Marching Orders: The Untold Story of How the American Breaking of the Japanese Secret Codes Led to the Defeat of Nazi Germany and Japan

by Bruce Lee

In the summer of 1944, when word reached London that the Germans might be developing a true rocket weapon, the V-2, to replace the V-1, Masterman went to Poland, via Tehran and Moscow, to study a rocket-firing installation abandoned by the Germans while retreating from a Russian attack. At the time, skeptics did not believe the Germans could launch a long-range rocket, even though portions of such a missile had been recovered in Sweden and Poland after misfires. The team of experts—British, American and Russian—assigned to the case were baffled when they first arrived at the captured launch site. The records of V-2 firings were missing. These would have provided the amounts of fuel, range and payload.