| Marc Kaufman |
WASHINGTON – What is it? Hanging from the seven-storey dome of the largest indoor atrium in federal government hands, the newly installed sculpture is sleek yet weighty, covered in polished metal but seemingly lifelike.
More than 36 feet long, it could be an abstracted sea creature starting a dive. Seen sideways from a few stories up, it brings to mind a huge plunging bird, wings tucked in and about to hit the water. And from ground level looking up, the piece could be a rocket headed your way, caught as it approaches a hard landing.
What makes the sculpture additionally confusing is that it hangs in the recently finished building on the outer Silver Spring campus that has become the new home to the Food and Drug Administration.
‘Prototype for Re-Entry’ by artist Iñigo Manglano-Ovalle, is perhaps most importantly a window into the past. Artistically, it harks back to the day in 1912 when three prominent sculptors and painters visited the Paris Air Show and saw propellers and other soon-to-be military objects that the three concluded were more artistically important than anything they had ever created.
But regarding the FDA site itself, now home to 8,500 scientists, engineers, managers and support staff, the sculpture is a symbolic entryway into a morally uncomfortable and ultimately redemptive history.
Few grounds outside of battle zones have been contested and transformed with quite the sharp turns as this one, where ‘Prototype for Re-Entry’ approaches but never lands.
At the White Oak site in Silver Spring, Maryland, the wind tunnel 9 finished in 1976 – a legacy left behind by German scientists brought into the US after World War II – remains an aerodynamic-testing workhorse for the Defense Department, NASA and contractors
Sculptor Iñigo Manglano-Ovalle, an art professor at Northwestern University and a MacArthur genious grant winner, holds a model sculpture of ‘Prototype for Re-Entry’.The sculpture hangs in the atrium of the FDA’s new Life Sciences-Biodefense Complex in Silver Spring, Maryland, USA
It was more than 70 years ago, at the chaotic end of World War II, that the singular fate of the 660 acres that would become the Naval Surface Weapons Center was decided.
In Germany, as the Nazi regime crumbled, the Allied armies made a dash to both defeat the enemy and seek out the spoils they believed they needed.
The biggest prize was missile and rocket technology, for which the Germans were envied. The V-2 was the world’s first supersonic guided missile and the first rocket to cross into space, and near the end of the war it caused great destruction in London and elsewhere in Europe.
The V-2 was the culmination of science that the Germans had been perfecting since the early 1930s, first the theoretical physics, aerodynamics and propulsion of rockets and missiles, then their military applications after Adolph Hitler consolidated power.
Central to their success was a series of pioneering wind tunnels developed to test how missiles would behave as they rose to the edge of space and fell toward their targets. These supersonic wind tunnels – far more sophisticated than any others in the world – were first built at the secret Nazi weapons centre at Peenemünde on the Baltic Sea, and after a series of British air raids they were transferred to the Bavarian town of Kochel.
The Kochel facilities were in what was to become the American zone when the war ended. Once American officials understood what they had found in the resort town, they quickly shipped it to the United States, as well as some of the wind tunnel scientists.
By early 1946, when the White Oak Naval Ordnance Laboratory was still under construction at Silver Spring, Maryland. two wind tunnels and nine German scientists were on their way. And by mid-1948, the wind tunnels, compact by modern standards, had been rebuilt exactly as they had been in Germany, but on a secluded, wooded area deep within the White Oak site.
Twelve German scientists and engineers were present to oversee construction and begin testing again.
White Oak was hardly the only military facility to receive former enemy scientists. Under Operation Paperclip, more than 1,600 former Nazi scientists were transferred in secret to the States after the war.
The American military had desperately wanted the German scientists’ expertise, and civilian leaders were equally adamant that they not fall into the hands of our new opponent: the Soviet Union. America’s biggest haul was Wernher von Braun and his much-in-demand team of rocket scientists.
As far as historians can determine, the 12 German scientists at White Oak were the only ones on permanent duty in the Washington area. And except for the men and women who worked with them in highly classified silence, nobody knew they were there.
The Germans had a lot to teach about the aerodynamics of V-2s and later intercontinental missiles. Peter Wegener, one of the 12 White Oak Germans, wrote ‘The Peenemünde Wind Tunnels, A Memoir’ and emphasised the pure science, as opposed to the applied military side.
If any of them had been members of the Nazi party, he wrote, it was because they could do their work only if they joined.
That may have been true of Wegener, the liberal son of a famous German movie star, but it was not the case for many others, said Michael Neufeld, an expert on the Nazi era and senior curator of the Division of Space History at the Smithsonian’s National Air and Space Museum.
“I think it would be fair to say that some of the scientists just went along with the Nazi programme, but others were doubtless true believers,” he said.
A test section from the original 40×40 centimetre supersonic wind tunnel is now on display in the lobby of the AEDC Hypervelocity Wind Tunnel 9
The really difficult moral issue, Neufeld and others have argued, is how aware the scientists were that their work on V-2 aerodynamics was implicated in one of the most ghastly chapters of the Holocaust and the war.
With Peenemünde largely out of commission, the Germans moved mass production of their V-2s to an abandoned gypsum mine under a mountain in central Germany. The high command forced inmates from a nearby concentration camp to dig tunnels for heavy machinery coming in and out and later to assemble the rockets.
Historical accounts of the site, known as Mittelwerk, report that 20,000 inmates were worked to death. It is generally agreed that more people died making V-2s under these brutal conditions than died in the explosions that followed the later missile launches.
Wind tunnel memoirist Wegener wrote that he had seen the hellish scene at the V-2 factory near the very end of the war and that his short visit to retrieve documents there left a permanent scar. If he had been reassigned to Mittelwerk, he wrote with an understatement that speaks volumes, “I do not know what I would have done.”
All of the German scientists who worked at White Oak are now deceased, and knowledge about what they may have done and seen during the war years is limited.
Meanwhile, the Naval Surface Weapons Center at White Oak prospered throughout the Cold War, conducting classified research and development on torpedoes, mines, nuclear triggers and much more.
And according to the current site director, Dan Marren, the German scientists were instrumental in overseeing the design and construction for seven other wind tunnels later built at White Oak, including tunnel 9, which remains state-of-the-art and in high demand.
But after the Cold War ended, the naval centre was on the chopping block, and in 1995 the official order came down to close the base.
The closing of the base was a crisis for the nearby communities of Hillandale and White Oak. In the eyes of Hillandale resident Betsy Bretz and some of her neighbours, however, it was also the opportunity of a lifetime.
A community organiser who happened to be married to a Navy aviator, she had worked in neighbourhood action programmes in the South during the 1960s and was head of the Hillandale Citizens Association during the base closing.
What she and many of her neighbours gradually came to see as a desired future was the rise of the first-ever consolidated FDA campus on the Navy site and then the birth of a spin-off health and science corridor nearby.
The eastern section of Montgomery County – long a stepchild to the likes of Bethesda, Chevy Chase and Potomac – would finally take its place as an economic, residential and commercial magnet.
Despite sometimes intense opposition in Congress and from some area residents as well as a lawsuit by the Sierra Club, an agreement for the FDA to move to a General Services Administration-developed White Oak campus was inked in 1997.
But there was a major obstacle: An Environmental Protection Agency report concluded that seven White Oak locations posed significant environmental threats, including a dump with buried chemicals, acids, explosive compounds and kerosene.
The report stated that there “may be an imminent and substantial endangerment to human health or the environment.” White Oak became the equivalent of a Superfund site.
As Bretz tells it, the Navy balked at cleanup. But she and her Labquest Partnership community and advocacy group – along with top EPA managers who met in her living room – began a campaign that helped persuade top brass to spend US$48 million to bring the site up to the highest environmental standards.
When the most recently finished building was dedicated last year, the dais included many of those officials and Bretz. As then-FDA Commissioner Margaret Hamburg put it, Bretz “has played such an important role in this project from the beginning”. Many others describe that role as “essential”.
But for Labquest, the goal was just half achieved. The group envisioned the rising of an off-campus but FDA-focused “epicentre”, with scores of buildings filled with major international and national companies, as well as lively gathering places and construction of a new Washington Adventist Hospital with a close FDA association.
“We’ve had a vision now for more than 20 years, and we’ve come a very long way,” Bretz said. “A community can be a victim to change, or it can be proactive. We’ve had many, many obstacles, but we’ve played that active role and consider what we have now to be something of a miracle.”
And now, as an authentic “swords to plowshares” transformation continues in and around White Oak, it’s a history at last ready to be told. – Text and photos by The Washington Post
The post How Nazi wind tunnels end up in Washington suburbs appeared first on Borneo Bulletin Online.