V2 A Novel of World War II - Robert Harris Page 0,33

in a tank above the rocket motor, linked to it by a single pipe. They had stubbed out their cigarettes, opened the fuel line, and Wahmke had held a burning tin of kerosene to the nozzle. What had they been thinking? The flame had shot straight up the pipe and blown up the tank. Graf had been the only one who had reacted quickly enough, flinging himself headlong behind the concrete wall. The charred corpses of the other three had stayed in his mind for weeks, the smell of roasted flesh seeming to clog his nostrils, although von Braun had viewed the remains with equanimity. His main concern had been that the test stand was destroyed. He was always able to take other people’s tragedies in his stride. That was the mark of a leader, Graf supposed.

But poor Wahmke was already in the past, dead and buried – what was left of him – never to be mentioned again, certainly not during the long day’s drive from Berlin to Emden carrying Max and Moritz. They spent the night in the port and the next day took a boat to the North Sea island of Borkum, about thirty kilometres offshore. It had been a horrible crossing in a high wind, and Graf had spent much of it crouched below decks, throwing up. Von Braun, needless to say, the Aryan Superman, was not only a proficient horse rider, pilot, concert-standard cellist, et cetera, but also an accomplished sailor. He spent the voyage on the bridge. Apart from a couple of dozen soldiers, there were five engineers in the Party as Graf remembered it: himself and von Braun; Walter Riedel (not to be confused with Klaus Riedel), whom they all called ‘Papa’ on account of his sedate manner; Heini Grünow, the mechanic from the Rocket Aerodrome; and Arthur Rudolph, an expert in jet propulsion from the Heylandt works, who had been with the racing driver Max Valier on the evening he was killed by an exploding motor. Rudolph was the only one of them who was a Nazi.

They installed themselves in a hotel on the beach and sat on uncomfortable cane furniture in a chilly, brine-streaked glass-enclosed veranda looking out at just such a view as this. They listened to the gale whistling around the gabled roof and waited for it to die away. And waited, and waited. That was Graf’s first experience of winter on the northern European coast, when you might see seven hours of daylight if you were lucky. They stuck mostly indoors and scanned the monotonous grey vista for any signs that the weather might break. They played chess and bridge. They discussed space flight. They listened to von Braun’s ideas for a two-stage rocket – the first stage to carry its captain beyond the earth’s atmosphere and into orbit, the second stage with a booster to propel him to the moon or Mars: ‘The vacuum of space will mean that only a relatively small amount of power will be required.’ He showed them his calculations. When he claimed that the first man to walk on the moon had already been born, it was obvious he meant himself. Finally, over dinner on 18 December 1934, after a week of waiting and with Christmas approaching, he announced that they would launch Max the next day, whatever the weather; if it failed, they always had Moritz as a backup.

The morning of the 19th dawned clear and blustery: cloud base 1,200 metres, wind from the east, gusts up to 80 kph. For the sake of secrecy, the local people, mostly fishermen and their families, were ordered to stay indoors and keep their curtains closed. Soldiers were posted to make sure they obeyed. The engineers carried Max to the dunes and erected the launch mast, connected the electrical cables to the measuring equipment, checked the gyroscopes and filled the fuel tanks with alcohol, liquid oxygen and compressed nitrogen. Graf took charge of the movie camera. He had to keep wiping sand from the lens. They waited for a lull in the wind, then von Braun lit the tin of kerosene at the end of the broom handle and applied it to the nozzle. There was a crack of thunder as the jet ignited, and Max shot upwards – up and up and up: they had to tilt their heads right back to follow him, until his exhaust flame had shrunk to a tiny red dot. He reached an altitude, they later calculated, of