Reading of Recent Times

 Finished a couple volumes of military history recently:

Michael J. Neufeld's Von Braun: Dreamer of Space, Engineer of War is definitive.

Wernher von Braun's professional life can be divided into three stages - military engineer for Germany, military engineer for the US, and NASA. There are a few subdivisions, but these are the three that made him famous and controversial.

His childhood seems important, though. His family was upper-class - and not just the von. His father was in government, and the family rich enough that they were largely insulated from the hellish economy of post-WWI Germany. It feels like he was sheltered - going to prep schools, able to indulge hobbies. He was interested in rocketry from his teens, with antics and explosions akin to those in the film October Sky, about one of his admirers three decades later. He was hired by the Army almost immediately; interest in rocketry was high if only because it was a technology not banned by the Versailles Treaty.

His team's association with the Dora concentration camp didn't occur until fairly late in the war - it was only when the V2 rocket went into full production in 1943. But while he didn't have any direct involvement, Neufeld makes absolutely clear he was aware of the conditions in the camp. After his death, one member of his team was deported as the camp was uncovered by Western media, and it certainly looks like he could have suffered the same fate had he lived long enough. There are conflicting accounts, that von Braun acted both against and in support of prisoners, but Neufeld's conclusion is that he was too focused on rocketry to care so long as he was supported by the Nazi state in his interests. Although Tom Lehrer was unaware of the Dora camp, he was ultimately right about von Braun's laser-focus on what was most important to him - though he was perhaps, at least partially wrong to depict von Braun as a mercenary willing to work for anyone who would fund his projects. He chose the United States, after all.

But his title of Professor (an actual title in Germany, not a profession granted by a university) was given him by Hitler. This was downplayed for the rest of his life.

The next stage in von Braun's life was roughly 1946-1958, when he was employed by the US Army and the Redstone Arsenal in Alabama (which gave its name to America's first crewed rocket). Von Braun's team launched the first American satellite after a series of failures by the US Navy, and believed they could have achieved this before Sputnik. Neufeld's focus here, however, is how von Braun and his team adjusted to life in the US. Not only did he become an American citizen, he worked with magazines and Disney Studios to popularize space in his spare time and make money on the side. It's arguable that the mix of von Braun's enthusiasm and Chesley Bonestell's classic art were what ultimately captured the public imagination.

The apex of von Braun's life, and this biography, is the sixties, wherein he effectively headed the engineering side of the Mercury and Apollo programs (Gemini is given short shrift, and even the "lunar rendezvous" plan that drove its planning doesn't get much page time beyond von Braun's initial opposition). Here, both his most famous projects - the V2 and Saturn V - are linked by his vision and organizational drive. See, von Braun wasn't a genius, or really even much of an engineer. He was a planner and team leader - his expertise really lay in combining the efforts of a broad spectrum of people and juggling the needs of government, private enterprise, and a wide variety of sub-projects.

This is one of the things that, perhaps, makes him less of a villain?

The "German" team was maneuvered out in 1970. Von Braun's organizational skills extended to finding ways for the Redstone group to continue contributing despite a sharp downturn in funding, but ultimately he wasn't that enamored of the space shuttle and ended up at Fairchild, right about when they were designing the A-10 "Warthog." He died in 1977 after a couple bouts of cancer, leaving a wife and children who had all been born in the US. Only in the 1980s did the informal secrecy about the true consequences of the V2 project come out to tarnish his legacy.

I'm Jewish myself, and although there were no Jews at Dora, it was a part of the Holocaust at which tens of thousands died, building rockets that killed thousands of British and Belgian civilians. (Interestingly, there is no mention at all of RV Jones' "Wizard War," which involved using the XX counterspy system to feed incorrect impact locations back to Germany, thus causing most of the rockets to be aimed at less-populated areas.)

But this is also one of the things that fascinates me about military history, and has ever since I was a young girl fascinated with airplanes - especially warplanes. To a large extent, the history of aviation is the history of 20th-century warfare. Without the world wars, we would not have airliners, or a space program. The fascination of von Braun is the dichotomy of a man who spearheaded the creation of the first ICBM, but also the rocket that landed men on the Moon - and seems to have "treated those two impostors just the same."

No real gaming inspiration here (though I'm itching to play Kerbal Space Program again), but some food for thought. Highly recommended. I'll write about the Battle of Hue another time.