General Clay told General Wolfe that he was not opposed to such a program but that now was hardly a good time to broach it. “Besieged by the countless demands and the chaotic conditions relevant to ending the war, and the burdensome complexities of planning for the peace, [Clay] considered such efforts six months premature,” explains historian Clarence Lasby. General Clay told General Wolfe to come back and talk to him in six months. Instead, Wolfe set out for Nordhausen, Germany, where his colleague at the Pentagon, Colonel Gervais William Trichel, was running Special Mission V-2, the Top Secret scientific intelligence operation for the U.S. Army Ordnance, Rocket Branch.
Inside the abandoned rocket production facility in the underground tunnel complex at Nordhausen, Special Mission V-2 was just getting under way. When General Wolfe saw the vast numbers of V-weapons left behind, he became even more convinced that a U.S. program to exploit Nazi science had to happen now. Upon his return to Washington, D.C., General Wolfe wrote to General Clay with a revised idea. Not only did the United States military need to act immediately to capture Nazi armaments, Wolfe said, but America needed to hire the “German scientists and engineers” who had created the weapons and put them to work in America. “If steps to this end are taken, the double purpose of preventing Germany’s resurgence as a war power and advancing our own industrial future may be served.” Clay did not respond; he had already told General Wolfe to back off for six months. Meanwhile, the work that was going on at Nordhausen under the auspices of Special Mission V-2 would greatly influence the future of all the Nazi science programs that would follow.
The man in charge of Special Mission V-2, twenty-eight-year-old Major Robert B. Staver, was no stranger to the military significance of the Nazis’ rockets. While preparing for Special Mission V-2 in London the winter before, Staver was nearly killed by one. He and a British colleague had been working inside an office at 27 Grosvenor Square one afternoon in February when a loud blast knocked both of them to the floor. Staver went to the window and saw a “big round cloud of smoke where a V-2 had exploded overhead.” Watching pieces of burning metal rain down from the sky, Staver did a few calculations in his head and determined that the V-2 had likely been heading “very directly” at the building in which he was working when it blew up prematurely. A few weeks later, Major Staver was asleep in a hotel room near the Marble Arch when he was thrown out of bed by an enormous blast. A V-2 had landed in nearby Hyde Park and killed sixty-two people.
The near-death experiences made him ever more committed to Special Mission V-2. For six weeks Staver worked twelve hours a day, seven days a week, studying aerial photographs of Nordhausen supplied to him by the British and otherwise learning everything he could about the V-weapons. As soon as the Allied forces liberated the tunnel complex, Major Staver would be one of the first intelligence officers inside.
Now, finally, here he was at Nordhausen. It was May 12, 1945, and though his mission was almost complete, time was running out, because the Russians were headed into this area soon. By U.S. Army calculations, they would most likely arrive in eighteen days from Berlin.
U.S. Army Ordnance believed that the V-2 rocket could help win the Pacific war, and for nearly two weeks Staver had been hard at work. He had overseen the collection of four hundred tons of rocket parts, which had been loaded onto railcars for delivery to the port at Antwerp, from where they would be shipped to the United States. But with his degree in mechanical engineering from Stanford University, Staver knew that the V-2 rocket was a lot more than the sum of its parts. Without blueprints or technical drawings, it was highly unlikely that American engineers could simply cobble the rocket components together and make the V-2 fly. The drawings and blueprints had to have been stashed somewhere near Nordhausen. If only Major Staver could find a German scientist to bribe, he might be able to find out where the crucial documents were hidden.
For two weeks now Staver had been traveling through the Harz Mountains touring underground weapons factories, searching for a clue or a lead as to who might know more about the V-2 document stash. Locals told a wide variety of stories. Some spoke of paperwork going up in flames. Others talked about truckloads of metal trunks being hidden away in abandoned buildings, in beer gardens, and in castle walls. But this was all hearsay. No one could produce a concrete lead, and it was not exactly difficult to understand why. War crimes investigators were also in Nordhausen asking locals lots of questions. And as Staver trolled for rocket scientists, American GIs continued to dig mass graves for the thousands of corpses found at Nordhausen-Dora slave labor camp. The entire town of Nordhausen still smelled of death.