Oxyacetylene welding torch neck with cutting tip from the Dora Mittelbau V2 factory

Chester C. “Jack” Boone Jr. (1920-2008) was born in Las Animas, Colorado, to Chester C. Boone Sr. and Venus (Phillips) Boone. Chester had two brothers and four sisters. The family moved to Peru, Kansas when Chester was three, and then returned to Colorado a few years later, settling in Pueblo. Chester graduated from high school in 1940. After high school, he moved to San Diego, California, and worked at Consolidated Air Craft until 1943, when he joined the Merchant Marines. In 1944, Chester entered the United States Army and served in the Army Transport System (ATS), where skills he learned in his family’s machine shop were put to use. Chester was promoted to Second Lieutenant and received training as an amphibious engineer at an Air Force training center. He entered active duty on February 21, 1944, and served in the European Theater, under General Omar Bradley. He maintained the mechanics of a ship that transported troops, north of Omaha Beach, prior to the D-Day assault on June 6, 1944. In spring 1945, Boone was put in charge of the army detachment that took over the underground V-1 and V-2 rocket factory outside of Nordhausen, Germany. Upon his arrival at Nordhausen in April 1945, Chester saw piles of slave laborers’ bodies the Nazis had enclosed in barbed wire and massacred. A forced labor camp of 6,000 people was attached to the factory, and accessed by a blacktop path, lined with barbed wire. When the inmates were freed by the US troops, few people left, because they had nowhere to go. The underground factory was not discovered by US forces until the war was almost over. It was built under a mountain, and consisted of two mile-long, parallel tunnels that stretched from one end of the mountain to the other, with cross tunnels between them. The tunnels were equipped with lights and railroad tracks. Train cars were loaded with raw materials and slave laborers assembled the rockets, as the cars moved down the tracks. When Chester arrived, there were 120 V-2 rockets present in the factory. Chester’s detachment was charged with securing and dismantling the factory. However, after six months of work, little progress had been made. While stationed at Nordhausen, Chester often served as a tour guide for visiting G-2 Intelligence officials from Washington DC, including Werner von Braun, the father of German rocketry. When Germany was divided between the Allied Powers in 1945, the factory was in Soviet territory, so Boone’s detachment left. Before leaving, they were able to remove all of the rockets from the factory. However they were unable to completely dismantle the factory. In 1946, Chester withdrew from active service. He was honorably discharged in 1952, and awarded two Bronze Battle Stars for his service. Chester later moved to Chase, Kansas, where he operated a welding shop for a number of years. In 1953, he moved to Fort Morgan, Colorado, where he opened an oilfield welding shop. Chester married Gloryann Frasco on June 26, 1955, in Fort Morgan and they had two daughters, Kim and Diane. He worked in his shop until ill health forced his retirement in 1990.

The welding torch neck was donated to the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in 2007 by the Boone family, and Dave Johnson.

United States Holocaust Memorial Museum Collection, Gift of Dave Johnson and the Boone Family