Page 10 of V2

‘Fascinating,’ said Biwack. He had been following the exchanges like a spectator at a tennis match. He suddenly pushed back his chair and rose to his feet. ‘Thank you for your welcome, Colonel.’ He briefly touched his hand to Huber’s shoulder. ‘This is a social gathering, not the occasion for a political lecture, so let me just say that while I may have come here to inspire your faith, it is my faith in our ultimate victory that has been inspired by what I have witnessed today. How can we fail in our sacred task when our country is capable of such marvels of technology? Allow me to answer your toast with one of my own.’ Unexpectedly, he swung towards Graf and gave him a gracious bow before lifting his glass. ‘To the genius of our German scientists!’

Graf was uncertain whether or not he was supposed to stand. In the end, he did, and raised his empty glass with the rest.

‘To our German scientists!’

When they had resumed their seats, Huber gestured to Graf. ‘Doctor? Would you care to say a few words in reply?’ And make amends? his tone implied.

Graf smiled and shook his head. ‘I’m not a man for speeches.’

‘There is no need for a speech,’ said Biwack. ‘Could you not tell us something of your work with Professor von Braun?’

‘I would not know where to begin,’ he said truthfully. How could one compress half a lifetime into a couple of after-dinner anecdotes? He suddenly wished von Braun were there. He would have had them mesmerised in a minute. There was no one he could not charm, not even Hitler. When he laughed, he would throw back that huge patrician head of his and stick out his broad chin in unfeigned delight, like a youthful FDR, and you were sure he must be the greatest fellow in the world. He was certainly the greatest salesman. But Graf was well aware he was no von Braun, and all he could say was, ‘He is a brilliant engineer, I can tell you that much.’

There was a pause.

‘Well then,’ said Huber with a glare at Graf, ‘I suppose we shall have to leave it at that. Goodnight, gentlemen.’

He caught up with Graf in the street outside as the engineer was walking back to his billet – grabbed him by the arm and pulled him into the shadow of the hotel. ‘What the devil was that all about?’

‘What?’

‘Don’t give me that! You know what I mean. You sounded like a complete defeatist in front of that Nazi shit. “Let’s launch twelve hundred”! It reflects badly on us all.’

‘It’s not defeatism, Colonel, it’s simply realism. We may have to lie to the public – I understand that. But what’s the point of lying to ourselves?’

‘The point? The point is to avoid being picked up by the Gestapo for treason!’ Huber practically had him pushed up against the wall, so close Graf could smell the schnapps on his breath. ‘You helped build the fucking thing. You lot rammed it down the army’s throats! Take responsibility for it!’

The colonel held him trapped there a few more seconds, then gave an exclamation of disgust and turned away. Straightening his tunic, he marched unsteadily back into the headquarters.

Graf stayed where he was, leaning against the wall. Huber was quite right, he thought. He, above all of them, had no business complaining. He should learn to keep his mouth shut. But a toast to victory? Really, it was laughable.

He realised to his regret that, despite his best efforts, he was more or less sober. He pushed himself back up onto his feet and walked around the corner. The clouds had lifted slightly; the weather front was passing. There was a hint of moonlight in the sky, softening the blackout. A couple of soldiers were lurching along the street towards him, doubtless on their way back from the Wehrmacht brothel, which was just nearby. This pair most definitely were drunk, and not on schnapps either, by the look of their glazed eyes, but on the methyl alcohol that fuelled the rockets. Although a purple dye was added to make it look unappealing and to give it a bitter taste, and although the barracks were covered in warning signs (‘A one-shot glass will blind you! Several shots will kill you!’), the first thing every man assigned to the V2s learned was how to strain it three times through the carbon filter of his gas mask. You were left with a slightly off-colour drink that was 150 per cent proof. If you swallowed it quickly you would not throw up and Scheveningen in winter might suddenly seem not such a bad place after all. Graf stepped into the gutter to let the men stagger past.

He was billeted in a small hotel with a dozen sergeants and NCOs. He could hear them in the kitchen as he came into the dimly lit hall. He could also make out female laughter. It was forbidden to have relations with any of the local women in The Hague; even so, it was not uncommon for one or two to be smuggled past the guards, hidden beneath blankets in the motorcycle sidecars. He climbed the stairs to the third floor, stopping off at the lavatory on the landing to relieve himself, then unlocked his door, tossed his hat onto a chair and threw himself down on the bed. He didn’t bother to turn on the light or close the curtains or even take off his coat. He simply lay there, listening to the incessant crash and roar of the sea on the other side of the promenade. After a while, he searched through his pockets for his cigarettes and lit one. He lifted the ashtray from the nightstand and balanced it on his chest.

He was thinking about von Braun. Biwack had seemed both well informed and remarkably curious about their friendship, as if he was trying to trick him into some disclosure. Perhaps he had seen his Gestapo file. That would make sense. It must be thick: never mind the reports of informers, his interrogation alone had lasted a week. No strong-arm stuff, no lights shone in his face, nothing like that – they had obviously been given orders that he was too valuable to be reduced to pulp. Just remorseless questions in a nondescript office in Stettin nine months ago, one session after another, sometimes at night, with plenty of time alone in his basement cell in between to work on his nerves.

When did you first make the acquaintance of Professor von Braun?

Well, that would depend on what you meant by ‘acquaintance’. He had first spoken to him – he could be quite precise about this because he had a mind that always remembered such details – at the AVUS motor-racing circuit in Berlin on 23 May 1928, when they were both sixteen. He was sure of the date because it was the occasion when Fritz von Opel set a new land-speed record of 238 kilometres per hour in a car powered by twenty-four solid-fuel rockets. Wernher had stood out, even at that age, even in a crowd of three thousand.

Why?

Oh, his height, his good looks, his manner – a certain confidence in advance of his years. After the test run was over, they had both hung around von Opel, and his partner, the famous Austrian rocket pioneer Max Valier, and had even been allowed to take turns sitting in the driving seat of the five-metre-long monster car, the RAK-2. All four of them, including the two schoolboys, were members of the Verein für Raumschiffahrt, the Society for Space Travel. That was the dream, you see, even then. Rockets were the means, rather than the end. Not that he said that to the Gestapo.

He contemplated the ceiling and wondered what had happened to von Opel. He had heard a rumour he had fled to the United States when war broke out. Valier had been killed a couple of years after the speed record when a liquid-fuel rocket motor had blown up and a piece of shrapnel had severed his aorta.

As to when he had first become properly acquainted with von Braun, that would really have been the following year, and again he could be exact, because it was the premiere of Fritz Lang’s movie Frau im Mond – Woman in the Moon – at the Ufa-Palast am Zoo cinema in Berlin on 15 October 1929. The Society for Space Travel had been hired by the studio to produce a working rocket for the occasion, which they had failed to do. But von Braun, whose family were rich and well connected, had managed to wangle Graf a ticket. He lent him a dinner jacket, so they could mingle with the VIPs. He even marched up and introduced them both to Lang. Graf would never forget how the great director had squinted at him through his monocle, as if this awkward schoolboy were himself a creature from the moon.

After that, they saw a lot of one another. Graf was an only child, the son of two teachers – one of English literature, the other of music – wonderful, kindly, somewhat elderly parents, neither of whom had the slightest interest in space travel or engineering, although they taught him English so that he could read the science fiction of H. G. Wells. Von Braun became his confidant. He would catch a tram and visit the von Brauns’ mansion on the edge of the Tiergarten, where lemonade would be served by a butler. They wrote science fiction stories of their own about interplanetary travel and orbiting space stations. They raised money for the Society for Space Travel at a stall in the Wertheim department store. (‘Ladies and gentlemen,’ declared von Braun, ‘the man is already alive who will one day walk on the moon!’) They both enrolled at the Institute of Technology in Charlottenburg and studied theoretical physics, and they both did a six-month ‘dirty hands’ stint on the factory floor, von Braun at the Borsig locomotive works, and Graf at the Daimler-Benz factory in Marienfelde.

It was around this time that the society – an impecunious collection of amateurs and dreamers, plus one or two serious engineers, like Karl Riedel and Heini Grünow, both mechanics – persuaded the Berlin city authorities to let them use a stretch of waste ground out in the north of the city near Tegel, where there were a few big disused munitions bunkers left over from the Great War. They made a clubroom in the old guardhouse, brought in camp beds and a Primus stove so they could stay for days at a time, put up the publicity logo from Frau im Mond of a glamorous woman sitting on a crescent moon, and called their derelict swampy paradise the Raketenflugplatz, the ‘Rocket Aerodrome’.

And in due course, thanks largely to Riedel, they did indeed build a rocket. They called her ‘the Repulsor’, after the spacecraft in one of the society’s favourite science fiction novels, Two Planets. She was an ugly device, nothing like the shapely aerodynamic beauties they would eventually produce – ‘Repulsive’ would have been a better name. Her fuselage was a thin metal tube, three metres long and only ten centimetres wide, with the engine in an egg-shaped container in the nose and with a canister at the bottom containing a flare and a parachute. The innovation lay in the fuel configuration they came up with, which was the same as they eventually used in the V2: alcohol and liquid oxygen in separate tanks, one on top of the other, forced into the firing chamber by compressed nitrogen. It was a wonder they didn’t blow themselves up. They would set the fuel running and start counting the seconds backwards from ten – a dramatic touch they borrowed from Frau im Mond – while one of them dashed out and touched a burning rag to the nozzle, then dived for cover. On a good day, 160 pounds of thrust would send the Repulsor shooting up to a height of a thousand metres and the parachute would bring her floating back to earth. There were plenty of bad days too, of course. The long metal broomstick often misfired, or headed off at tree height; one time they hit a police barracks.

Riedel might have been their senior engineer, and Rudolf Nebel, an ex-pilot, their nominal leader, but it was von Braun even then who was the dominant personality: always smiling – they called him ‘Sonny Boy’ after the Al Jolson hit – a quick learner, good with his hands as well as his brain, intensely ambitious to be the first man in space. In the summer of 1932, his father, an aristocratic landowner, was appointed Minister of Agriculture in the von Papen government. Von Braun senior must have had a word over dinner with someone important in the defence ministry, because soon afterwards the society were invited to demonstrate their creation at the military proving ground at Kummersdorf. The test was a fiasco. The jet flame burned through a weld and the rocket crashed a few seconds after take-off. But the army officers loved von Braun, saw the potential in the twenty-year-old right away – he was one of those polite and lively young men who were always good with their elders – and a couple of months later he burst into the clubhouse at the Rocket Aerodrome to announce he had negotiated a deal. The army would fund their research. There was only one condition: they would have to continue their work in secrecy, behind the walls of Kummersdorf.

None of the others wanted to go. Nebel was a Nazi sympathiser and didn’t like the conservative German army. Rolf Engel, another twenty-year-old, was a communist and wanted nothing to do with the military. Klaus Riedel was a utopian opposed to war. Graf’s father had been gassed in the Great War and was a strong supporter of the League of Nations. Von Braun told them they were crazy to let such an opportunity slip. ‘We haven’t even worked out how to measure our test results – fuel consumption, combustion pressure, thrust. How can we make any progress until we have the equipment to do that? And how can we get the equipment except through the army?’