Exploitation of Nazi Aerospace Technology by Britain

[Whenurhappy]

A friend of mine is writing a paper on the post-war exploitation of captured German technologies by the UK. Principally, he is looking at aircraft and powerplant designs and related weapons systems. He's looked up the usual sources (TNA, IWM) and spent a bit of time at AHB looking at Air Ministry Intelligence Summaries, but seems to be drawing a blank between the reporting of these technologies and them being adopted/developed/applied by the British aircraft industry.

It was quite clear that the US Government actively exploited aviation and missile technologies under programmes such as Op LUSTY and OP PAPERCLIP, but very little evidence of the same happening this side of the pond. Interestingly, the British Army captured a number of V2 (A4) missiles, complete with all the support vehicles and launch crews near Cuxhaven. In 1946, under OP BACKFIRE several of these were fired and appeared to operate sucessfully. But that was it. No British Ballistic Missile Programme - at least not for another 10-15 years, by which time it was too late for the UK to catch up. Perhaps the dire fiscal situation and lack of overseas funds after the war prevented greater exploitation and development?

Can any PPruners give him a steer on any good books? For example, was the crescent wing of the V-bomber inspired by German developments?

I've done a little bit of research into this - but teh internet is useless - all full of wierd (and anti-Semetic) conspiracy theories about NAZI UFOs etc.

[mcjlf1]

From memory, 'Wings on my sleeve', by Cpt Eric 'Winkle' Brown has quite a bit of stuff about the various craft he flew during his time in Germany post WWII:

Wings on My Sleeve: The World's Greatest Test Pilot tells his story: Amazon.co.uk: Captain Eric Brown: Books

It may perhaps be a bit too detailed for what you are looking for, i.e. describing the actual flying and his experiences rather than the overall strategy for assimilation of German technology, but it's still a good read from the perspective of somebody who was there at the time.

Regards
James

[Jollygreengiant64]

For all the good it's done us in the long run...

[green granite]

Germany's Secret Weapons in World War II by Paul Wood and Roger Ford (Mar 2000) covers a lot of their jet aircraft


This might be useful as well:
BritishSecretProjects-Fighters&Bombers1935-1950
©AnthonyLeonardButtler,2004

[Whenurhappy]

I've seen quite detailed reports on the handling of captured aircraft - including the British Air Forces of Occupation report on disarmament, but the problem is trying to make a link with subsequent British aircraft and weapons designs. Bell Air Craft Corporation certainly exploited the variable geometry concept that Messerschmitt pioneered with the P1101 aircraft - but my colleague has not been able to make similar British comparisons.

[ColdCollation]

www.luft46.com (http://www.luft46.com)

[Whenurhappy]

I'm afraid Luft46 is a bit of a 'what if?' site with very little fact to back up some of the rather fanciful designs. However, designs like the 1107 do look remarkably like some British post-war designs...but most were never more than sketches to keep General Kammler and Himmler - if not Hitler - in a fully delusional state.

[pr00ne]

Jollygreengiant64,


Yeah, ending up with the second largest aerospace industry on the face of the planet is a REAL kick in the teeth...


Jeez.

[Yellow Sun]

T-Force: The Forgotten Heroes of 1945: The race for Nazi War Secrets, 1945 by Sean Longden ISBN: 1849012970 / 1-84901-297-0

Gives quite a good account of the British collection process. However I am at a loss to recall anything that methodically records subsequent exploitation of captured material. But you know that already.

Longden's book may provide a few pointers as it does name some of the German scientists brought to Britain for in depth interrogation and a further few who "chose" to remain here for a period afterwards. Linking those names to subsequent papers might provide clues for lines of enquiry.

I should be interested to read or hear the results of your friend's endeavours.

YS

[Whenurhappy]

Thanks - on order.
Hopefully there will be something in the Air Power Review in a few months, I understand.

[Onceapilot]

From interested reading over the years, it seems to me that the main conduit for technology transfer on the aviation side was through both the RAE and via technical papers and patents. Do not forget that private companies were in direct competition, even in wartime, I believe Bristol had to be coerced to help Napier sort out the sleeve problems with the Sabre. I am sure that wartime analysis of Axis technology was performed by some R&D departments as and when they saw the need or opportunity. Much information was also published in post-war BIOS and CIOS reports.
Overall, for your purposes, I think that some research about the RAE and its involvement in promoting different aviation technologies with the Government Ministry might be worth a thought? Cheers

OAP

[Chairborne 09.00hrs]

Apologies for incipient thread drift.....

Where is it possible to get back issues of "Air Power Review" from?

[Innominate]

The RAE was certainly a key player. A team was sent to Germany to dismantle and bring back wind tunnels (Operation SURGEON, I think) and some German scientists were employed in the research establishments - certainly Dietrich Kuecheman worked in Aero Dept at Farnborough. His name is linked to the "carrots" designed to reduce drag on the Victor, and he apparently had a lot of involvement in deciding the planform of Concorde's wing.

[Brewster Buffalo]

Try here Chairborne

https://cms.raf.mod.uk/rafpublished/downloads/airpowerreview200009.cfm


BB

[glad rag]

70 years ago wasn't it?

[Bing]

I thought I read somewhere that while the US mostly got the aviation technology the UK got the Hydrogen Peroxide tech, which could have lead to air independent propulsion for submarines but look at the Kursk for the issues with that. And possibly the only satellite launch vehicle powered by hairdressing products...

[Lima Juliet]

Someone's got to do it...

http://uforeview.tripod.com/gerufo1.jpg

:}

[CoffmanStarter]

LJ ... Von Luger's butter ? :E

[Lima Juliet]

Coff

Quite probably :D

[dragartist]

Winkle (Capt Eric) Brown RN must be the expert. Track him down though John Farley on here. you will find him most useful. he has written many books on the topic. including some referenced in other posts in this thread. His latest on M52 (mixed reviews but I read it having heard him speak about it at LSAB- the RAeS particularly slated it) That a/c was not dependant upon German aerodynamics or powerplant. If you get chance to visit Washington you must take in the Smithsonian at the Airport. They refer to the collection as the Hangar. lots of 50s stuff clearly from the German stable but mainly rocketry and guided weapons.
Interested to see you findings posted on here.

[tornadoken]

GW may offer more scope for fresh work than do aircraft, which have been widely discussed. EE “closely modelled” Thunderbird I gyro on V2’s A.R.Adams, Good Company, BAC, 76, P142. Start with S.R.Twigge, Early Devt of GW in UK,1940-60, Harwood, 1993, and go to RAF Museum/Cosford which has much to show.

[Whenurhappy]

LJ

Oh, dear - you shouldn't have gone there - Kammler's UFO - apparently based on spinning Mercury at high speed causing it to create 'levitational fields'

The idea was dreamt up in the 1990s by a Czech writer (successful publisher in spite of being widely discredited), and conflated with some experimental flying wing designs.

Thanks for the various links, which I shall pass on. Unfortunately RAE archives at TNA are a bit 'gappy' due to numerous reorganisations, the formation of DERA and then Qinetic, many records were lost or destroyed.

Guided Weapons seems to be a bit more fruitful...

[Roger D'Erassoff]

As someone mentioned, Op SURGEON was the UK codename for the UK's exploitation of German scientists in this area. If you look it up on the world's favourite internet encyclopaedia there is a short article about it. One of the sources in the further reading is a paper written by Prof Matt Uttley:

Matthew Uttley "Operation 'Surgeon' and Britain's post-war exploitation of Nazi German aeronautics", Intelligence and National Security, Volume 17, Number 2, June 2002, pp. 1-26(26) Publisher: Routledge, part of the Taylor & Francis Group

Matt was the Dean of King's College at JSCSC Shrivenham, so if you have access to him or Shriv you can get hold of the article without paying for it. I'm sure his bibliography would provide a huge amount of other sources, unlike mine when I was at College which was just an exercise in listing vaguely related books that served to eat up the necessary word count!

Roger D

[Archimedes]

Or whenurhappy needs to, he could PM me with an email address and I can send him a pdf copy of Matt's article...

[ColdCollation]

Sorry - I posted about Luft46 when I was on the fly and should have taken the time to add that perhaps the site's originators could maybe help.

Eric 'Winkle' Brown wrote 'Wings of the Luftwaffe', which details his post-War experiences of flying many types. Worth a look.

[Whenurhappy]

Thanks for the useful posts - I have managed to get a fund of information, although the paper produced by Matt Uttley is particularly useful:

Matthew Uttley (2002): Operation ‘Surgeon’ and Britain's post-war
exploitation of Nazi German aeronautics, Intelligence and National Security, 17:2, 1-26

Now separately, I discovered a Messerschmitt Me 262 Performance report on Feb 1945 (provided from a private archive) - on how to mod/upgrade the exisiting platform. I've never seen reference to this proposed mod '5 Zustand' - and I have to say, what a smart aircraft. It proposes using the existing fuselage ('Rumpf') but upgrading the engine installation to wing-root mounted HeS 011a, uses a dramatic 45 deg swept wing, and suggests a V tail as an alternative. Calculations and wind-tunnel information suggests 120 km/hr improvement over all altitudes, peaking out at M.92 at 6,000 m. I've tried posting it here - for some reason it won't upload the format. Has anyone ever heard of this variant before?

[hval]

I presume you found this (http://www.lwag.org/reference/rl262dl001.PDF) document then?

Or this one on performance enhancements (http://herbert-thiess.de/Laber/LeistungssteigerungMe262/Index.html)?

[chopper2004]

Read Jane's Nick Cook's The Hunt for Zero one and mentioned is one Hans Kammler, one of the most camera shy Nazi who started off as a mere (aeronautical?) engineer grad working menial tasks in their Ministry of Works or Labor and rose up the ladder.

The Skoda motor works got involved in whatever secret aerospace projects Kammler was looking at. Also the allied 'T' Forces discovered list as long as your arm with futuristic projects (at the time) either in the planning or experimentation stage found such as lasers to shoot down aircraft, devices to stop enemy vehicles engines from a distance, amongst others.

Nick Cook had gone to Wenceleas Mine in Poland and whatever its called , and discovered what could have been remains of a strange structure that could imply either what was a nuclear reactor or housing / test platform for a saucer shape craft.

Ah its friday night must stop reading too much and head down the pub :)

[AtomKraft]

Chopper. It's 'The Hunt for Zero point'.

If you want to waste 90 minutes in a similar vein, watch 'Billion dollar secret ' (also by Nick Cook) on Youtube.

It's 100% drivel and quite tainted my previos enjoyment of his book.

The book makes him sound like a knowledgable resercher.
The film like a blithering idiot.

[iRaven]

I stopped reading "the hunt for zero point" when started going on about a mysterious "henge" that no one had ever seen the like of before...

http://www.seawolfsden.net/images/sg/thehenge1.jpg

[iRaven]

Apart from those that had targets in Eastern Europe to memorise and they looked very familiar!

http://www.gorysowie.pl/modules/coppermine/albums/riese/foto_black/normal_mucholapka2.jpg

It's the concrete base structure of a bl00dy cooling tower at a power station. Nazi/alien technology structure - my arse!

[AtomKraft]

iRaven

Well, you did better than me. I lapped up 'The Hunt for Zero point' with nary a murmer, although there are some quite nutty bits in it. (The stuff about anti-gravity engines powering the B-2 raised an eyebrow, for example).

I only tumbled what a nut he was when I saw 'Billion Dollar Secret' which manages to spend 90 minutes padding out large periods of nutty speculation. To be fair theres a couple of interesting nuggets in it- but precisely NOTHING new.

I suppose I must have swallowed some of it as I'm still intrigued by the idea of gravity being lowered above spinning superconductors or by the chapter on Viktor Schauberger.
The stuff on the 'Hutcheson effect' was intersting too, but I now wonder if it's all being 'puffed up' by Mr. Cooks overactive imagination.
It would be nice to know the veracity of some of the content...

[iRaven]

Nope its all bunkum as far I'm concerned. The "henge" above was supposed to contain this mythical "Bell" Nazi weapon - but it most definately is the base of a cooling tower!

The book is full of conspiracy theory just like other theories:

- Faked Apollo moon landings
- Nazi bases in Antartica
- Missing U-boats taking Hitler away
- Manchurian candidates and the Catcher in the Rye

The only thing that I do believe in is that of "Occam's Razor" - ie. normally, the simplest explanations are what they really are! Just like my cooling tower base!

iRaven :ok:

[Archimedes]

Have you not considered, iRaven, that the henge might simply have been pressed into service as the base for a cooling tower, either to disguise it or because the East Germans thought 'Ach, ve do not know vat ziss iss, but - if Archimedes will stop the comedy attempt at writing out our accents- we will make use of this remarkably convenient structure which is just the right size and in just the right place'?

And might I respectfully suggest that if you haven't considered that possibility, you haven't drunk enough?

[Whenurhappy]

Oh dear, as I warned before - don't open the Kammler Box - it will let out all the Holocaust deniers, Nazi supremacists, conspiracy theorist....the works!

Kammler was a particularly unsavoury character. Yes, he was an Engineer – indeed had a PhD – but typified the brutally efficient bureaucrat that permitted Endloessung - the ‘Final Disposition (Solution)’ to be carried out. He oversaw the V2 barrage and in Dec 45 he was put in charge, inter alia, of fighter production, which was basically ‘make more Me 262s’. Goering, during his interrogation, made no reference to Kammler, but did elude the fanciful production figures of c 3000 Me 262s per month!

According to Werner von Braun, when interrogated by US CIC in Garmisch in May 1945 (now the site of the George Marshall Centre for Security Studies), Kammler indicated that he was going to disguise himself as a Benedictine month (from nearby Ettallerkloster) and make his escape and meet up with SS elements near Prague. There are reports that he was killed near Prague or took his own life; suffice to say, in spite of his role in designing Auschwitz, heading the strategic weapons programme etc, he was never actively sought after WWII by any party, because he was dead. Ends.

The Henge and Bell stories emerged out of febrile imagination of a demented Czech writer in the 1990s, along with the bonkers stories about NAZIs in Antarctica. So much complete and utter tripe has been written (and continues to be circulated about the latter subject) that the Scott Polar Research Institute published a paper in 2006 convincingly debunking this nonsense. But they would say that, wouldn’t they?

Summerhayes & Beeching (2006):’Hitler’s Antarctic base: the myth and the reality’ in Polar Record 43 (224): 1-21 (2007).I

Back to the image of a rather nice-looking Me 262 (and thanks to Hval for finding a link - scroll down):

Herbert Thiess : Unterirdische Fluzeugfabrik Oberammergau : Me 262 Leistungssteigerung (http://www.herbert-thiess.de/Laber/LeistungssteigerungMe262/LeistungssteigerungMe262-09.html)

[skylon]

Of course German aerospace engineering skills had been exploited by Britain as much as by Americans after the war..



http://www.artefactsconsortium.org/Publications/PDFfiles/Vol3Trans/3.05.Transport-Nahun,GermanAeroSciencePicsGrBlank5,6WEBF.pdf


Royal Aeronautical Society | Society News | OBITUARY - DR JOHANNA WEBER (http://aerosociety.com/News/Society-News/2742/OBITUARY-DR-JOHANNA-WEBER)

Johanna Weber was a mathematician who, over a period of 36 years, in collaboration with her colleague and contemporary, Dietrich Küchemann, laid the foundations for the world-leading position that the UK now enjoys in the aerodynamic design of civil aircraft wings. In turn, this wing design capability has contributed to the rise of Airbus to stand beside Boeing as one of the world’s two dominant manufacturers of civil aircraft, with the consequent benefit to the European industry and economy. Many others have played their part in this success but, without the combination of Küchemann’s vision and Weber’s mathematical prowess, the advances in UK design capability between the 1940s and 1970s would probably not have occurred
says the Royal Aeronautical Society..