BluFrogg GardensHow could we go back to the city, now that we've been down on the farm?

I arrived at WSPG, as a photographer, in July of 1948.

WSPG, in those days, was a small cluster of Quonset huts surrounding the Mills Building and the Nike Building. In a series of photos that I took from the top of some kind of tower, I count maybe 30 Quonset huts, several barracks, a small church, some trailers, and various areas of open storage, in which you can see components of lots of V-2 rockets. Before I arrived, I was told, it was all field tents.

The single launching pad, with its blockhouse and some test stations, was about four or five miles to the east of the main post complex.

The Mills Building, the Nike Building, the Post Photo Lab, Ballistics Research Lab and the Data Reduction Center were all located fairly close together, within a fenced security area. There were guards at the gates to this area. To enter the Nike Building, there was another set of guards. It was a secure area within a secure area.

While the Mills Building had windows all around, just under the roof, the Nike Building, which looks like an overgrown Quonset hut, had no windows, and was an excellent place for testing lenses. The Nike Building looks like it may have been, in a previous usage, an airplane hangar. (The hangar at Holloman Army Air base looked similar.)

You will recall that at the end of WWII in Europe, the Americans captured the German rockets at Peenemunde, and also convinced many of the German scientists to come to the United States, too. We had a crash program, Project Paperclip, to get the personnel and hardware out of there, to prevent the Russians from getting these assets.

White Sands was established in February,1945. In July, 1945, many box cars of materiel from Peenemunde arrived, much of it German V-2 rockets.

The US Army was tasked with facilitating the research on these rockets. We used them in many research projects. Ultimately, we designed bigger and better rockets. As our rockets gained range and accuracy, the newly formed Air Force felt that exceeding certain distances fell within their domain, and eventually gained control of the US military missile programs.

But, in 1948, the rockets were Army’s. At WSPG some research was being done by the Navy, also, as well as various visiting scientists from US universities.

Wernher Von Braun was one of those imported German scientists. I attended one of the very first presentations he gave on the possibility and method of how we could actually orbit the moon. It was at the public library in Los Cruces, NM. Before they ever let the attendees into the room, Von Braun had drawn the entire system on the chalkboard! Needless to say, the next lectures were held on post, and behind closed doors!

Von Braun spoke very good English. He was very articulate and scientific. There was an accent, much like our Gov. Schwarzenegger, but far more precise. He actually lived in Huntsville, Alabama, where the Redstone Arsenal Laboratories are.

The military had a program called T. I. & E. Training, Information and Education, for both the enlisted and the civilian working on post. Once a week we were required to have classes. Military and civilian supervisors gave the classes. I took classes given by Von Braun, Clyde Tambaugh, our own Battalion Commander, and many others gave these classes on subjects pertaining to our mission. We were encouraged to ask questions. Good ideas sometimes popped up that were incorporated in our operations.

At WSPG, I first worked in the Post Photo Lab. M/Sgt Rowe was the NCOIC, (Non-Commissioned Officer in Charge) and a civilian, Brown, (we called him “Brownie”), was in charge of the Post Photo Lab. Brown had been a Hollywood photographer. Other enlisted men that worked there were Maurice Brunell “Frenchie,” and Eddie Mays. Don Reisinger was there, and then he transferred next door to another lab, as I later did, too. There was another person there, who had been with my Signal Corps Photo class in New York. I do not remember his name, but we all suspected he was there to keep an eye on the intelligence security.

Since we all had security clearances, we could all talk freely to one another, but we were never to discuss what we did to anyone outside our area.

Our basic function at the Post Photo Lab was to document the many visitors and functionaries that came through WSPG. The rockets and missiles attracted a lot of official attention.

The Post Photo Lab was a sort of repository for many different kinds of photos and film. Since the New Mexico atmosphere was so very dry, it was thought that our secure lab was a good place to store photographs and negatives and motion picture film. It is possible that these were copies of material that was also stored elsewhere. We were free to look at these films and photographs.

There was film from many of the US atomic weapon tests. Film about some of the radiation accidents that had occurred at Los Alamos. (One of the victims knew he was going to die, and allowed himself to be filmed. His skin became transparent. I didn’t watch any more than that). There was film and photos of Japanese immediately after the Atomic bomb blasts at Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Pictures of bodies, people being treated in the street, effects of radiation on their skin. One person had the pattern of the fabric transferred to her skin.

There were also shots of the big balloons and long strings of balloons. I think they were weather balloons of some sort. I may have a negative of this.

The group of us got along well. There was much jocularity. Brownie shared his collection of negatives of Hollywood stars in various states of undress, particularly one of Carmen Miranda. I later destroyed my copies of those, but I kept a lot of the other photos and negatives that I took while at WSPG.

 George Arnold, a civilian in charge of photographic instrument research and development was looking for someone to assist him. I had the necessary qualifications, and so I was moved next door to the Ballistic Research Lab (BRL). We were working with high speed and long range optical instrumentation. Clyde Tombaugh was one of the supervisors at this lab.

Both the Post Photo Lab and the Ballistics Research Lab occupied part of the Mills Building, and were inside the fenced, guarded security gates. They were side by side, but had separate entrances. All the film taken on base was developed and printed in one of these two labs.

The WSPG intelligence officer had his office nearby. Major Smith was his name. He may have also been the Post Information Officer. We were never allowed to talk about any of the accidents that happened on post. We didn’t want the townsfolk to worry, and we did not want to call attention to ourselves or our activities on WSPG.

These were industrial accidents. One man was cut in half by a high pressure air hose that broke loose. Another mishandled some explosives and lost a hand. Captain Armstrong reached down into a missile and pulled out the primer cord. Because he was holding the primer cord tightly, the resulting explosion didn’t take his hands, but burned them quite badly instead. We had a lot of chemicals and a lot of explosives around. People got hurt.

Photography was very much a hands-on activity. We used a Speed-Graphic camera, with 4 x5 inch negatives, either cut film or in film packs; a 35MM Lieca, an Argosy C-3; and for motion pictures, we used a Mitchell 35 with 1000 foot film canisters

This is all pre Polaroid, pre digital stuff. Film had to be protected from exposure to light or moisture. Darkrooms, red light bulbs, special chemical baths to develop the film, then printing on special paper, more chemistry to develop the paper, rinsing, washing, drying.

Up until this point, all the film, even the motion picture film, had to be developed by hand. Reisinger who had been in the Army, but was now a civilian, was able to get some large machines, comparable to those used in Hollywood, and then the motion picture film was developed mechanically, by Reisinger and his machines. This increased our capability, and saved us time, so we were able to shoot more film.

Before Reisinger took over the BRL, that spot had been occupied by Lassiter. Lassiter had been an Air Force photographer in WW II, ane showed us many photos of bombing raids over Europe. When “Banana River”, later to be “Cape Canaveral,” now called JFK Space Center was first started, he was transferred there, and that is how Reisinger got the job.

 The BRL had various functions, some of which were designing and constructing new equipment to facilitate missile tracking, and maintaining the photo equipment used throughout the proving ground. We were trying to improve the equipment. We ground lenses, and constructed our own reflecting telescopes to be mounted on the German-made Ascania Theodolites, to give a greater tracking distance. Somebody named Stamie was in charge of the Ascanias.

We used 35 mm Mitchells to record the initial phases of the rocket firings. After we developed the film, it was taken to another building, also within the security area, called the Data Reduction Lab. The job of the people in that lab, among other things, was to synchronize the films of the missile launchings, because multiple cameras were used to film each of the launchings.

Central to the functioning of the Data Reduction Lab was a brilliant mathematician, Virginia Farquar. She rode a bicycle to her post. The bicycle had a license plate with the name Virginia, on it. Somebody removed a few letters from the license plate. I don’t think she ever noticed.

Clyde Tombaugh was in the BRL. He directed us in making the photo lenses and telescopes that we used to track the firings. Tombaugh wasn’t always on the same page as us guys. We loved to kid him a lot. “Look at that crow, Clyde. It’s raven’ mad!” It would be minutes before he finally got it, and then came the laughter.

Tombaugh was very big on planets, and also believed in alien life. (You know he discovered Pluto.) One day, a young astronomer from nearby McDonald Observatory stopped in, and told us that he had discovered a fourth moon for a particular planet. (I can’t remember which planet.) I went into Tombaugh’s office, and said, “It’s really interesting that (planet) has a fourth moon.”

“No!” he yelled, and shot out of his office to confront the young astronomer.

I’m telling you these little stories to give you an idea of the freedom of communication that existed there at WSPG.

My job, at WSPG was to take photos, both still and motion. I had a security clearance, and a little red badge, and could go everywhere and anywhere on the base. And I did! And I still have copies of many of those photos, but none of the films.

My other job was to go out on the Range on recovery missions, and collect whatever was left of the rockets when they fell to the ground. We had all terrain jeeps, big trucks with cranes, various explosives to retrieve and dismember the rockets, to make them more portable. When we were firing missiles, I often went out once or twice a week. I may have gone on fifty or sixty recovery missions, at least.

Condon Field was our little airstrip, where we kept L-19 aircraft used by the search and recovery teams. An L-19 is about the size of a Piper Cub. It seats two people. If we needed a bigger airplane, we called over to Holloman Army Air Field, later Holloman Air Force Base, as they had bigger runways.

Holloman Army Air Field had one big hangar, much like the Nike Building over at the Proving Ground, and several outbuildings. The outbuildings were of the type known as five year temporaries, as they were lightweight wooden buildings and not expected to last much longer than five years. There was a road between the Proving Ground and Holloman, and we passed through it regularly to get to a camera station.

On the weekends, my buddies and I would go out onto the Range. We had the run of the entire place, as long as we wore our fatigues and carried identification. We would hike and climb in the Organ Mountains, hunt for Indian artifacts, go rock hunting, and shoot jackrabbits with weapons we drew down from a weapons locker on the base.

We mostly traveled by Jeep. Sometimes we horsed around with the Jeeps, dodging boondocks, and did what is now called off-roading. The roads were dirt, mostly, and cris -crossed the Range. When we went out the Stallion Gate, to go up to the Trinity Site, it was a dirt road until just before you got there, the road became paved.

The first time a buddy and I visited the Trinity site, we took a Geiger counter. This would be about 1949. The site was not radioactive. We walked all over the area. There was no crater. The explosion had taken place on a metal test stand, much like we used a test station to test the Nike engines. All that was left was metal stubs protruding from the concrete apron.

There were little hard ground airstrips scattered around the Range, for the L-19s to land if they had to, as part of a search mission. There were camera stations, little 10 x10 cinder block houses with a tower outside. Some of these were maybe ten miles away from the launch site. On launch days, we would go out there and set up our cameras. We communicated with the main base either by radios or, if we were close enough, telephone lines. When we were done, we would pack up the equipment and put it back in the cinder block house.

I wasn’t much interested in the rocks or the jackrabbits. I was really interested in finding components of the radio controlled aircraft that the artillery practice groups were using for targets. These had Continental or Lycoming engines, and we were looking for parts. This would be down by the McGreggor Range.

We also hunted the mule deer. The mule deer is the largest American deer, almost as big as a horse. In the fall, before hunting season opened, they would come down to the Proving Ground in droves, maybe forty or fifty of them, the does as well as the bucks with great racks of antlers. But the day hunting season opened….they all disappeared!

Besides mule deer, there were wild horses, scruffy little mustangs, up by the Trinity site; and pronghorn antelope. I don’t think anybody hunted these.

During hunting season, civilians were allowed on the Range, except for firing days. They had their own Jeeps and trucks. They had to register, I think, and they probably camped over on the weekends. I met some civilian hunters down towards Ft. Bliss and also in the Organ Mountains.

There were signs all over the range telling the civilian hunters where they were not to go, like our camera stations were posted “Restricted Area,” and the schedule of firing days was posted on big signs in prominent places. Military Security patrols ran around the desert, and also the L-19s patrolled.

 I went hunting, once, with a man in my unit, a Sgt. First Class, who had served in WW II. He had been there a year or two before me. He said, “I only take two shells, in my pocket. When I get there, I use one shell to test my weapon on a target, but I keep the other shell in my pocket. When I see the deer, I load my weapon. If I don’t get him on that round, I don’t get him. There is sportsmanship in doing it right.”

Some of the guys I went out on the range with had been there from the very beginning of military troops being at White Sands Proving Ground, about two or three years before I got there in fall of 1948.

I never got the sense that being allowed to go out on the range and drive anywhere we wanted, or the civilian hunters that were allowed in was anything new or novel. It had always been done that way.

On firing days, the road was closed to traffic, and the L-19s would patrol the range and also this road to make sure everything was clear.

The Army, with Von Braun and the other German scientists, notable in their long leather coats, always looking on and making suggestions, was testing what the rockets could do, and what the conditions and effects of the upper atmosphere would be on living things.

The rockets we were working with, when I was there, were the Wasserfall, a small

version of a V-2 that had wings; a V-2 that was used with a Ramjet; the German JV-1, also known as the Buzzbomb; the American made Aerobee, the Viking, the Lark, the Loon, and early experimental Nikes. There were probably other types, but I do not recall at this time.

One day, I was in the bunker on the launch pad. A V-2 was ready to go. Suddenly, it sprang an oxygen leak. Von Braun went out to the launch pad, and tinkered with the flexible corrugated tubing. He came back in and ordered the launch to proceed. Later, we learned that he had taken a wet a book of matches and stuck it in the hole, causing it to freeze in the oxygen and seal the hole.

The joke that circulated became: “How do you fire a V-2?” “Very simple. You get a German to go out and light the fuse.”

Von Braun’s driving force, and a big reason he came to the States, as in the movie they made of him (we saw it on Turner) was: “I Aim For the Stars.” (You should try to rent that movie….it uses actual WSPG film footage, some of which I may have taken! with the actors in the foreground.)

Also, various universities would show up with items they wanted to have sent up to the upper atmosphere. I was not privy to what the experiments were, but I was told that in the years before, that some of the experiments were plants and seeds.

I did see photos of some monkeys, in the Post Photo Lab, and the equipment that was used to restrain them was in one of the buildings. Later, when I was back at Ft. Bliss, I learned that they later used other monkeys, to see the effects of atmosphere, and to see if they could get the animal to help guide the missile, but that was after I was there.

The rockets and experiments did not always go where we wanted them to. The early missiles were self guided ballistics. The V-2s used a gyroscope to set up an artificial plane, a stable point. If the gyroscope sees the missile getting off that artificial plane, it can send an electric signal to the servos to make a correction. Or, at least, that’s the way they were supposed to work.

Just about the time I left WSPG, they were getting more guidance into the missiles. They had developed the telemetry that enabled them to guide the missile from the ground. But early on, we didn’t know any of that, and the missiles went all over the place, if they got off the ground at all.

Once, Eddie Mays and I were filming a rocket, and it disappeared off our tracking scope. We assumed it was lost, and while securing the equipment, we saw a little white pin point on the scope getting larger, and realized that the rocket was coming straight down towards us. It was an eight foot jump for us off the platform, to burrow in the sand.

One time, a rocket that was supposed to go down range, over the Tularosa Basin, went 180 degrees south, and landed in a cemetery outside of Juarez, Mexico. This had just occurred shortly before I arrived, and everyone was still talking about it. They found the man who had accidently wired the servos backward, Wilson, doing it again, and he was gone the next day. The Army could not afford such embarrassing mistakes.

Another time, we simply could not find our rocket. It was not until an off duty military man having a beer at the Penguin Bar in Los Cruces, overheard some rancher talking about the debris that had fallen on his roof. We found our missile, an Aerobee, lodged in a ravine above his cabin.

Everyone knew everyone else. Those of us that were working on sensitive material were not allowed to talk to the townies or those outside our circle, but within the secure fenced area, conversation flowed freely. We worked together, we partied together. We

didn’t party with the German scientists.

Since we were exploring, for the first time in our history, the upper atmosphere, naturally the idle talk often turned to “What is really out there?” and, “Are we alone?” We really wanted flying saucers and aliens to be real!

Our watchword to everyone was: “Be on the lookout for anything that is unusual!”

One night, we were setting up a missile with flares to be set off at different altitudes. It had to be a dark moonless night. Suddenly, the Proving Ground lit up like daylight. You could read a newspaper. All the observation stations were calling down to us. “What are you guys doing down there?” Of course, we all hoped it was of alien origin.

Tombaugh calmed us down. “It’s a rare Aurora Borealis event,” he said. “Enjoy it!”

Remember, “War of the Worlds” had been broadcast, ten years earlier, in 1938. Of course, the Jules Verne works had been popular for years. And folks were beginning to write Science Fiction. In fact, we later found out that one of the guys working in the lab was, under a “nom de plume” writing and publishing Science Fiction.

Even Clyde Tombaugh thought that flying saucers were possible. In fact, one time the crew at Mule Peak thought they saw a long white object traveling along the Tularosa Basin. They thought they were watching a UFO through the lower powered tracking scope. They called back down to Clyde, and he gave them permission to photograph it.

A 1000 feet of shell burst 35 mm film was brought in to be developed.

How embarrassed everyone was when we developed the film and saw that it was a white, cigar shaped tow target.

A tow target was a kind of horizontal fabric balloon that caught the air as it was pulled by an airplane. Sometimes they even had little gas burners in them, to provide a heat signature. They were used as targets for the artillery units that came to the range to practice.

If people didn’t know to expect to see that, and had not noticed the little airplane pulling them, they would see a long white cigar shaped object. Sometimes the airplane would have to cut it loose, and then it would become subject to the air currents and updrafts that the mountain range caused.

On the night launchings, we sometimes put flares on the rockets, so we could see them better. I think they liked the green ones better than the red ones, for some reason.

By my count, I was at WSPG for 41 months, beginning in August 1948, 13 months after the supposed event in Roswell.

 If something had happened at Roswell, it would have filtered down to me. Gossip is the main entertainment for the Army enlisted, even today. Later, as an officer, I would have had a “need to know,” given the field in which I worked.

Surely, they would not have excluded Tombaugh or Von Braun from that information. Tombaugh would have let something slip in the Lab. He was just that naive.

But I never heard anything, and neither did anyone else.

Not only that, but they would have taken photographs. Real photographs. If there were photos of aliens to be had, they should have been in those files at the Post Photo Lab, or the BRL Lab, and would have been even more interesting to us than atomic tests and, maybe, even compromised starlets.

I made my first trip to Roswell on Saturday, September 15, 1948, to a football game at Walker Air Force Base at deBremond Stadium. The” Walker Bombers” were playing the “V-2 Missiles” from WSPG. At a measly 150 pounds, I was a reserve Back, number 11. There were four more games to be played that year at Roswell, with four other teams, and four other games between other Southwest Army teams.