Special Mission V-2

Col. Holger Toftoy and the Operation That Brought German Rocket Technology to America

By Dwight Jon Zimmerman - April 26, 2016

Toftoy’s Special Mission V-2 provided the technology that kick-started America’s space program. Bumper 8 was an ambitious two-stage rocket program launched in July 1950 that topped a V-2 missile base with a WAC Corporal rocket. The upper stage was able to reach then-record altitudes of almost 400 kilometers, higher than even modern space shuttles flew. Launched under the direction of the General Electric Company, the Bumper Project was used primarily for testing rocket systems and for research on the upper atmosphere. Bumper rockets carried small payloads that allowed them to measure attributes including air temperature and cosmic ray impacts. Seven years later, the Soviet Union launched Sputnik I and Sputnik II, the first satellites launched into Earth orbit. In response, in 1958, the United States created NASA and launched Explorer 1. U.S. Air Force photo

Toftoy had organized his search teams into rapid response units. Three were in the field, one attached to each Army Group (the British Army’s 21st, and the American Army’s 12th and 6th), with a fourth, roving gypsy team that Toftoy used on personally directed independent missions. Each team was furnished with vehicles, cameras, radios, filing equipment and supplies, and qualified personnel able to identify, tag, and record their discoveries.

V-1 and V-2 manufacturing and test facilities were originally all located on the Baltic Sea island of Usedom at Peenemünde near the present border with Poland. After a heavy RAF bombing raid in August 1943, production facilities were relocated, two in the south at Friedrichshafen on the Swiss-German border and in Austria near Wiener Neustadt (south of Vienna), one in the east near Riga, Latvia, and another roughly in the middle (and appropriately named “Mittelwerk”) near Nordhausen in the Harz Mountains of central Germany. Riga fell to the Soviet Red Army in the fall of 1944. In April 1945, Peenemünde’s remaining scientific personnel evacuated the facilities. V-2 program director Dr. Wernher von Braun and about 500 members of his group fled south to Oberammergau along the Austrian border, where they planned to turn themselves over to the Americans.

On April 11, Combat Command B (CCB) of the U.S. 3rd Armored Division reached Nordhausen. The Mittelwerk V-2 production facility, located in tunnels dug in the Harz Mountains, had been shut down the previous day, and the SS guards had all left. V-2s had been assembled by slave labor under appalling conditions, and the liberating soldiers were shocked and sickened by the sight of the emaciated survivors as well as the many dead.

The main tunnel in the underground production plant for V-1 cruise missiles and V-2 ballistic missiles after capture by the Allies. Bundesarchive photo

CCB’s intelligence officer, Maj. William Castille, inspected the V-2 assembly line, later describing the orderly rows of V-2 parts and subassemblies in the tunnels “like being in a magician’s cave.” He radioed news of CCB’s discovery to Toftoy, who dispatched to the site an AOTI team located in Fulda, about 80 miles southwest, under command of Maj. James Hamill. Hamill’s team included Maj. William Bromley, responsible for technical operations, and special adviser Dr. Louis Woodruff, an electrical engineering professor from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). A combing of the area revealed more treasures: an almost complete Henschel Hs 117 Schmetterling (“Butterfly”) antiaircraft missile and the guidance and control unit of a Henschel Hs 298 air-to-air missile; a wide variety of precision optical instruments for tracking guided missiles; a complete guidance unit for a Wasserfall-guided surface-to-air missile (a spinoff design of the V-2); and tons of priceless technical documents.

While it would be incorrect to say that finding the V-2s at Mittelwerk had been easy, now came the truly hard part: logging, organizing, and transporting their find out of the Mittelwerk to the port of Antwerp, Belgium, for the journey to New Mexico. The logistics challenges were daunting in the extreme: No document existed, or was ever found, that listed all the parts needed to complete an operational V-2, and no one in the area possessed the necessary knowledge; the transport unit under Toftoy’s command, the 144th Ordnance Motor Vehicle Assembly Company, was stationed in Cherbourg, 770 miles west; and parts, partial assemblies, and complete V-2s were scattered throughout the area. Toftoy was burdened with vague orders from above that prevented him from using the full resources of the U.S. Army’s technical services; unsympathetic local commanders who couldn’t understand the urgency regarding what one of them called “this Buck Rogers stuff”; Supreme Headquarters Allied Expeditionary Force (SHAEF) orders that stated no captured war materiel could be removed from one occupation zone to another; a “gentleman’s agreement” between the British and Americans that disposed captured advanced German weaponry between the two on a one-to-one basis except when only one such item was found – and then it would go to the British; and finally the imminent arrival of the Soviet Red Army. As part of their postwar plan for Germany, the Allies had divided the country into zones of occupation. The Mittelwerk area was going to be split between the British and the Soviet Union. Nordhausen was in what would be the Soviet zone.

Working around the clock, rail cars were loaded and trains sent west – right beneath the noses of British and Soviet officers searching for the same thing.

Though Toftoy knew this, his actual marching orders were worded vaguely enough to allow him discretion regarding the capture and transporting of materials on his list, like the V-2, and he seized the opportunity with both hands. This resulted in some close-call chicanery by Special Mission V-2 personnel.