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

62 The Hunt for Zero Point
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, removing
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.