https://orcid.org/0000-0001-9991-431X
Probably many members of the public, even if not very interested in the history of technology, are aware that many of Nazi Germany’s aerospace experts were recruited to the USA’s rocket programme at the end of the war, and certainly Wernher von Braun’s name is extremely well-known for his work on the V-2 and Apollo rockets. However, what is far less well-known, even amongst those interested in the histories of World War 2 and technology, is that the UK also recruited many German experts and raided many factories and research establishments for potentially useful equipment. This extremely detailed book opened up an array of, to me, previously unimagined programmes that the victorious Allies employed to gain technological benefits from their defeated enemy.
From my own interests in both aeronautical history and that of women in engineering, I had gleaned that a couple of women had been sent on these forays into Germany but had never been able to find anything solid about the variously-named Operations (e.g. Surgeon, Backfire). World War 2 led to a plethora of acronyms and short-lived organisations, and this period either side of the war’s end generated ever more as the Allies set up groups which combined and divided, some demonstrating how fragile and contingent those alliances actually were. Hall’s book focuses on exploitation organisations set up by the British but alludes to the better-known US and Soviet ones, as well as the few run by the French. The planning for these operations started while the war was still in progress so that, as soon as the Allies started to make progress across Europe, ‘T-Force’ teams of civilian experts and military support could move in immediately behind the armies in search of the people and establishments on their target lists. Ironically, the T-Force was closely based on wartime intelligence about the Germans’ own Abwehrkommandos which were embedded in the Blitzkrieg attacks.
Starting with the background of the interaction of modern science with warfare, not of course a new thing — as many of Leonardo da Vinci’s technical designs often related to his patrons’ need to do well in the latest war — Hall frames the desire by the British to harvest as much as possible, in the light of what they believed to be Germany’s technical advantage. Despite unprecedented government support for pre-war R&D, there was a persistent myth that Germany was far ahead in most fields. As the Allied efforts moved across Europe there were some conflicts between the overt aims of the programme as ‘legitimate spoils of war’ and the need to ensure that Germany was on the one hand deprived of the possibility of military resurgence and on the other not so crippled as to need years of economic support. Civilian experts from industry and research establishments were part of the programme throughout, but the 1945 experience was pretty rough, as at first the civilians had no status and often had difficulties getting transport, accommodation and even food. However, by1947 one of the tiny number of women involved, safety lamp manufacturer Monica Maurice, had the honorary rank of a Lieutenant Colonel with all the mess privileges to go with it. Her diaries of her experiences of her trip (one of the last before the scheme ended), now held in the Imperial War Museum, are much quoted in the book.
German universities were long considered among the elite places of learning for engineers, even after the constraints of the Versailles Treaty and many British engineers corresponded with their academics, visited or studied there, up until not long before the war. So, for many of the visitors, including Maurice in as late as 1947, it was a real shock to see the total devastation wrought on the big German cities by the Allies’ bombing raids. If Maurice was part of a group from an arguably niche industrial field, it was not the only one - as numerous commercial groups clamoured for the chance to see what their continental competitors had been doing. The book details the UK’s involvement in the international structures for post-war exploitation as well as the rapidly changing landscape of UK-only organisations and committees. The spoils of war included both material spoils, such as the very advanced wind tunnels at Göttingen, as well as the brain drain of expertise. If the former was easy enough to box up and transport, the human element was unsurprisingly trickier. The Germans on the very lengthy target lists had to be found, interrogated and their actual value assessed. With the increasing competition with the USA and the need to prevent experts being taken by the Soviets, the UK was in a very difficult position as it had no way to offer the inducements that the Americans could provide. The process by which German experts were recruited to the UK, initially on a temporary and poorly-paid basis, did eventually lead to many of them remaining permanently, with the larger numbers in government research but numerous individuals also scattered across civilian industries of many sorts, so their direct intellectual contribution to the U K lasted well into the 1970s.
Hall considers the ethics and practicalities of not only the desire for reparations via exploitation but also the Allies’ aim to control the future directions of German science, by attempting to categorise industries according to their military potential. It seems incredible now, given Germany’s post-war successes in these fields, but iron and steel, rubber and synthetic fuel industries were all initially banned. The book concludes with an attempt to assess the impact and legacies, a nearly impossible task given the intangible aspects of most of what was exploited.
There are, sadly, no pictures to bring some of the participants to life for us and the soft back cover was perhaps not of the most robust quality - shedding its plastic film by the time I had finished my first read-through. However, the paperback is considerably more affordable than its hardback predecessor, both deriving from Hall’s doctoral work and hence very welcome. The book is definitely in the formal, academic category with copious end notes per chapter and source lists for anyone to pursue in the archives. It is a - perhaps surprisingly - ripping yarn and I could easily imagine it making an excellent TV series, along the lines of the film The Monument Men, whose work in retrieving works of art etc was just one thread of these many post-war efforts. Although it is evident that the author has scoured a vast amount of archival material, I really hope there is still more to know, as this has whetted my appetite to find out more about the people and the Operations.
Independent Engineering Historian
Newcomen Society
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