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Sixty-three seconds into its flight, the rocket ceased being a rocket: Huzel, Peenemünde to Canaveral, p. 75.

At an altitude of seventeen miles: Neufeld, The Rocket and the Reich, p. 98.

shell painted in a jagged camouflage scheme of signal white, earth gray, and olive green: http://www.v2rocket.com/start/makeup/markings.html.

moving at 3,500 miles per hour: Huzel, Peenemünde to Canaveral, p. 75.

4 Another ten seconds passed, and the rocket reached its apogee of fifty-two miles: http://www.v2rocket.com/start/deployment/timeline.html.

4 forward at nearly five times the speed of sound: http://www.centennialofflight.gov/essay/EvolutionofTechnology/V-2/Tech26.htm.

The time was 6:41 PM: http://www.v2rocket.com/start/deployment/timeline.html.

six-year-old John Clarke was freshening up for dinner: John Clarke interview with BBC, September 7, 2004, at http://news.bbc.co.uk/l/hi/sci/tech/3634212.stm.

the quarter-inch-thick sheet metal that encased it rose to 1,100 degrees: http://www.v2rocket.com/start/makeup/design.html.

5 the V-2 slammed into Staveley Road at Mach 3: BBC, at http://news.bbc.co.uk/l/hi/sci/tech/3634212.stm.

“The best way to describe it is television with the sound off “: Ibid.

“German science has once again demonstrated a malignant ingenuity”: William E. Burrows, This New Ocean: The Story of the First Space Race (New York: Modern Library, 1999), p. 102.

Boris Chertok had no trouble finding the big brown brick building: To recreate Chertok’s experiences in Berlin, I have drawn on the English translation of the first volume of his four-volume memoirs, Rakety i Lyudi: Boris Evsee-vich Chertok, Rockets and People (Washington, D.C.: National Aeronautics and Space Administration History Series, 2005).

8 “Oh, this German love for details and this exactness”: Ibid., p. 221.

“We have every right to this”: Ibid., p. 362.

“The thing that every laboratory needs the most”: Ibid., p. 221.

“No, we no longer felt the hatred or thirst for revenge”: Ibid.

9 “Occupation of German scientific and industrial establishments has revealed”: John Logsdon, ed., Exploring the Unknown: SuDocNAS 1/1.21, vol. 4 (Washington, D.C.: National Aeronautics and Space Administration, 1995), p. 33.

“The thinking of the scientific directors of this group is 25 years ahead”: Ordway and Sharpe, The Rocket Team, p. 198.

He was a crack marksman, a recipient of the Knox artillery trophy and the Distinguished Pistol Shot medal: See Toftoy’s official biography at http://www.redstone.army.mil/history/toftoy/memoir.html.

10 “It is no exaggeration to say that almost everything that [the class of] ’26 has done”: Ibid.

“Hey Sarge, what do you think that odor could be?”: Mary Nahas, The Journey of Private Galione: How America Became a Superpower (Enumclaw, Wash.: Pleasant Word Publishers, 2004), p. 276.

11 “They were gray in color, and they looked like skeletons”: Ibid., p. 284.

“From where I was standing, I could see a hidden tunnel”: Ibid.

The only unit that remotely fit that bill was the 144th Motor Vehicle Assembly Company: http://www.v2rocket.com/start/chapters/mittel.html.

The Americans had hauled away one hundred intact rockets and had filled sixteen Liberty Ships with 360 metric tons: Ibid.

12 “The problem is this”: Quoted in Ordway and Sharpe, The Rocket Team, p. 221.

nearly five hundred Russians, Poles, and Hungarian Jews: Nahas, The Journey of Private Galione, p. 286.

“Most of their bodies have lost both trousers and shoes”: Neufeld, The Rocket and the Reich, p. 262.

5,789 V-2s produced at Mittelwerk: Ibid., p. 263.

13 “I know places where the SS hid the most secret V-2 equipment”: Chertok, Rockets and People, p. 278.

One of the biggest windfalls was dug out of a sand quarry in Lehesten: Ibid., p. 339.

had been counterintuitively shortened and flared, creating a larger opening: http://www.centennialofflight.gov/essay/EvolutionofTechnology/V-2/Tech26.htm.

14 twenty thousand separate parts went into each V-2: Ernst Stuhlinger and Frederick I. Ordway, Wernher von