Red Moon Rising Sputnik and the Rivalries That Ignited the Space Age - Matthew Brzezinski [5]
Surveying the marvels of German science, Chertok could not help being swept up in the moment, pushing aside the fact that the Nazis had murdered his Jewish relatives in Auschwitz and ravaged his homeland. “No,” he wrote on April 30, “we no longer felt the hatred or thirst for revenge that had boiled in each of us earlier. Now it was even a pity to break open these high-quality steel laboratory doors and to entrust these diligent but not very careful soldiers with packing priceless precision instruments. But faster, faster—all of Berlin is waiting for us! I am stepping over the body of a young panzerfaust operator that has not yet been cleared away. I am on my way to open the next safe.”
• • •
Five hundred miles west of Berlin, ensconced in the Parisian luxury of the Plaza Athénée Hotel, Colonel Holger N. Toftoy had been issued almost the same instructions as Boris Chertok. Only his scavenging list consisted of one item: the V-2.
Like Moscow, Washington wanted the rocket. The U.S. Army had quickly grasped that the V-2 represented a new type of weapon that could revolutionize warfare. The rocket had demonstrated that it could deliver significant explosive charges over long distances with relative accuracy. It could be mass-produced (Hitler had ordered twelve thousand units made) and easily transported. Its potential was obvious. It was even possible that guided missiles might someday replace artillery and make long-range bombers obsolete. The U.S. brass was not about to pass up the chance to grab this promising new weapon, as Toftoy’s boss, Major General Hugh Knerr, made clear in a 1945 memo. “Occupation of German scientific and industrial establishments has revealed the fact that we have been alarmingly backward in many fields of research,” Knerr wrote. “If we do not take this opportunity to seize the apparatus and the brains that developed it . . . we will remain years behind. Pride and face-saving have no place in national insurance.” Knerr’s boss, General Dwight D. Eisenhower, put it even more starkly in a cable to Washington. “The thinking of the scientific directors of this group is 25 years ahead of U.S. Recommend that 100 of the very best men of this [V-2] organization be evacuated to U.S immediately.”
Toftoy’s marching orders were equally terse. “Get enough V-2 components to make 100 complete rounds,” he instructed in the spare tone preferred by the military. “Ship to US.” Attached to the directive was a “black list” of names headed by Wernher von Braun, the boy wonder who at the age of twenty-four had been put in charge of what would become the Third Reich’s most important military project. It sounded so simple: round up one hundred rockets and one hundred men. Little did Toftoy know that the assignment would preoccupy the next ten years of his life.
Unlike Chertok, “Ludy” Toftoy (as he was oddly nicknamed by his classmates at West Point) was a career military officer, a graduate of numerous advanced programs at the Command and General Staff School, the Ordnance School, and the Army-Navy Staff College. He was a crack marksman, a recipient of the Knox artillery trophy and the Distinguished Pistol Shot medal. Slim and square-jawed, Toftoy was the embodiment of the American soldiering spirit. He had brains and brawn, and an innate talent for organization, which he displayed amply and eagerly from his earliest days at West Point, where he was chairman of the Ring Committee, designer of the 1926 Class Crest, president of the Dialectical Society, art editor of the student newspaper, and a four-year letterman on the pistol team. The West Point yearbook, the Howitzer, summed up his busy stay on the banks of the Hudson: “It is no exaggeration to say that almost everything that [the class of] ’26 has done during the past two years has felt the guiding hand of little Ludy.”
Little Ludy, now grown up and newly promoted to chief of Ordnance Technical Intelligence