About the Author
Dan D. Williams
Debut novelist and grandson of Major General Holger N. Toftoy.
A Story Only He Could Tell
Dan Williams is a partner and CEO of ONELIFE Senior Living, a multistate senior living owner–operator based in Scottsdale, Arizona. He grew up in Huntsville, Alabama, the city his grandfather helped build into the center of American rocket science. He lives in Fountain Hills, Arizona, with his wife Connie, their dogs Aspen and Bentley, and a cat named Mocha.
Major General Holger N. Toftoy, the American protagonist of this novel, was his grandfather. Williams brings to this story something no other writer could: a lifetime inside the family that carried this history, and the questions it leaves unanswered.
Always the Stars, Never the Ashes is his debut novel.
The Real History
Major General Holger N. Toftoy
"I'm on my hands and knees begging you."
— Holger Toftoy, to the Army Chief of Staff, 1949
Holger Nelson Toftoy was born on October 31, 1902, in Marseilles, Illinois. He graduated from West Point in 1926. In 1944, he was assigned as chief of the Army Ordnance Technical Intelligence teams in Europe, responsible for locating and evaluating captured enemy weapons. It was in this role that he first encountered the V-2 rocket and understood what it meant.
In the spring of 1945, Toftoy directed the American effort to secure Wernher von Braun and his rocket team, remove 341 railcars of V-2 hardware from the Mittelwerk facility at Nordhausen, and recover fourteen tons of technical documents, all before the territory passed to Soviet control on July 1, 1945. That effort, first known as Operation Overcast, became part of what history remembers as Operation Paperclip. In its first year, 119 German scientists arrived in the United States under Toftoy's leadership.
By 1949, Toftoy had identified Huntsville Arsenal in Alabama as the right location for a consolidated American rocket program. The Army was preparing to sell the property at auction. Toftoy went to the Pentagon, spread his maps across the floor of the Army chief of staff's office, and got down on his hands and knees to make his case, crawling from map to map, tracing terrain, rail connections, and available land. He looked up and said: "I'm on my hands and knees begging you." The argument worked.
The rocket program moved to Huntsville in 1950. Toftoy served at Redstone Arsenal from 1952 to 1958, the years it became the center of America's missile and rocket program.
On January 31, 1958, a Jupiter-C rocket carried Explorer I, America's first satellite, into orbit.
Toftoy retired in 1960. He died on April 19, 1967, two years and three months before July 20, 1969. He is buried at Arlington National Cemetery.