Red Moon Rising Sputnik and the Rivalries That Ignited the Space Age - Matthew Brzezinski [47]
When Germany’s leading scientists began arriving under military escort at Fort Bliss in the fall of 1945, it is not difficult to imagine the culture shock they must have experienced. Brown dusty plains stretched to the east as far as the eye could see. The desert was unbroken save for the occasional tumbleweed, buzzard, and cactus, and it baked at over a hundred degrees for most of the year. To the west rose the jagged red peaks of the Sangre de Cristo, or Christ’s Blood, Mountains. To the south ran the Rio Grande and the squalid pueblos of Mexico. At night, an impregnable blackness descended over the land, Stuhlinger recalled. And during the day, the hot Texas sky broiled a deep blue completely alien to any European.
“To my continental eyes,” von Braun later confessed, “the sight was overwhelming and grandiose, but at the same time I felt in my heart that I would find it very difficult ever to develop a genuine emotional attachment to such a merciless landscape.”
Fort Bliss, an old cavalry outpost built around the rough adobe walls of a border citadel, offered little respite from the inhospitable terrain. Low, ramshackle “rat shack” two-story barracks, made mostly of plywood, sat on the sand. A half-empty hospital building dominated the grounds, along with a few disused hangars and single-story structures connected by gravel pathways. Chain-link fences cut off the German compound from the rest of the base.
Fort Bliss was a far cry from the resplendent accommodations von Braun had grown accustomed to in his German headquarters on the island of Peenemünde, where the sand was confined to pleasant beaches, his sailboat and personal Messerschmitt plane were always at the ready, and the maître d’ at the research center’s four-star Schwabes Hotel stocked the wine cellar with the finest vintages seized from France. The restaurant’s embossed china, fine silverware, and elaborate dining protocols had astounded the Soviets when they occupied Peenemünde. “A line of waiters in black suits, white shirts, and bow-ties marched in solemn procession around the table,” Boris Chertok recalled. “In this process, the first waiter ladled soup, the second placed a potato, the third showered the plates with greens, the fourth drizzled on a piquant gravy, and finally the fifth trickled about 30 grams of alcohol into one of the numerous goblets . . . a scene that to us was familiar only from movies.” The quality of the ingredients, alas, had deteriorated by the time the Red Army arrived. “I served the best wines,” the maître d’hôtel had apologized to his new Communist customers. But when “von Braun evacuated Peenemünde, they took all the food and wine stores with them.”
At Fort Bliss, snakes slithered around the cinder-block footings of the mess hall, where cooks in greasy T-shirts slopped something called grub on tin trays. (Complaints about American cuisine figured prominently in the first published press reports revealing Germans in El Paso. The scathing comments of Walther Riedel, von Braun’s chief design engineer, earned him a subheading in a December 1946 article: “German Scientist Says American Cooking Tasteless; Dislikes Rubberized Chicken.”) The revelation that von Braun’s team was in the country in turn prompted impassioned complaints. On December 30, 1946, Albert Einstein and the Federation of American Scientists wrote to President Truman, arguing, “We hold these individuals to be potentially dangerous carriers of racial and religious hatred. Their former