“Oh, yes… yes, I did, didn’t I?” Henry scowled and shook his head, a silent apology for an old man’s forgetfulness. “Anyway, I was seeing her as often as I could without our babysitters catching on. I didn’t want them to know that I’d met a girl because I was afraid they’d consider her a security risk and tell me to break it off. So I started brown-bagging, too, and at lunchtime I’d go over to the library and meet Doris there. There was a faculty lounge in the basement that wasn’t much used, so we’d go down there and have lunch together.”
“Did she know what you were doing?”
“No, of course not. So far as she was concerned, I was a graduate student in the physics department, that’s all. She didn’t learn the truth until later, when…” He suddenly shook his head again. “Sorry, getting ahead of myself there. Anyway, our routine might sound monotonous, but it really wasn’t. I mean, we were designing a spaceship! Maybe even the world’s first if we managed to beat the Germans…”
“Yeah, well, that was the plan,” Jack said. “We didn’t know it, though, but the Nazis had their own ideas about staying ahead.”
ON ORDERS OF THE REICH MARSHAL
AUGUST 18, 1942
The bombs began falling shortly after 1 A.M.
Wernher von Braun awoke to the wail of air raid sirens. He’d barely opened his eyes when he heard what he first thought was a thunderstorm rolling in from the Baltic. Then he realized what was happening, and in moments he was out of bed. No time to get dressed; he found his robe and slippers in the abrupt, violent flashes of light coming through the bedroom windows, then he was racing down the stairs, taking the risers two or three at a time, even as he felt the house tremble from explosions coming closer with each passing second.
The streets of Peenemünde’s residential area were filled with scientists, engineers, and military officers, all of them in their bedclothes as they scurried for the air raid bunker beneath the foreign workers’ barracks. Von Braun found Lise Muller in the darkness; she was wearing only her nightgown, so he gallantly put his robe around her, then took her arm and led her through the yelling, shoving crowd. Frequent flashes and explosions from the northeast end of the island told him that the industrial center was being targeted, but the housing complex might be next. Above the rooftops, searchlights roamed across the black and pitiless sky, while the luminescent tracers of antiaircraft guns sought targets too high for them to reach. No sign of Luftwaffe fighters taking off to do battle with the invaders; the airfield had probably been the first thing destroyed. Von Braun could see nothing when he looked up, but a loud, rolling drone that sounded like a swarm of immense bees told him that that hundreds of British bombers were up there, bringing wave upon wave of destruction.
Walter Dornberger found him and Lise just as they reached the shelter; he looked odd without his uniform, and for once he wasn’t smiling. They managed to make their way into the shelter just as the first bombs began falling on their houses. The concrete ceiling quaked, causing several women to scream in terror; Lise remained calm, but she clung tight to him. Taking her under his arm, von Braun shuffled through the crowded shelter, trying to find a place where, if the ceiling were to collapse, they might possibly escape being crushed to death beneath tons of rubble. It was a hopeless notion, of course—if a one-ton bomb made a direct hit, everyone down there would die—but it helped him feel just a little more in control.
For the next forty minutes, the people who’d taken refuge in the shelter listened as giants marched overhead, each footfall signaling another house, office, or workshop that had ceased to exist. The shelter was so tightly packed that no one could sit down; swaying lights revealed terrified faces and eyes that constantly peered upward as if expecting to see RAF Lancasters through the ceiling. Von Braun spotted Arthur Rudolph; he had his wife and children with him, and he was doing his best to comfort them. Looking around, he glimpsed various other members of his rocket team, peering out between the French and Polish workers who’d been the first to get belowground. He searched for Walter Thiel, his senior chemical engineer, but didn’t see him; von Braun hoped he and his family were safe.
A little after 2 A.M., the bombs stopped falling. No one moved, though, until they heard the sirens sound the all clear. Someone went upstairs and threw open the steel double doors, and everyone began to leave, pushing against one another in their eagerness to get out of the cramped and airless bunker.
Yet the nightmare wasn’t over. They emerged to find Peenemünde on fire, the flames spreading to even the places that the bombers had missed. Fire trucks raced through the streets, bells jangling as they headed from one blaze to another. Von Braun’s house was intact, but the cottage Fraülein Muller shared with several other unmarried women was gone. A couple of blocks away, von Braun was horrified to discover that Thiel’s house was nothing more than a burning heap of wood and brick. Soldiers were trying to put out the fire before it spread to other homes, but its occupants were nowhere to be seen. Staring at the Thiel home, von Braun realized that Walter and his family lay within the inferno.
The shock had barely settled in, though, when Colonel Dornberger found him and Lise again. There was no time to grieve; the colonel dragged them to the research-and-development district, which had been hit even harder than the residential area. There they found that the fire had reached Haus 4, and no firefighters had yet arrived to put out the blaze. As Dornberger ran down the street, yelling for everyone to drop what they were doing and save the headquarters building, von Braun and Lise took their chances and went inside. Keeping away from the part of the building that was on fire, they cupped their hands across their faces and made their way upstairs to von Braun’s office, where they managed to break down the locked door. While von Braun gathered the most important papers and blueprints from his file cabinets, Lise opened the wall safe and took out the Silbervogel master study. They fled the building before the flames could reach them; Dornberger returned with a bucket brigade just as the roof fell in.
By daybreak, the fires had been put out, but as the sun came up, it became clear that the raid had been a success. Entire buildings had vanished into bomb craters, and blackened iron skeletons and smoking piles of debris lay where houses, laboratories, and offices had been only yesterday. Many streets were impassable; scores of parked cars and trucks had been crushed or burned. Hundreds of people were dead, ranging from foreign workers to top-level scientists. Walking through the ruins, von Braun saw so many bodies covered by sheets that he soon lost count.
Ironically, the nearby concentration camp was largely untouched. Only a handful of Russians died there when a stray bomb fell on their quarters. But the camp wasn’t very large; because of the sensitive nature of the Silbervogel Projekt, it had been decided that prisoners would be used as forced labor as little as possible. Von Braun hadn’t been involved in this decision, though, and he’d deliberately tried to ignore the camp’s existence as much as he could, so the fate of its prisoners barely registered on his conscience.
Not all was lost. With the notable exception of Walter Thiel, most of the project’s key scientists and engineers had survived. Like von Braun, they’d taken shelter as soon as they heard the sirens. Just as importantly—miraculously, in fact—the raid had missed Wa Pruf 11’s most valuable facilities, the construction and test complex at the northern tip of the island. Whether it was sheer luck or because the bombardiers couldn’t see Peenemünde clearly from high altitude, von Braun didn’t know. Nonetheless, the wind tunnel, the static test stand, the liquid-oxygen and gasoline storage tanks, and the control bunkers had all gone untouched.