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

66 The Hunt for Zero Point
commands that had commissioned their work had either capitulated or
been wiped off the map.
Many documents and blueprints were missing. German project
managers would tell U.S. investigators that they had destroyed them
under orders, but the USAAF officers quickly learned to apply some
psychology of their own: men and women who had devoted years of
commitment to technologies they considered vastly superior to those
of their enemies were incapable of such vandalism.
Most of the files existed, but had been hidden.
Germany had already been divided by the Allies into zones of
occupation; and many of the most technologically interesting German
facilities—the underground V-l and V-2 production sites in the Harz
mountains, for example—were in the designated Russian sector.
Before the zones were locked and sealed the missing documents had to
be located and brought under American control.
By a process of detective work and, where that failed, by persuasion
and coercion of the German scientists and program managers, boxes of
blueprints and notes were pinpointed, then recovered from the bottom of
lakes, as well as caves, farms, crypts, hospitals and mines.
O'Brien's team hit pay dirt early: their sleuthing led them from
Thumersbach to an air raid shelter covered with earth in the side of a
mountain close to the Austrian border. There they found files belonging
to the l Gruppe/6 Abteilung, the German Air Ministry's intelligence
directorate. These detailed all the Luftwaffe's latest air weapons, from
the Me 262 jet fighter and the Me 163 rocket fighter to radars, air-to-air
missiles and guided bombs. It also showed that the blueprints had
recently been smuggled out of Germany in U-boat shipments to Japan.
Reading through the signals transmitted by Lusty field team officers to
their superiors, I was hit by the sheer scale of the operation and the
pressures endured by those who took part in it.
On April 22, 1945, two and a half weeks before the guns in Europe fell
silent, additional recruits were needed to process the data. "It is planned
to expand the activities of air technical intelligence tenfold, securing
the most highly qualified specialist personnel available to the Army Air
Forces," Brigadier General George C. McDonald, head of USAAF Intelligence,
wrote that day.
The caliber of the technological spoils was indicated by the arrival intheater
at the end ofthat month of a "special group of scientists" headed
by Dr. Theodore von Karman, special consultant to the U.S. Army Air
Forces' supreme command.
The hardware that awaited them was detailed on several pages of