Book Review: Space Race: The Epic Battle Between America and the Soviet Union for Dominion of Space
Space Race: The Epic Battle Between America and the Soviet Union for Dominion of Space
By Deborah Cadbury
HarperCollins Publishers, 2006
Hardcover, 370 pp., illus.
ISBN 0-06-084553-8
US $24.95
As the clichÃ?© goes, there is no need to reinvent the wheel. Applied to the craft of literature, this means it is unnecessary to write books that have already been written. Why, then, would Deborah Cadbury toil over a biography of Wernher von Braun and Sergei Korolev when so many dedicated biographers have done so before her? One potential explanation is that her research produced previously unknown material requiring new analysis. Adding another spoke to the wheel, perhaps. A close reading of Cadbury’s book “Space Race” eliminates that explanation. Another possible reason is that she is trying to deliver known information to a new set of readers. Same wheel, different audience. That must be it.
As a BBC Television producer, Cadbury has discovered a successful formula for popularizing science and technology topics. Just as “Space Race” was dramatized for broadcast on the BBC (as well as the National Geographic Channel), so too was her prior project, “Seven Wonders of the Industrial World.” (For argument sake, those wonders were deemed to be the Bell Rock Lighthouse, the Great Eastern steamship, the sewers of Victorian London, the Transcontinental Railway, the Brooklyn Bridge, Hoover Dam and the Panama Canal.) In 2002, Cadbury published “Terrible Lizard: The First Dinosaur Hunters and the Birth of a New Science” which would have to be shelved in the Pop Paleontology section. She followed that up in 2003 with “The Lost King of France: How DNA Solved the Mystery of the Murdered Son of Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette,” a book that spearheads the History/Mystery genre. Given the proper ingredients, the Cadbury formula results in attracting cross-over audiences. That is, non-academic lay readers are attracted to research oriented topics, traditional consumers of fiction are lured to non-fiction titles and, it must be said, women are intrigued by stories from the male dominated fields of technology and science.
The post-World War II space race offers the “perfect storm” confluence of politics, power, money, invention, heroics and exploration for a good yarn in anyone’s estimation. Cadbury cunningly superimposes the parallel biographies of Wernher von Braun and Sergei Korolev and toggles our attention back and forth between the U.S. and the USSR like heads at a tennis match. This technique is effective in building suspense, even though we already know how it ends.
We also know much of the two principal’s life stories from previous sources. We know they were both pilots, both visionaries, both were arrested by their own repressive governments when they were perceived as expendable, both were lauded when recognized as essential and both had to compromise their dreams in the face of budget realities. It is recognized that von Braun’s life was charmed, insofar as his detention was just two weeks and it gave him credibility in a later celebrated career, and Korolev’s life was cursed, in that his arrest lasted six years and contributed to his early physical deterioration in a state-imposed anonymity. Other authors have inserted more backbone into these biographies than is evident in Space Race. Cadbury has a tendency to whitewash von Braun’s black shirt and apply gold leaf to Korolev’s red star with occasional lapses into purple prose.
Addressing von Braun’s intertwining of rocketry with fascist affiliations in pre-war Germany, Cadbury writes, “And as more funds conveniently flowed through, von Braun joined the Nazi Party in 1937.” This simply begs the question, did funds conveniently flow through because von Braun joined the Party or did he join the Party because funds flowed through? Where other historians have struggled with this dilemma for chapters, if not entire books, Cadbury simply concludes, “If Kristallnacht – ‘the Night of Broken Glass,’ the smashing up of Jewish homes and businesses in November 1938 – did anything to make him question his party membership, his work was so absorbing that he did not act on it.” She surrenders her obligation too easily when she writes, “While there is no record of the extent to which these issues were explored at the time, it is evident from an affidavit von Braun gave in 1947 that, when questioned, he claimed he was under pressure to join the Nazi Party.” Again, in discussing von Braun’s detention by the SS under accusation of sabotage, Cadbury merely says that the incident “impressed on the rocket scientists that it was dangerous to express opposition of any kind to the SS. However, records of the arrest have not been located to verify their account of events.” End of analysis.
Michael J. Neufeld, curator at the Smithsonian’s National Air and Space Museum, agrees that the arrest event is hard to document, but he asserts that the meaning of the action is easy to surmise in his 1995 book, “The Rocket and the Reich.” Von Braun’s arrest was not based upon clashing ideology with the Nazis. It was a cynical power play carried out by Heinrich Himmler of the SS to seize control of missile development at Peenemunde from Army operations. Neufeld adds context to the incident by stating that, for von Braun, “it proved to be one of the most fortunate things that ever happened to him in the Third Reich. After the war his defenders were able to credit him with an anti-Nazi record that he never had. Moreover, the nominal grounds for the arrest fitted perfectly with the image that he and his group wanted to project in the United States, especially after Sputnik. Von Braun’s ‘team’ were, so the mythology later ran, apolitical space enthusiasts from the Weimar rocket groups who were forced to make a detour through military development in order to reach the stars.”
Another historian who subjects this event to elevated scrutiny is Dennis Piszkiewicz in his 1998 von Braun biography, “The Man Who Sold the Moon.” He sees the stain of collaboration in it. “There is one puzzling aspect of the arrest of von Braun and his colleagues that neither he nor others who have written about it have addressed. The Gestapo was legendary for the consistent and systematic brutality with which it treated those it arrested. The Gestapo routinely roughed up and tortured its prisoners, not to obtain confessions, but to use every opportunity to extract information about subversive activities. There are no reports that von Braun and his group were mistreated while in custody or that other arrests of Army or Peenemunde personnel followed, which might indicate they had informed on others. It appears that von Braun and his colleagues were pawns in Himmler’s power play, and were protected so that they could be used again.”
Where Cadbury demurs from offering opinion, a historian like Neufeld wades in right up to his eyeballs. Neufeld feels von Braun essentially made “a pact with the devil in order to build large rockets. [A]fter the war he bore proudly the nominal reasons for his arrest – putting space flight before military missile work – but there is no evidence that he ever stuck his neck out for the concentration camp prisoners before his arrest, nor did he show any obvious pangs of conscience about their fate until the 1960s and 1970s, when protests by French prisoner survivors forced him to confront the issue more directly.” Cadbury leaves to an epilogue, almost as an afterthought, the evidence that other researchers feature so prominently. It is von Braun’s chilling letter to the notorious Albin Sawatzki regarding obtaining more prisoners for the V-2 project at Mittelwerk, where one third of the 60,000 forced laborers died under unspeakable conditions. Von Braun wrote, “During my last visit to the Mittelwerk, you proposed to me that we use the good technical education of detainees available to you and Buchenwald to tackle âÂ?¦ additional development jobs. You mentioned in particular a detainee working until now in your mixing device quality control, who was a French physics professor and who is especially qualified for the technical direction of such a workshop. I immediately looked into your proposal by going to Buchenwald âÂ?¦ to seek out more qualified detainees. I have arranged their transfer to the MittelwerkâÂ?¦” Other researchers have reprinted the full extent of the document, but Cadbury quotes only a few words from this incriminating letter.
We can excuse Cadbury’s lesser anomalies of interpretation, such as her description of Sergei Korolev’s upbringing as giving him “everything a child could need,” versus the view of historian James Harford in his 1997 biography of Korolev that he was born into “a family that would be called dysfunctional today.” We can forgive her descriptions of experimentation upon animals as sounding like press releases from the British Anti-Vivisectionist Society, such as this weepy tribute to Laika the dog: “[S]he waited patiently 70 feet up in the nose of the quiescent rocket, oblivious of her sacrificial role; and during the long night prior to takeoff, the tiny scrap of life, bone, and fur, and trusting eyes, sitting astride the rocket, was mercifully unaware of the trail she would be blazing.” We can look away when an occasional clinker of a sentence comes along, like this: “Khrushchev’s hard words weighed down the epaulets on Marshal Nedelin’s shoulders, increasing his awareness of how easily they could be removed should he be seen to be less than effective.” We can dismiss the commonplace photographs used to illustrate the book. But it becomes difficult to ignore writing style more appropriate for bodice-ripper romances, such as this overripe salute to the original Mercury 7 astronauts: “Had they not just competed with hundreds of their fellow men for the honor and the dubious reward of sitting astride a throbbing mountain of metal with all the gaseous fury of the fires of hell under it, as it hurtled toward the unknown, at a speed faster than sight can comprehend?” We should not tolerate mistakes such as the reference to “the Institute of California,” when what is meant is the Jet Propulsion Laboratory at Cal Tech, the California Institute of Technology. Or the characterization of the (then) Soviet Union as “landlocked” which would come as a surprise to anyone from Leningrad, Odessa, Vladivostok or Kamchatka. And what are we to make of this estimation of the thrust of the Saturn V moon rocket? “[I]t was claimed it could develop more power than a string of Volkswagens placed from New York to Seattle.” Volkswagens?
The most serious omission of “Space Race” is that it lacks citations with page attribution. The book has a bibliography and an index, but these are lesser tools than specific footnotes for research and reference. This is an omission shared, by the way, by Cadbury’s “Seven Wonders of the Industrial World” and “Terrible Lizard” as well. Tom Wolfe’s “The Right Stuff” is duly noted in Cadbury’s bibliography and there is no mistaking her admiration for Wolfe’s colorful portrait of astronauts cavorting in Florida as she echoes his chapter “The Cape” anecdote for anecdote, down to the individual preferences for racing vehicles. But two books apparently missing Cadbury’s attention, however, are Normal Mailer’s 1969 reflection titled “Of a Fire on the Moon” and “If the Sun Dies” by Oriana Fallaci from 1965. Both of these intensely personal reactions to the space program could have given Cadbury additional depth in her approach. Especially Fallaci’s brilliant account of her half hour interview with von Braun, in which the scent of his soap evokes her harrowing youthful memories of trying in vain to hide two Yugoslavian underground resistance fighters from the relentless Nazi Army.
Cadbury ultimately asks good questions. “If Sergei Korolev, from his place in the shadows, had not shared the same vision of space as von Braun, and pursued that vision with such energy, would America be fighting to get to the Moon at all costsâÂ?¦?” Did Korolev and his brilliance actually light the fuse of the American space program? If “Space Race” exposes a new audience to these and other important questions, then it has fulfilled its purpose.
