Word: rocketeer
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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Exit from Peenemünde. Greatest technical triumph of Nazi Germany was the V-2 rocket, prototype of the guided missiles which may dominate future wars. The V-2 project (code name "E.W.," for Elektromechanische Werke) was pushed with all the secrecy and urgency which surrounded the U.S. "Manhattan District." The rockets were developed and tested at Peenemünde on the Baltic, and manufactured in a vast underground factory at Nordhausen, east of Kassel...
With Russian artillery thundering behind them, the rocket men packed up everything they could move, and fled through the chaos of collapsing Germany. A few had gone south (on Hitler's orders) toward the "Alpine Stronghold"; the rest fought their way over bomb-battered highways and railroads to a small town near Nordhausen...
Soon the Americans swept into Nordhausen. Colonel Holger N. Toftoy, of Army Ordnance, grabbed the rocket men, took them to the U.S. zone, got permission to send most of them to the U.S. Meanwhile, another Ordnance team commanded by tall, cheery Major James P. Hamill, 27, was vacuum-cleaning the V-2 factory. They got all the V-2s they wanted...
First job of the rocket men at Fort Bliss was to pass on to qualified Americans everything they knew about rockets. This took millions of words of interrogation: hundreds of U.S. officers and civilian experts passed through their camp, absorbing what the Germans could teach them, which was plenty. By Ordnance Department calculation, they saved the U.S. ten years of research, millions of dollars...
...former National Youth Administration camp near Wright Field at Dayton, brain center of U.S. Army air power. Some of their names were still secret, but among them are men like 1) thin, nervous Dr. Alexander Lippisch, butterfly collector, landscape painter, lute player, and designer of the Messerschmitt 163 rocket plane, 2) blond, ruddy Dr. Hans Heinrich, inventor of the ribbon parachute, 3) Russian-born Dr. Eugen Ryschkewitsch, world authority on heat-resisting ceramics. Other new workers at Wright Field: German aerodynamicists, wind-tunnel men, instrument men and experts on all the complexities of modern aviation...