In March 1945, his driver fell asleep at the wheel and Von Braun was left with a compound fracture of his left arm. Insisting on being mobile, he had the fracture roughly set in a cast. It was unsatisfactory, and so in the following month he had to return to hospital where the bone was broken again and re-aligned correctly. He was still in plaster as the Allied troops advanced.
Suddenly the team was ordered to move to Oberammergau in the Bavarian Alps. They were placed under guard by the SS who had orders to shoot everyone if they were about to fall into Allied hands. Von Braun got wind of this, and persuaded the SS officer in charge that keeping them together made them a sitting target for Allied bombing raids. Since they were important personnel, Von Braun argued, it would surely be safer to distribute the members of the team among the nearby villages. In one of these villages, on 2 May 1945, Von Braun’s brother Magnus — also a rocket engineer — suddenly encountered an American private of the 44th Infantry Division named Fred Schneiker. Magnus von Braun rode up on his bicycle, and announced: ‘My name is Magnus von Braun. My brother invented the V-2. Please, we want to surrender.’ Von Braun was immediately locked up, and so were thousands of the others, as war criminals. The factories were quickly overrun and between 22 and 31 May 1945 a total of 341 railway trucks were used to move as many V-2 rockets as possible and the manufacturing equipment to Antwerp, from where 16 Liberty ships transported them to the port of New Orleans. From there the rockets and equipment were transferred to the New Mexican desert under conditions of extreme secrecy.
The German rocket engineers themselves were also taken to the United States covertly, as part of Operation Paperclip. This secret scheme was set up by the United States Office of Strategic Services (OSS), which in turn gave rise to today’s Central Intelligence Agency (CIA). It had been assumed that the personnel involved in creating the weapons of mass destruction would be put on trial for war crimes, but during the closing stages of the war it was decided instead to see if the United States could secretly harness their knowledge. Agents within the United States resolved to bring these people to America and use the benefits of their research, at the same time denying the benefits to their allies, the Soviet Union and the British.
Although relatively unknown, there was a similar scheme operating for the British. This was code named Operation Surgeon and it was intended to bring promising research engineers to Britain and to deny them to the Soviet Union. The official policy was not to involve suspected war criminals, but to capture some 1,500 research personnel and to remove them forcibly. The document setting this out was entitled Employment of German Scientists and Technicians: Denial Policy, and it survives to this day at the National Archives, Kew, United Kingdom. It was explicit about the need to obtain personnel, and said they would be removed ‘whether they liked it or not’. Many of the individuals on the lists offered their services to other Commonwealth countries, with some opting to go to South American countries (including Brazil) and others going to Scandinavia and Switzerland. The scheme was the first to come into operation, and ran from the time the British forces overran the German research establishments until all the scientists and engineers had been accounted for.
Not until September 1945 was Operation Paperclip authorized by President Harry S. Truman. The President’s orders stated that nobody should be included who had ‘been a member of the Nazi Party, and more than a nominal participant in its activities, or an active supporter of Nazi militarism’. Included under that clause as Nazi sympathizers were many of the senior figures like Von Braun who was stated, at the time, to be ‘a menace to the security of the Allied Forces’.
As a result, the aims of Operation Paperclip were clearly unlawful and what is more OSS agents acted in direct defiance of the President’s orders. In order to make the most desirable personnel seem acceptable, the representatives of the OSS constructed false employment and faked political biographies for the chosen scientists. All references to Nazi party membership, and any political activity in Nazi Germany, were removed from the record, and new résumés were concocted by the American secret service. At the end of each exercise, a German specialist — often with enduring Nazi sympathies — had been provided with a fictitious political history and an imaginary personal life. The documents were typed up, carefully countersigned, and attached to their birth certificates with paperclips — which gave the operation its name. In the meantime, Von Braun had disappeared. He found himself secretly jailed at a top-secret military intelligence unit at Fort Hunt, Virginia, in the United States. It had no name, and was referred to only by its postal code ‘PO Box 1142’. This was a top-secret confinement facility undeclared to the Red Cross and was thus in breach of the Geneva Convention.
Another of the senior scientists who was taken to America by the Allies was Adolf Thiel. Before he had joined Von Braun at the Peenemünde research laboratories, Thiel had been Associate Professor of Engineering at the Darmstadt Institute of Technology. After the war, as part of Operation Paperclip, Thiel was taken with Von Braun to Fort Bliss, Texas, and later to the White Sands Missile Range in New Mexico and on to Huntsville, Alabama. His prime responsibility in America was the refinement of the V-2 design into the Redstone missile, and he later adapted it to become the Thor ballistic missile, which was the first stage rocket for the Explorer spacecraft. Thiel was made a Fellow of the American Astronautical Society in 1968 and died in Los Angeles in 2001 aged 86. So he lived into the new millennium, and saw the realization of the dream of space exploration.
Dörnberger was also brought to America and went on to work for the United States Air Force developing guided missiles. Later he was a key figure in developing the X-20 Dyna-Soar which was, in many ways, the ancestor of the space shuttle; he also worked on the Rascal, an air-to-surface nuclear missile used by the Strategic Air Command. He later retired to Germany and died in 1980 at home in Baden-Württemberg. On 8 July 1944 he had received a handwritten note from Hitler: ‘I have had to apologize only to two men in my whole life,’ the Führer had written. ‘The first was Field Marshal von Brauchitsch. I did not listen to him when he told me again and again how important your research was. The second man is yourself. I never believed that your work would be successful.’
Von Braun was soon working for the United States as their senior rocket designer. Within two years, the United States had test-launched her first spacecraft — a two-stage rocket code named Bumper.
Shortly afterwards, they proudly announced the inauguration of their successful Redstone rockets. The Redstone was described to the world as the first American ballistic missile and it was in service with the United States Army in Germany between June 1958 and June 1964 as part of the Cold War deterrence policy of NATO. The Redstone was also involved in the first United States nuclear missile tests in the Pacific and in 1960–61 a Redstone was used for the pioneering Project Mercury manned space flights. Its predictability earned the Redstone nicknames including the ‘Army’s Workhorse’ and ‘Old Reliable’. This rocket had its final flight when it launched Australia’s first earth satellite in 1967.
Although Bumper and Redstone are claimed as pioneering names in American rocketry, both were actually V-2 rockets. The Bumper, heralded as the first two-stage rocket when it was initially tested on 13 May 1948, was a German V-2 fitted with a little United States Wac Corporal solid-fuel rocket as a second stage. The Redstones were also V-2 rockets, some with later modifications, but all based on the Nazi-funded research during World War II. When John Glenn rose into space, it was on top of a modified V-2. And when the Australians launched their WRESAT satellite into orbit on 29 November 1967 from Woomera, it was one of those modified V-2 rockets that provided the launch.