Red Moon Rising Sputnik and the Rivalries That Ignited the Space Age - Matthew Brzezinski [7]
Don’t touch anything, Toftoy ordered. I’m on my way.
• • •
When Chertok and the Russians arrived at Mittelwerk, on July 14, 1945, the place had been virtually picked clean. The Americans had hauled away one hundred intact rockets and had filled sixteen Liberty Ships with 360 metric tons of component parts for transfer to the White Sands Proving Ground in New Mexico. They had made off with an entire liquid oxygen plant, all sorts of fueling equipment, static test-firing rigs, and a dozen mobile launchers. Most of Mittelwerk’s precision tools and sensitive bench instrumentation panels were gone, as were the German engineers who knew how to operate them. Even the giant overhead tunnel lights that illuminated the underground production lines had apparently been tinkered with, so that Chertok and his team were left to grope dangerously in the dark.
“The problem is this,” another Soviet rocket scientist, Colonel Grigori A. Tokady, glumly reported to Moscow. “We have no leading V-2 experts in our zone; we have no complete projects or materials of the V-2; we have captured no fully operational V-2s which could be test launched right away. We [only] have lots of bits and pieces.”
At least the Americans had buried the dead at Dora—nearly five hundred Russians, Poles, and Hungarian Jews—and nurtured the skeletal survivors back to a semblance of life. Still, Chertok could barely bring himself to visit the concentration camp, where mounds of human ash still littered the crematorium, and the horrors of working at Mittelwerk still haunted the hollow features of its freed slave laborers. The majority of the factory’s twenty thousand victims had been Russian POWs—often hanged a dozen at a time for minor infractions from the overhead crane that ran the length of Tunnel B. A French prisoner, Yves Beon, described being forced to file past the corpses dangling above the V-2 assembly line: “Most of their bodies have lost both trousers and shoes, and puddles of urine cover the floor. Since the ropes are long, the bodies swing gently about five feet above the floor, and you have to push them aside as you advance. . . . You receive bumps from knees and tibia soaked in urine, and the corpses, pushed against each other, begin to spin around. . . . Here and there under the rolling bridge, truncheons in hand, the S.S. watch the changing of the shifts. They are laughing: it is a big joke to these bastards.”
For each of the 5,789 V-2s produced at Mittelwerk, which had been built by the same engineer who designed Auschwitz, nearly four prisoners had died. But those who survived now came forth to offer their intimate knowledge of the factory’s intricate cavern network. One former prisoner told Chertok, “I know places where the SS hid the most secret V-2 equipment that the Americans didn’t find.” As Chertok later recalled, “He led us to a distant wooden barracks hut, where in a dark corner, after throwing aside a pile of rags, he jubilantly revealed a large spherical object wrapped in blankets. I was stupefied. It was a [next generation] gyro-stabilized platform, which still hadn’t become a standard V-2 instrument.”
The find brightened morale among the despondent Soviet scientists. Perhaps the Americans hadn’t taken everything of value after all. Toftoy had left enough exterior rocket parts—tail fins, middle-section casings, and nose cones—to piece together fifteen to twenty whole V-2 bodies. Without the innards, though, the shells were largely useless. Yet the gyroscope gave Chertok hope: if an advanced version of the V-2 guidance system could be so easily located, what other buried treasures might the Americans have missed?
Over the next eighteen months, Chertok and an increasingly crowded field of German and Soviet experts began fitting together the missing pieces of the V-2 puzzle. In nearby Bleichrode, at the bottom of a dead-end drift in a potassium mine, they found more guidance system