West Point ’41: The Class That Went to War and Shaped America

24 | Permission to Withdraw

287 24 Permission to Withdraw As the ’60s drew to a close, Charlie Fletcher, having returned stateside, was at the Department of Defense, tasked with industrial preparedness. His goal was to determine how the United States could take a war footing— its stockpile of weapons and mobilization strategies—and plan in the future to have a graduated response by industry rather than a full-blown mobilization. Fletcher deliberated, Not all wars will be a world war. We need to scale up only to the level required by the situation. We need stages of intensity from a limited mobilization, up to reworking a full mobilization like in World War II. Charlie Fletcher was in his element. Preparing. His ’41 classmates remained spread around the world, sharing holiday and reunion greetings as the decade progressed: George Brown expressed fond sentiments over his location—commander of a task force running atomic weapons tests “from the Land of Enchantment” in New Mexico. A classmate, Joseph Brown, echoing sentiments shared by many about the puzzle palace, wrote, “wanted! To exchange small home in Arlington on the Potomac for castle on the Rhine, hut in Hawaii, French chateau, or quarters on post. Be of light heart—there is room for you at the Pentagon.” Spec Powell was ready to take him up on it: “Even the puzzle palace looks good after a year in Iran.” Still another, Robert Johnson, kept up the black-class humor by commenting that he’d “escaped” the Pentagon, been “resentenced,” gone through “rehabilitation” in Germany, and then ended up in “maximum security” at the Aberdeen Proving Ground. Wrote James Green from the class: “Am working for the Boeing Company to help put a man on the moon. May he be one of the sons of ’41.” Classmate Jerry La Rocca had been helping to make that moon shot happen . He had been the scientific adviser to President Kennedy, and under the Kazel-Wilcox - West Point.indb 287 3/19/2014 5:40:18 PM 288 ★ west point ’41 auspices of the government-sponsored Arnold Engineering Development Center, designed the world’s first “supersonic diffuser.” In short, La Rocca helped bring space to earth. The supersonic diffuser was a test chamber that simulated on the ground what a rocket would encounter attempting to reach space. There had been enormous challenges trying to lighten a rocket load so its velocity could pass the earth’s gravitational field, but the larger the booster rocket, the heavier the load, which caused the rocket to fall back to earth. The solution was to have the heavy “first stage” rocket jettisoned during ascent to lessen the load, after which a “second stage” rocket would ignite and further propel the rocket into space. The problem was trying to figure out how to get the second stage to ignite at that different atmosphere. The supersonic diffuser was the answer , and La Rocca called on famed aerodynamic scientist Dr. Bernhard Goethert to help build it. The supersonic diffuser simulated conditions for a space vehicle flying at high speed and reaching a hundred-plus miles in altitude, at which point its second stage would ignite to push the vehicle past the earth’s gravitational pull. While outward appearances suggested these efforts were aimed at seeking to explore where none had gone before, La Rocca’s initiatives were, in truth, far more focused on defense. He was ever cognizant of a world at risk. U.S. intelligence officers had broken through codes to learn that the Russians wanted to “own” the moon so they could plant atomic weapons there, which could theoretically be aimed at any spot on earth. La Rocca had confidentially relayed this to President Kennedy when he’d been in office, which contributed to the urgent thrust to put a man on the moon. Making that moon shot happen meant overcoming endless obstacles. Getting a man to the moon was one thing, but then came the next question asked of La Rocca: “How do we get them back to earth?” La Rocca’s answer: “If we have a space capsule returning, we don’t know for sure if the astronauts will be alive or unconscious or semiconscious. So we don’t know if they’ll be capable of flying. We need features to aid their landing so they don’t come crashing back to earth at such a high speed that it burns apart the capsule and the astronauts inside.” La Rocca, with his days bailing out of fighter...