During the November 1944 to March 1945 planning stage of the T-Force operations, the problem facing British investigators was a fundamental lack of intelligence on what they were supposed to be looking for. A "black list" of technical targets was drawn up, the majority of them weapons-development and research centers put forward by CIOS.
But a general air of ignorance of the situation on the ground persisted, as a T-Force field commander later recorded. "It appeared that the sponsoring ministries knew little or nothing about the specific whereabouts and natures of their targets; and that investigators who would eventually come out would know even less."
If there was any sense at all that the British realized they were in a race against the other allies — the French and the Americans particularly — it came far too late. Roy Fedden, a senior and respected British aviation industrialist who flew into Germany to view the tech-plunder operation for himself, complained that his compatriots were being "lamentably slow" to take advantage of the information on offer. With many of the U.K. technical experts drawn from industry, part of the problem was a considerable reluctance on their part to accept that Germany could possibly have been as far ahead of British technology in certain pioneering areas — the jet engine, for example — as they evidently were.
There were British successes — the capture of the German navy's laboratories at Kiel, for example, where highly advanced German U-boats and torpedoes, propelled by an innovative peroxide-fueled engine, were being developed. There were also significant British finds at Krupp in Meppen, where advanced armor and artillery technology had been produced for the Wehrmacht.
But reading between the lines of the British-controlled tech-plunder operation, its disparate character was clearly a factor in its limited success. Without adequate direction from London, there was confusion as well as a palpable lack of urgency about the operation at the front. And in some cases — the activities of T-Forces of the 21st Army Group's Canadian First Army, for example, who were roaming between Germany and Holland, looking for targets — it was portrayed as being akin to a jaunty adventure.
Among the most prominent targets on First Army's T-list, according to records of its operations at the time, was the radio transmitter of Lord Haw-Haw, the British traitor and Nazi propagandist. "Two further wireless stations had been discovered on the (German) island of Borkum and another platoon was dispatched there as guard. That platoon was in the happy position of having 4,500 German marines to wait on them!"
It all seemed a very far cry from the exotic weaponry that Vesco had described in Intercept — But Don't Shoot.
In scanning the British documents, however, I'd found one big problem with Vesco's thesis that the British had discovered flying disc technology and removed it to Canada. By far the greater part of Germany's advanced aerospace development had taken place in Bavaria in southern Germany, a long way from the main thrust of British operations in the northwest of the country.
And while some British T-Force units had been integrated with American forward army operations in central and southern Germany, they were more often than not outwitted by the Americans, who time and again seemed to have had the resources to take what they wanted, much to the dismay of Roy Fedden.
"The Americans," he wrote, "have fine-combed the country, remov ing considerable quantities of drawings, technical records and actual equipment direct to the States."
This, I could see, was no mere happenstance. American tech-plunder activities were the result of the most carefully thought out strategy in the history of U.S. military operations, its orchestration planned at the highest levels.
In November 1944, the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff had established a Technical Industrial Intelligence Committee to seek out anything in Germany that might be useful to the postwar American economy. Nor did the Joint Chiefs' target list just comprise military objectives. One subcommittee had a staff of 380 specially trained civilians set up specifically to represent the interests of 17 U.S. companies. Special agents from the U.S. Field Intelligence Agencies (Technical) scoured Germany for vacuum tubes a tenth of the size of the most advanced U.S. devices, and condensers made out of zinc-coated paper, which were 40 percent smaller and 20 percent cheaper than U.S. condensers — and, instead of "blowing" like the U.S. vacuum tubes, were "self-healing" in other words, they could repair themselves. Such innovation would later prove invaluable to the postwar U.S. electronics industry.
The teams were also on the lookout for German textile and medical advances — and found them by the ton-load. At the German chemical giant LG. Farbenindustrie, notorious for its role in the development of the gas chambers of the Holocaust, investigators found formulas for the production of exotic textiles, chemicals and plastics. One American dye authority was so overwhelmed by the discovery that he declared: "It includes the production know-how and the secret formulas for over 50,000 dyes. Many of them are faster and better than ours. Many are colors we were never able to make. The American dye industry will be advanced at least ten years." German biochemists had also found ways of pasteurizing milk using ultraviolet light and their medical scientists had discovered a way of producing synthetic blood plasma on a commercial scale.
Hundreds of thousands of German patents were simply removed and brought back to America.
No wonder the Brits were struggling. It was clear from these and other accounts that CIOS, the Anglo-U.S. reporting channel and assessment office for German high technology, was little more than a front. The real American tech-plunder operation had been organized long beforehand, under separate cover, in Washington.
A year after the war ended the U.S. Office of Technical Services (a body set up to ensure that German technology, where required, was spun rapidly into American industry) was reportedly sifting through "tens of thousands of tons" of documentation. This "mother lode" of material, according to one contemporary report, "very likely contained practically all the scientific, industrial and military secrets of Nazi Germany." Had exotic propulsion science been buried somewhere within this mountain of raw material, it would have been almost impossible to locate. But after the war, the mother lode was divided between the Library of Congress, the Department of Commerce and the technical archives at Wright Field. Most of the Wright Field material had come via Lusty, the postwar intelligence report on Luftwaffe technology that Lawrence Cross had told me about. This was the report that was stuck, frustratingly, in Alabama — nowhere near the Air Force symposium that I was due to hit in a quickie assignment to Washington later in the month.
I called the Air Force Historical Research Agency at Maxwell Air Force Base in Alabama again to see if the administrator there could recommend any other sources of information comparable to the Lusty report. Since I was going to be in the vicinity of the U.S. National Archives in Maryland, I wanted to be sure I wasn't missing out on anything.
"If you're gonna be in D.C. anyway," she told me, chewing slowly on the syllables, "you might want to check out the other copy of Lusty that's available at our sister site down by the Old Navy Yard, just across the river from Capitol Hill."
For a moment, I thought she was joking. This was the person who'd told me, in painstaking detail, that if I wanted to obtain a hard copy of Lusty from the archives of Maxwell Air Force Base it would take me months or even years; that due to the poor condition of the microfilm reels, the only viable way of accessing the information was by reading the reels in situ. When I pointed this out, her answer was nothing if not honest. "You never mentioned nothin' 'bout no trip to D.C.," she said. The Office of Air Force History maintained an out-of-the-way archive in Washington, D.C., located at Boiling Air Force Base, next to the Old Navy Yard.