Fort Strong, on an island in the middle of Boston Harbor, had been used as a training camp during the Civil War and remained in use on and off through World War I. The fortresslike nature of the coastal defense facility made it an ideal place for a secret military program like Operation Overcast. When the first German scientists arrived in September 1945, the fortress was still under army control but had not been used for nearly thirty years. Thick weeds grew in between the gun blocks and pedestal mounts. The administration and observation buildings had fallen into disrepair. But the army barracks was easily converted into what would become known as the Operation Overcast hotel. German prisoners of war were moved onto the island to work as staff, including as translators, cooks, bakers, and tailors. Kolm’s job was to process the scientists, which included fingerprinting, medical examinations, and coordination with the FBI. This all took time, and the Germans were not known for patience. Before long an insidious unease settled in among the scientists, Kolm recalled.
When the weather was clear the Germans played volleyball games outside. Far off in the distance they could make out the Boston skyline and see the tall, shiny buildings on shore. But often the fog rolled in, and the island was soaked in a thick, dense mist for days at a time. To pass the time the scientists stayed indoors and played Monopoly, which they called the “capitalists’ game.” Still, it was impossible to deny that Fort Strong took on a penal colony feel, as Kolm recalled. Soon the Germans started calling their new home Devil’s Island. Finally, on September 29, 1945, Major James P. Hamill, an intelligence officer with the Army Ordnance Corps, was sent to the east coast of the island to escort a group of Germans off. Hamill had been in Nordhausen with Major Staver at war’s end and had personally assisted in the mission to locate enough rocket parts to reconfigure one hundred of them at the White Sands Proving Ground. His presence on Devil’s Island had to have been a welcome one among the rocket scientists. Hamill took six of them—Eberhard Rees, Erich Neubert, Theodor Poppel, August Schulze, Wilhelm Jungert, and Walter Schwidetzky—to Aberdeen Proving Ground, where they began translating, cataloguing, and evaluating the information from the D?rnten mine stash. Hamill’s next mission was to escort Wernher von Braun by train to Fort Bliss, Texas.
The train ride began on October 6, 1945, and was a memorable event. Operation Overcast was a highly classified military matter, and Major Hamill was required to keep watch over von Braun twenty-four hours a day. Drawing any kind of attention to the German scientist was to be avoided at all cost. In St. Louis, Major Hamill and von Braun were assigned to a Pullman car filled with wounded war veterans from the 82nd Division, renowned for parachute assaults into Sicily and Salerno. Also in the train car were wounded war veterans from the 101st Airborne Division, men lauded for action in the Normandy invasion and the Battle of the Bulge.
Hamill quickly arranged for himself and von Braun to be moved into a different car. The train moved along to the Texas border. Hamill watched as the man sitting next to von Braun began engaging him in friendly conversation, asking von Braun where he was from and what business he was in. Von Braun, apparently well versed in lying on demand, replied that he was from Switzerland and that he was in “the steel business.”
“Well it turned out that this particular gentleman knew Switzerland like the back of his hand,” Major Hamill later recalled, “and was himself in the steel business.” Von Braun quickly qualified “steel business” to mean “ball bearings.” As it so happened the man was also an expert on ball bearings, Hamill explained. The train whistle blew. The approaching station stop was Texarkana, which was the businessman’s destination. As the man prepared to exit the train he turned back to von Braun and waved good-bye to him.
“If it wasn’t for the help that you Swiss gave us, there is no telling as to whom might have won the war,” the businessman said.