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Engine Specialists
the hands of wise, talented, and honest scientists. Scientists and engineers were
upright intellectuals and enthusiasts devoted to their work.They couldn’t care less
about your nationality.They had no use for concentration camps, special prisons,
and crematoria. Scientists and engineers of the world, unite! But let’s return once
again to Berlin in May 1945.
isayev, pallo, and their fellow travelers, including Raykov, Tolstov, and
other engine specialists who would become Isayev’s future compatriots, had not
been in Berlin very long before they set out for the Walter factory in Basdorf.This
was the factory laboratory base where the Germans had developed and fabricated
the liquid-propellant rocket engine for the Me 163 rocket-propelled fighter plane,
which was functionally very similar to our BI. I will annotate my previous discussion
of this factory with some details from Arvid Pallo that I believe are pertinent.
Having settled in Basdorf, Isayev and Pallo’s team began searching for specialists
who could restore documentation and hardware. Our troops had not fought with
anyone here and hadn’t damaged anything. But, in contrast to the Berlin enterprises,
everything here had been carefully cleared away. The spindles and chucks
had been removed from the machine tools.They couldn’t even find everyday tools.
They were not able to find engines or valves or any technical documentation.After
a thorough inspection of the grounds, they finally discovered well-camouflaged
aboveground storehouses containing concentrated hydrogen peroxide, tonka rocket
fuel, and concentrated nitric acid which had been used as an oxidizer.
After lengthy questioning of the local inhabitants, they managed to find out the
home addresses of several engineers from this firm, and using the successive
approximation method, they managed to find the chief engineer in Berlin and one
of the lead designers.They did not “crack” immediately. But after a certain amount
of time they wrote a report about the firm’s work and drew diagrams of the
engines’ construction. They claimed that the SS Sonderkommandos had taken the
missing equipment and materials.
Nevertheless, one of the Germans, a test rig mechanic, directed Pallo’s attention
to a pipe sticking out of the ground and hinted that someone should dig there.
They dug and found carefully packed and conserved liquid-propellant rocket
engine combustion chambers, turbopump assemblies, and propellant component
feed mechanisms with all of their valves.After they had laid this entire windfall out
on tables in the shop and called the former directors to provide explanations, the
latter announced,“Everything that we told you and wrote for you had nothing to
do with reality. Everything was false. Now we see that we are not dealing with
army officers but with real specialists, and we are ready to collaborate with you.”
With the assistance of the German mechanics, our “real specialists” installed the
engines they had found on test rigs and conducted a series of firing tests, taking
down all the necessary specifications.When I arrived in Basdorf from Berlin, Isayev
was distressed that he had previously (in Khimki) made me invent the most exotic
methods of electrical ignition to set alight mixtures of kerosene and nitric acid.
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