Technol Rep Tohoku Univ: GENERATION OF ANTI-GRAVITY ...

Chapter 24
The flight was several hours out of Heathrow, when I reached into my
hand luggage and extracted the book that Marckus had made me promise
I'd read before I got to the States. He'd sent it to me ten days earlier, but
in the hurly-burly of stories that needed to be written before I
disappeared off to America, and in the course of preparations for the
weeklong trip itself, I simply hadn't had the time to pick it up.
Not only that, but the book, which was called Blowback—The First
Full Account of America 's Recruitment of Nazis, and Its Disastrous Effect on
Our Domestic and Foreign Policy, looked rather academic and heavygoing.
Even now, as I gazed at the cover, I found myself reluctant to make
a start on it, the more so as Marckus never told me what it was about
the book that made it essential reading. But I'd read the newspaper,
established that there were no movies on the entertainment system worth
watching and had even plundered the in-flight magazine for items of
interest. With nowhere left to go, I turned to Blowback and started
reading.
It began promisingly enough, although the territory itself was more
than familiar. By Chapter 3, the author, Christopher Simpson, an
American, had got his teeth into his country's recruitment program of
German scientists after the war—an operation that had started under the
code name "Overcast." As early as July 1945, barely two months after the
end of the war in Europe, the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff gave its authorization
for Overcast to commence. Its job was to "exploit. . . chosen rare
minds whose continuing intellectual productivity" America wanted to
use in the continuing war against the Japanese and in the gathering Cold
War against the Soviet Union. Under the top secret project, the JCS
directed that 350 specialists, mainly from Germany and Austria, should
be brought immediately to the United States. Among the Germans who
came to the U.S. at this time were rocket specialists like von Braun and
his boss, Army General Walter Dornberger.
I did as I always did with books that held details of Germany's wartime
technology effort: I flicked to the index and looked for references to
242