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Text of 1958 article:
"HOW WE LET THE MISSILE SECRETS GET AWAY"
[but don't blame the 3rd Armored - Web Editor]
By Peter Van Slingerland
LOOK Staff Writer
A SERIES of fuzzy directives is to blame for America's costly
blunder in letting the Soviet Union get Germany's missile secrets.
The Communists did not get all of the basic German research on
missile. But what they got was enough to contribute perhaps 15
to 20 per cent to the launching of their Sputniks.
With hindsight sharpened by a dozen years' developments, it is
now clear how we bungled. Here, carefully gathered from the best
sources, is the sequence of events that allowed the missile secrets
to come under Russian control.
Early on the morning of April 11, 1945, tanks of Combat Command
"B" of the 3rd Armored Division rumbled through the
heartland of Germany toward the town of Nordhausen. Their goal
was a meeting with the Red Army on the banks of the Elbe River.
Meanwhile, Col. John C. Welborn, heading the northern element
of the Combat Command, got a report that alerted him to "expect
something a little unusual in the Nordhausen area." What
he and Col. William B. Lovelady, commander of the southern element,
found was indeed unusual. At a spot four miles north of Nordhausen,
Lovelady says, they came across the entrance to a tunnel in the
side of a hill. Nearby were "a lot of V-2's stacked up."
Lovelady questioned some civilians, who told him that the Germans
were working on "fantastic things in an underground factory."
The two officers notified Col. William A. Castille, their intelligence
chief. He passed the word through channels to Ordnance Technical
Intelligence teams working behind the front lines.
A few miles away, men of Combat Command "B" discovered
the remains of Nordhausen concentration camp. Colonel Castille
recalls that "bodies were stacked up like cordwood."
Some of the 700 survivors (the camp once held 22,000) reported
that the inmates had served as a slave-labor force building the
V-2's. Their factory was the tunnel. The subterranean arsenal
was not only the sole plant in the Reich assembling the weapons
that had terrorized London, but also the laboratory where new
and more fearful missiles were being developed. The prisoners
who had worked on the new weapons had all been "liquidated"
to insure their silence before the arrival of the American spearhead.
Sgt. Frank Woolner, of the public-information section of the
3rd Armored, took a closer look at the interior of the underground
factory. He describes what he saw as "amazing." He
adds, "It was rather crude, not well appointed like other
factories. There was a regular labyrinth of tunnels. Some were
assembly lines; others, machine shops, laboratories and drafting
rooms. That project was super-secret, and it looked as if it
had just been abandoned."
In fact, it had just been abandoned - by some of Hitler's top
scientists. The story of what they were doing in Nordhausen begins
in late January, 1945. They had come from Peenemünde, the
rocket-testing station on the Baltic coast, where the V-2 was
born. Throughout the war, theirs had been an uncertain lot. Beginning
as early as 1930, they had developed a series of guided missiles
under the auspices of the Army Weapons Department. Privately,
their aim was to build an operative spaceship. Officially, their
objective was the construction of the "ultimate weapon,"
a successor to both the cannon and the bomber. In 1943, before
any airplane had flown at supersonic speeds, they were hard at
work on project A-9/A-10, a combination supersonic rocket glider
with an ultrasonic rocket booster.
Of this project, Dr. (then General) Walter Dornberger, chief
of Peenemünde, wrote in his book V-2, "With
our big rocket motors and step rockets, we could build spaceships
that would circle the earth like moons at a height of 300 miles
and at a speed of 18,000 miles an hour. Space stations could
be put into permanent orbits around the earth." This description,
written five years ago, fits the first of the Russian Sputniks
almost exactly. While the first stage was still on the drawing
boards and the second stage was undergoing tests, work on the
A-9/A-10 was suspended. Hitler ordered the scientists to concentrate
on the missile that ultimately became the V-2.
In January, 1945, the Peenemünde scientists held a meeting
to discuss what their next move should be. The Soviet troops
were scarcely 75 miles away. The Germans' work and, in fact,
their lives were in jeopardy. They admitted that the war was
lost and that they had best surrender to the Americans. They
packed everything that was portable, including machinery, models,
plans and other documents, and poured highly inflammable rocket
fuel on whatever could not be moved. Then 4,000 of them, with
wives, children and belongings, left their charred laboratory
and started for Nordhausen. They arrived in early February and
set up headquarters in the nearby village of Bleicherode Ost.
As the war drew to a close, they waited impatiently for the American
Army.
Just five days before the 3rd Armored arrived, the SS ordered
the scientists to burn all their papers and withdraw to Hitler's
last-ditch "Alpine Redoubt." Rather than destroy years
of work, Dr. Dornberger and his assistants, including Dr. Werner
von Braun, hid their papers in secret caches throughout the Harz
Mountains. Then the SS took 400 key men to the Allgäu Alps
at gun point, leaving their families and associates behind.
The 3rd Armored stayed in Nordhausen about 48 hours, then
continued its eastward thrust. Right behind the combat troops
came Maj. James P. Hamill of Ordnance Technical Intelligence,
with a three-man team. Acting on instructions from Col. Holger
N. Toftoy (now a major general and commandant of the Redstone
Arsenal at Huntsville, Ala.), Major Hamill had a delicate mission:
"We knew about the Nordhausen plant long before we took
it. The written orders I received indicated that Nordhausen was
to be in the Russian zone and that all plans and equipment were
to be left for the Soviet. These orders originated at a very
high level. Unofficially and off the record, I was told to remove
as much material as I could, without making it obvious that we
had looted the place.
The question of what was to be done with German industry had
been the subject of high-level discussions over a period of years.
At the Quebec Conference in September, 1944, President Roosevelt
and Prime Minister Churchill debated the so-called "Morgenthau
Plan" for "pastoralizing" the Reich. In November,
1944, a decree to be issued after the. war was drafted by the
European Advisory Commission, made up of Russian, British and
American representatives (Ambassador John G. Winant represented
the United States).
The decree was signed in Berlin on June 5, 1945, by Gen. Dwight
D. Eisenhower. It stated: "All factories, plants, shops,
research institutions, laboratories, testing stations, patents,
plans, drawings and inventions . . . will be held intact and
in good condition at the disposal of Allied representatives for
such purposes as they may prescribe." The decree did not
state which "Allied representatives," yet it is known
that at the Yalta Conference in February, 1945, Stalin had demanded
80 per cent of German industry as indemnity for the destruction
Russia had suffered. There is no record that Roosevelt or Churchill
agreed to Stalin's demand. But at Potsdam in August, 1945, the
Russian leader spoke of it as a settled matter.
Those were days of crucial bargaining. Russia was bombarding
the Western Allies with a series of unfriendly notes accusing
us of attempting to negotiate a separate peace so that we could
grab a large section of the Soviet zone of Germany. The war was
not over, and we were most anxious for Russian intervention in
the Pacific. Therefore, we sought to avoid an international incident
at all costs.
On April 26, the Joint Chiefs of Staff issued order 1067. The
order directed General Eisenhower to "preserve from destruction
and take under your control records, plans, documents, papers,
files and scientific, industrial and other information and data
belonging to ... German organizations engaged in military research."
It was left to Eisenhower's discretion what steps would be appropriate.
Leading rocket scientists credit Major Hamill with a good job,
considering the limitations under which he worked. Even though
he lacked an accurate parts list, he managed to pack up 100 nearly
complete V-2's, together with a large collection of plans, manuals
and other documents. He did not, nor could he under his orders,
remove everything from the plant. In late May, he shipped 300
carloads of material from Nordhausen to Antwerp. From there,
he accompanied his booty back to the U. S.
In June, another team, this one from the intelligence center
at Garmisch, paid a last visit to Nordhausen. Their mission was
to evacuate the remaining scientists and their families before
the Russians arrived. They had barely 24 hours in which to do
so. In the process they discovered additional caches of plans,
including five trunks filled with Dr. Dornberger's notes, hidden
in abandoned salt mines. Later, a civilian member of the team
said: "We probably got a complete set of plans, but the
Russians probably got a nearly complete set too. You know, with
things like plans, you always make copies." Before leaving
Nordhausen, they debated blowing up the plant, but since they
lacked the authority, they felt forced to leave it to be captured
by the Russians a few hours later.
Dr. Dornberger says some of the machine tools left in Nordhausen
were unique in the world. And it is his estimate that the plans
for the A-9/A-10 may have helped 15 to 20 per cent in building
the Sputniks.
Other scientists agree with this estimate, but all warn that
we must not underestimate Russia's tremendous engineering achievement.
We, too, captured an equal share of the German scientific data,
they say; but it was the use to which the Russians put their
share, the organization of Russia's scientific resources on a
crash basis, that explains their successes.
END
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