity had become a double-edged sword for Goddard: He had found the solitude he craved, yet he was struggling to finance his experiments.

  All that changed on the morning of January 29, 1942, when two civilians from the OSS and an officer from the U.S. Army General Staff, Colonel Omar Bliss, found Robert Goddard in the assembly shed at Goddard’s ranch with an assistant, working on another high-altitude rocket. The rocket scientist greeted his unexpected visitors with courteous surprise; he dismissed his assistant and sat down on a bench outside the shed to hear what they had to say.

  Bliss, now living in retirement on Sanibel Island, Florida, remembers the meeting he had with Goddard. “He was completely shocked, horrified,” Bliss says. “He told us that he had kept up with German research during the ’30s and knew that they were making progress with their rockets, but he had no idea that their work had come this far. We asked if Sänger’s plan was possible and he thought about it a minute, then told us that if they had the resources and a little luck, yes, they could make it work. He knew that von Braun and Oberth were working for the Nazis, and he had no doubts that they and others had the knowledge to develop the Amerika Bomber.”

  The men from Washington asked Goddard if he had any ideas how to prevent New York from being blitzed from space; Goddard indicated that he had a few notions. “Then we asked him if he would help us,” Bliss recalls. “I was afraid that he would refuse. People had treated him so unfairly before, after all. But he at once nodded his head, yes, he would do whatever was necessary to stop the Nazis.” The space race had begun.

  Robert Goddard’s role in what would become known as Project Blue Horizon, however, was not played in New Mexico. For various reasons, the War Department returned the professor to his hometown. Although Lucky Linda would be launched from the White Sands Test Range less than a hundred miles from Goddard’s ranch, Washington decided that the best place for Blue Horizon’s brain trust was in Massachusetts.

  The Department of War wanted to keep Goddard within arm’s reach, and Massachusetts is closer to Washington, D.C., than New Mexico is. Yet it was also decided not to take unnecessary risks. Goddard was reputed to tinker with his rockets personally while they were on the launch pad. This fact was known by Dr. Vannevar Bush, President Roosevelt’s science adviser, who gave orders for “the professor” to be kept away from the rockets themselves. In hindsight, this was good logic. Over the next two years of the crash program there were in White Sands many spectacular explosions, one of which claimed the lives of two technicians. It would have been disastrous if Goddard himself had been killed during one of these accidents.

  There was some resistance by the War Department to having Project Blue Horizon in Worcester, however. Another top-secret military R&D program was already under way in Massachusetts: the radar-defense project being developed in Cambridge at MIT’s so-called “radiation laboratory.” It was felt by many in the Pentagon that having two secret projects working so near to each other would be risky. Goddard was not eager to return to Worcester, either. It had become difficult for him to endure the New England climate, an
d he especially chafed at not being able to witness each rocket test. Bush argued, however, that neither Clark University nor MIT were high-profile enough (at the time) to attract Nazi spies; having Blue Horizon camouflaged by a college campus, like MIT’s “Rad Lab,” made perfect sense.

  The White House won out over the Pentagon, and Goddard went along with his relocation orders. Esther Goddard, always protective of her husband’s health, naturally returned to Worcester with Robert. They moved back into their former residence, where Goddard had been born, and readjusted to life in New England’s second-largest city.

  To build the security cover for Blue Horizon, the FBI coerced Clark University’s directors into reinstating Goddard’s status as an active faculty member. It was arranged that Goddard’s only real academic work load was to teach a freshman class in introductory physics. In the university’s academic calendar for the semesters in 1942 through 1943, though, there was a listing for an advanced-level class, “Physics 390,” whose instructor was “to be announced.” But even senior physics students at Clark found it impossible to enroll in the class; it was always filled at registration time.

  Goddard’s “graduate students” in Physics 390 were a group of nine young men enlisted from the American Rocket Society, unrepentant rocket buffs and farsighted engineers with whom Goddard had corresponded over the years. Goddard had quickly handpicked his group from memory; the War Department and the FBI had contacted each person individually, requesting their volunteer help. None refused, though the Selective Service Administration had to issue draft deferrals for four members. The FBI moved them all to Worcester and managed to get them quietly isolated in a three-decker on Birch Street near the campus.

  Team 390 (as they were code-named by the FBI) were strangers even among themselves. Almost all were from different parts of the country. Only two members, Lloyd Kapman and Harry Bell, both from St. Louis, had met before, and although Taylor Brickell and Henry Morse were known to each other from the letters page of Astounding Science Fiction, of which they were both devoted readers, they had never met face to face. The youngest, Roy Cahill, had just passed his eighteenth birthday; the oldest, Hamilton “Ham” Ballou, was in his midthirties and was forced to shave off his mustache to make him appear younger.

  And there were other problems. J. Jackson Jackson was the only black member of the team, which tended to make him stand out on the mostly white Clark University campus (his odd name earned him the nickname “Jack Cube”). Michael Ferris had briefly been a member of the American Communist Party during his undergraduate days, which meant that he had undergone intensive scrutiny by the FBI and nearly been refused on the grounds of his past political activity before he had agreed to sign a binding pledge of loyalty to the United States. And Gerard “Gerry” Mander had to be sprung from a county workhouse in Roanoke, Virginia: A rocket he had been developing had misfired, spun-out across two miles of tobacco field, and crashed into a Baptist preacher’s house.

  Once they were together, though, Blue Horizon’s R&D task force immediately hit it off together. “We spoke the same language,” recalls Gerry Mander, who now lives in Boston and who was then the team’s “wildcat” engineer. “Rockets were our specialty, and putting something above the atmosphere was a dream we all shared. I mean, I was a young snot from backwoods Virginia, so sharing a room with a colored man like Jack Cube, at least at the time, seemed more unlikely than putting a guy in orbit. But Jack talked engineering, so we had that much in common, and in a couple of days I didn’t even care.”

  “We were all a bunch of rocket buffs,” says Mike Ferris, the team’s chemistry expert, “and the War Department had given us carte blanche to put a man in space.” He laughs. “Man, we were like little kids thrown the key to the toy store!”

  Team 390 had little doubt about what was needed. The only device capable of intercepting the Sänger bomber was another spacecraft, and the only reliable navigation system was a human pilot. Since the 1920s, Robert Goddard had written, in his “gunpowder experiments” notebooks, rough designs for a rocket plane, along with notes for gyroscopic guidance systems and other plans that turned out to be useful for the team. Studies at the California Institute of Technology had also suggested that a single-stage rocket plane could be sent into space on a suborbital trajectory, with the ship gliding back through the atmosphere like a sailplane.

  The team postulated that a spaceplane, launched by a liquid-fuel engine and ascending at a forty-five-degree angle, could function as a one-man space fighter capable of intercepting the Amerika Bomber. Upon studying the Sänger report, Team 390 further realized that the bomber would be most vulnerable during the ascent phases of its flight. At these points the ship was slowest and least maneuverable, a sitting duck for another spacecraft’s ordnance. So if the U.S. ship was launched from New Mexico just as the German ship was flying over the Pacific coast, it could intercept the Amerika Bomber before it reached New York City and shoot it down with ordinary solid-fuel rockets.

  “We came up with it in one night over beer and pretzels in the Bancroft Hotel bar,” says Henry Morse, the team’s electrical engineer who now lives in Winchester, New Hampshire. “Bob wasn’t with us that night, but we had gone through his notebooks and read all that stuff he had thought up, so it was mainly a matter of putting it together. We knew we didn’t need a very sophisticated ship, nothing like a space shuttle today. Of course, we didn’t have time to make anything like a space shuttle. Just something quick and dirty.”

  “Quick and dirty” soon became buzzwords for Goddard’s people. The team took the plan to Goddard the following morning, during their “class” in Goddard’s lab at the university. By the end of the day, following many hours of arguing, scribbling notes on the chalkboard, and flooding the trash can with wadded-up notes, Team 390 and Goddard settled on the plan. The professor was amused that his “grad students” had come up with the scheme in a barroom. “If Mrs. Goddard will let me out of the house, I’d like to be in on the next session,” he told Morse.

  The FBI, though, was not amused when they discovered that Team 390 had been discussing rockets in a downtown Worcester bar. There was always the chance of Nazi spies. The FBI was especially sensitive, given the proximity to the MIT Rad Lab only forty miles away. Team 390 was ordered to stay out of the Bancroft, and J. Edgar Hoover assigned special escorts for Goddard and his team. The team thought the FBI was overreacting.

  “It was a pain, of course,” Roy Cahill recalls. “We couldn’t visit the men’s room without having a G-man escorting us. They were almost parked all night outside Bob’s house and our place on Birch Street. Esther couldn’t stand it at first, but she changed her mind after the City Hall thing.”

  By early 1943, the V-2 missiles were perfected and the first rockets launched against targets in Great Britain. The Allies had been flying air raids upon V-2 launch sites in occupied northern France, and finally against Peenemünde itself. During one of the early reconnaissance missions over France, Ham Ballou—temporarily brought over to England to gather much-needed intelligence on the V-2 rockets—flew over the Normandy coastline in the backseat of a P-38J Lightning, snapping pictures as the pilot dodged antiaircraft flak. Ballou returned to Worcester with little that was immediately useful to Team 390, but for a while he was able to claim that he was the only person among Goddard’s people who had come under enemy fire—until Goddard himself almost caught a bullet.

  Following a devastating Allied air raid on Peenemünde, the German High Command covertly transferred the principal R&D of the Amerika Bomber 250 miles inland, to Nordhausen, where the base of a mountain had been hollowed out into vast caverns by prisoners from the nearby Dora concentration camp. This was the secret Nazi rocket facility that MI-6 had been unable to locate. Many of the same European Jews who built the Nordhausen site were later sacrificed, over the objections of von Braun and Oberth, in grotesque experiments that tested human endurance to high-altitude conditions.

  Little of this mattered to SS
commandant Heinrich Himmler. Now that the Luftwaffe had taken over the A-9 project from the German Army, he was more concerned with the fact, surmised through briefings with von Braun, that the German rocket team’s work had been largely inspired by Goddard’s research; he suspected that the United States might be embarked on a secret rocket program of its own. Although Gestapo agents in America had not found any evidence of a U.S. space initiative, Himmler decided not to take chances. In March 1943 he ordered the assassination of the only known American rocketry expert: Robert Hutchings Goddard.

  For all his brilliance, Goddard was also absent-minded about the mundane tasks of life; he could forget to fold his umbrella when he walked in from the rain. On March 30, 1943, the Worcester city clerk’s office sent the professor a letter informing him that he had not paid his city taxes. Goddard received the letter while working in his lab. Both irritated and alarmed, he put on his coat and immediately bustled out to catch the Main South trolley downtown. He left so quickly that his FBI escort, who was relieving himself in the men’s room, missed the professor’s departure.

  But the Nazi Gestapo agent who had been watching Goddard for a week and waiting for such a break, didn’t miss the opportunity. Following Goddard from his post on the Clark campus, the assassin also took the downtown trolley, getting off at the same stop in front of City Hall. As Goddard marched into the building, the Nazi slipped his silenced Luger Parabellum from his trench-coat pocket and followed the scientist inside.