ScienceDirect - Technol Rep Tohoku Univ ... - Garryck Osborne

60 The Hunt for Zero Point
also ordered to subordinate its activities to a new and much larger force
of British tech-plunder units, known as "T-Forces." These would move
forward with General Bernard Montgomery's 21st Army Group,
principally in Monty's theater of operations, northwest Germany, but
not exclusively so. Under the terms of the CIOS charter, with its Anglo-
American task jointly to exploit German spoils of war, British T-Force
teams would also be allowed to tag along with forward U.S. Army units
in pursuit of their objectives.
These objectives were to locate and secure intact technical "targets" of
interest; to preserve German high technology from "destruction, loot,
robbery and, if necessary, counterattack," until the completion of their
examination by teams of experts or until their removal. They were also to
act as armed escorts in enemy territory for the "expert investigators"
drawn from CIOS offices far behind the front lines. As a quid pro quo,
U.S. technical teams could ride with forward British assault units. The
eventual size of British T-Forces would grow to 5,000 personnel.
But from the reports generated by these units, now freely available in
the U.K. Public Records Office, it was apparent that the British were
desperately ill-prepared to make the most of the opportunity that lay
before them.
Over the next two months, I spent every spare moment down at the
Public Records Office. And when I wasn't in the Records Office, just
down the road in Kew on the outskirts of London, I was gathering as
much open-source reading material as I could on the Allies' systematic
plunder of German high technology at the end of the war. One book,
The Paperclip Conspiracy by Tom Bower, read like a manual on how to
dismantle an entire nation's technology base. If America, Britain and
their allies had applied the lessons of Paperclip to the Iraqi problem at the
end of the Gulf War in 1991, the threat posed by Saddam Hussein's war
machine would have been eradicated forever.
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."