But by midday, I had still found nothing that indicated the merest presence of the machines elucidated within the Schriever/Vesco legend.
As more men and resources were plowed into Lusty, the search for high technology widened. The files detailed the growing number of shipments back to the U.S. "Hanau: 50 tons of documents ready for shipment. Munich: 30 tons of documents ready for shipment. Teisendorf: Approximately two tons of documents pertaining to flight-path studies of guided rocket missiles are on location ready for shipment…" From all over Germany, documentation was being gathered, marshaled and hauled back to the U.S.
But just when it seemed as if the USAAF mission was breaking the back of the task, new finds and new problems added to the logjam. The biggest and most unexpected of these related to the Nazis' underground facilities, whose scale and number had not been anticipated by the investigators, because Allied reconnaissance had failed to pick up anything but the vaguest hints that the Germans were putting their factories underground.
The underground facilities were of more than passing interest to me since they figured in the Legend as places where the Nazis had developed their antigravity technology.
From the message traffic that built up around the discovery of these facilities in the late summer of 1945, three or four months after the war in Europe ended, it was clear that the discovery of these underground facilities was diverting the Lusty investigators from their primary goal of plundering German technology.
On August 29, General McDonald sent USAAF headquarters in Eu rope a list of six underground factories that had been discovered and "excavated." All of them had been churning out aircraft components or other specialized equipment for the Luftwaffe until the very last day of the war.
According to McDonald, the facilities varied in size from 5 to 26 kilometers in length, according to measurements of their tunnels and galleries. The dimensions of the tunnels varied from 4 to 20 meters in width and 5 to 15 meters in height; the floor space from 25,000 to 130,000 square meters.
Seven weeks later, in mid-October, in a Preliminary Report on Underground Factories and Facilities in Germany and Austria, senior USAAF officers were told that the final tally showed "a considerably larger number of German underground factories than had hitherto been suspected."
In addition to Germany and Austria, the underground building program had been extended across France, Italy, Hungary and Czechoslovakia.
"Although the Germans did not go underground on a large scale until March 1944, they managed to get approximately 143 underground factories into production by the last few months of the war," the report stated. A further 107 facilities had been located that were either being built, excavated or planned by the end of hostilities, but another 600 sites could be added to the total if caves and mines, many of which had been turned into production lines and weapons laboratories, were taken into consideration.
The report's author was evidently taken aback by the breadth of the German underground plan. "It is a matter of conjecture what would have occurred if the Germans had gone underground before the beginning of the war," he concluded.
And then, hot on the heels of the underground investigation, a fresh directive, this time from a senior USAAF field officer to General McDonald, the air force intelligence chief at Wright Field in Ohio.
Set against the steady but predictable buildup of documentation, its tone was so unexpected and the content of the message so different that it took me a moment to come to terms with its implications. It was dated September 28, 1945:
1. It is considered that the following have been thoroughly investigated and have proven to have no basis of fact.
a. Remote Interference with Aircraft Investigations have been completed on this subject and it is considered that there is no means presently known which was in development or use by the German Air Force which could interfere with the engines of aircraft in flight. All information available through interrogations, equipment and documents has been thoroughly investigated and this subject may be closed with negative result.
b. Balls of Fire As far as can be determined from extensive interrogations, investigation of documents, and field trips, there is no basis of fact in the reports made by aircrews concerning balls of fire other than that phenomena similar to balls of fire may have been produced by jet aircraft or missiles. This subject may be considered closed with negative results.
A.R. Sullivan Jr., Lt. Colonel, Sig. C.
This was the first hint or mention of anything connected with the foo fighters. Sullivan was telling McDonald that investigations on the subject had been completed; and yet, there was no sign in any of the raw communications traffic that had hitherto flowed between the front and Wright Field that anyone was the slightest bit interested in the subject of "remote interference with aircraft" or "balls of fire." Furthermore, there wasn't any suggestion of interrogations having taken place or equipment or documents having been investigated pertaining to possible foo-fighter technologies — or of special "field trips" having been undertaken to track them down. But the instruction that the subject "may be considered closed with negative result" was so strident it made me sit up and wonder if I'd missed something.
I felt a knot of excitement in the pit of my stomach. The subject, as Sullivan put it, may be closed with negative result. Why? In the apparent informality of its memo format, the implication hadn't been clear on a first read-through. But it was now. This wasn't a casual instruction. It was an order.
I flicked back a few frames and found a field report of an investigation into German guided weapons technology. It was then that my eyes were drawn to an assessment of a sensor called Windhund ("wind-hound"). Windhund was a "sniffer" device that detected the presence of aircraft by measuring differences in the polarity of the surrounding air. It then automatically directed its parent aircraft to follow the trail until it reached the bomber stream itself.
All you had to do was hard-wire Windhund into an autopilot and you had a mechanism to allow a pilotless aircraft — conveivably, the Fireball — to be controlled automatically.
In the same document, a second sensor from a related facility (same organization, different location) was detailed as an infrared tracking system for locating aircraft exhaust gas. Both technologies were at an early stage, but the fact that they were being investigated at all was significant. A half century later, as far as I knew, neither had been perfected or developed. But here, in 1945, were sensors that a foo-fighter could have used to get close enough to a bomber to disrupt its engine ignition systems. I felt for the first time like I had a foot in the door. A few frames later and here was a large document set out in tabular format with headings running across the top of the page: Target~, Organization, City, Activity, Assessed (date), Action Taken and Remarks. From the first page, it was clear that this was a very different kind of file, filled with data as raw as it came, and instantly noteworthy for what it did— and didn't — say. In the remarks section of one target, listed only as a "research station" near the town of Eib See, assessed primarily by the British, curiously, on May 2, 1945, it said: "Over 400 evacuated Peenemunde personnel held. Excavations made in the mountainside close to lake for underground workshops. A very important target." Nothing else. Mysterious as hell. Next page. Target: Luftfahrt forschungs [sic]. City: Brunswick. Activity: Radiocontrolled aircraft. Assessed: April 21–24, 1945. Action Taken: Team has been dispatched. Remarks: "Evidence of radio-controlled aircraft." I scratched some notes. Another potential foo-fighter technology. Next page. Target: Research. Location: 87, Weimarerstr. Vienna. Activity: Experiments with antiaircraft rays. Remarks: "Research activity is conducted in a house at the above address. Research personnel were not allowed to leave house (reported hermetically sealed)."