That there would be spoils of war was never in doubt. The only issue was
how they would be divided. The spoils of the A-4/V-2 program could be
divided into four components: completed rockets, the factory where the
rockets had been made and more might be built, the mountain of documents
containing plans and test results, and the personnel who designed, built, and
fired the rockets. As the war ended, the victors began scrambling for the
pieces of the rocket system. Nobody worked harder at collecting the
components of the V-2 program than a small group of American army
officers.

The American effort to exploit German rocketry was ad hoc, bordering
on chaotic, with numerous teams questioning interned personnel and rum-
maging through captured materiel. The most productive actions were done
under the direction of Colonel Holger N. Toftoy, chief of United States
Army Ordnance Technical Intelligence in Europe. Toftoy was a 41-year-old
West Point graduate. He was tall, lean, and wore steel-rimmed glasses. His
expertise was in submarine mines, not rockets. As Nazi Germany fell,
Toftoy had received a request from Colonel Gervais Trichel, chief of the
rocket branch in the Ordnance Department at the Pentagon, to acquire and
ship 100 operational V-2s to the White Sands Proving Ground in New
Mexico for testing. Soon after the capture of the area around Nordhausen
and the Mittelwerk, Toftoy set up Special Mission V-2 to do the job. He put
Major William Bromley in command of Special Mission V-2; Bromley

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