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in the European theater, was for once having difficulty carrying out his orders. Though the V-2s he was supposed to find had been mostly fired from mobile launch sites in Holland and France, there were no rockets in either country. The missiles, apparently, had not been designed for lengthy storage periods, and firing batteries like the 2./485 that had launched the first strike against London tended to run through the German rocket supply faster than factories could replenish it. So Toftoy had to go to the source, which was problematic since the First Belorussian Red Army Group had overrun the V-2’s original production facility, a sandy islet in the Baltic Sea called Peenemünde. Fortunately, Peenemünde was of limited value to the Soviets because the SS had moved the V-2 assembly lines to a secret location after a series of Allied air raids in August 1943.

Despite Toftoy’s numerous and increasingly frantic entreaties, army intelligence still hadn’t located the new facility. It could be anywhere in Germany or Austria. Worse, it could be in Soviet-occupied territory, like Peenemünde, in which case Toftoy would never be able to carry out his mission. As Ludy contemplated the unpleasant prospect of a strikeout blemishing his stellar service record, a message clattered off the Teletype machine at G-2 army intelligence headquarters in Frankfurt. The 104th “Timberwolf” Infantry Division had apparently stumbled across something horrible in the Harz Mountains in central Germany.

John M. Galione, a private with the 145th Regiment, had made the grisly discovery by literally following his nose. “Hey Sarge, what do you think that odor could be?” he asked early on the morning of April 5. The smell was the stench of decaying corpses from a passing prisoner transport train. For four days, Galione followed the rail tracks, convinced they led to a concentration camp. He walked more than one hundred miles, mostly at night and by himself. “Something overpowering came over me,” he recalled fifty years later. “I don’t know what it was. My legs just kept walking. It was as if someone was pushing me from behind.”

Finally, early on April 10, after hiking again all night, he came across an abandoned railcar shortly before dawn. It was filled with dead bodies. Behind it, some sort of a camp emerged in the morning mist. As the sun rose, piles of dead bodies grotesquely materialized. “They were gray in color, and they looked like skeletons wrapped in skin. Some of them were so thin you could see their backbones through their stomachs.”

But amid the horror, something else caught Galione’s eye. “From where I was standing, I could see a hidden tunnel coming out of the side of the mountain. That’s how I knew I had found something big the Nazis were trying to keep secret.”

What Galione had found was Mittelwerk, the giant subterranean V-2 factory, and Dora, its attendant concentration camp.

When word of the find reached Toftoy at the Plaza Athénée Hotel a few days later, he immediately grabbed a map. Mittelwerk was near Nordhausen, in Thuringia. Oh my God, he thought. That region of Germany was slated to become part of the Soviet occupation zone. His closest inspection team was in Fulda, eighty miles away. It would take weeks just to inventory the more than one million square feet of caverns that connected Mittelwerk’s two-mile-long assembly-line tunnels. Subassemblies with tens of thousands of often highly complex component parts for fuel pumps, guidance systems, electronic relays, and everything else that made a rocket fly would need to be carefully examined and cherry-picked. The few intact rockets that had been completed just before the Nazi evacuation would have to be partly dismantled and readied for transport. Specialized troops with the necessary mechanical skills to handle such fragile cargo would need to be found. The only unit that remotely fit the bill was the 144th Motor Vehicle Assembly Company. And it was currently in Cherbourg, France, 770 miles away. And, as if all that wasn’t challenging enough, German engineers that could put all this