American Raiders: The Race to Capture the Luftwaffeâ??s Secrets

23. The Conquering Hero

[ 310 ] THE CONQUERING HERO Just a day after Bob Strobell bailed out of his P-47 fighter over Mannheim, Colonel Harold Watson and Flugkapitän Karl Baur ferried the last two Arado 234s from Melun-Villaroche to Cherbourg. The last Me-262 was delivered on July 6 by Bob Anspach. Although damaged on landing because of a nose-gear malfunction, the jet was quickly restored with parts flown in from Lechfeld. After that, Karl Baur and the Messerschmitt mechanics who had accompanied Watson from Lechfeld to Melun and then to Cherbourg were released and returned to Augsburg in Watson’s C-47.Versuchspilot Willie Hoffmann was recuperating from his injuries in an American military hospital in Paris. Hauptmann Heinz Braun, after making his last aircraft delivery to Cherbourg, was sent by Watson to Paris to work on “his” Ju 290 transport—the same Ju 290 Braun once piloted as a member of KG 200. Watson had promised Braun he would take him and his three mechanics along to the United States. On July 10 the Russians moved into that portion of their occupation zone once occupied by their American ally—Merseburg would remain under Russian control for many years to come. The boundaries for postwar Germany were set. 23 The Conquering Hero [ 311 ] Lieutenant Colonel Malcolm Seashore’s crew at Cherbourg was busily cocooning Luftwaffe aircraft and transferring them to the deck of HMS Reaper. This is how Bob Strobell described the operation: “They rolled the cocooned airplanes from the nearby airstrip out onto a jetty. A barge-mounted derrick then lifted them onto another barge which took them out to the aircraft carrier anchored in deeper water. The German planes then were lifted by crane up to the deck of the Reaper.” In addition, several Liberty ships anchored in the harbor were loaded with boxes of disassembled Me-163 aircraft, machine tools, missiles, jet engines, and all the varied paraphernalia Wright Field engineers had put on their want list. Most of that “stuff,” as Bob Strobell referred to it, would end up in Building 89 at Wright Field, inventoried and sitting for years gathering dust. On July 7, General McDonald signed off on a USSTAF Exploitation Divison memo giving approval for the Whizzer pilots and ten enlisted crew chiefs “to accompany the aircraft carrier to the Zone of Interior to be utilized as pilots and maintenance personnel for the jet aircraft being delivered.”The memo was in line with Watson’s earlier proposal of June 11, when he suggested that the “trained crew-chiefs and pilots be shipped and transferred to Wright Field or other research centers in the United States as a unit in order to accomplish performance and flight testing and comparative analysis with similar American equipment.” The memo also authorized Colonel Seashore to return home on the Reaper. The officer and six enlisted men who worked for Seashore on the Seahorse project were released for reassignment. “It is not believed,” stated the memo written in the usual stilted military English, “that the 6 EM and officer presently working for Col Seashore are essential to the operation upon arrival in the Z of I. . . . It is believed that adequate arrangements can be made at whatever port the ship docks at to furnish necessary unpacking and re-assembling personnel without shipping additional people from this theater.” The memo concluded, “Col Watson, two officers and six enlisted men are The Conquering Hero [ 312 ] planning to fly a Ju 290 bomber to the Zone of Interior on or about 20 July to meet this shipment at the other end and make such arrangements as are necessary at Wright Field.”1 The Ju 290 was not a bomber, but people continually referred to it as such. Only days before the Reaper was to“set sail,”its stateside destination was still in limbo. A 26 June Navy message suggested Naval Air Station Quonset Point as the unloading port, since “jet planes require 6000 foot runways,” and Quonset Point met that requirement.2 The final destination for HMS Reaper turned out to be Pier 6 in the Bayonne Military Ocean Terminal, just down from Ellis Island and the Statue of Liberty, and across from Newark airfield, but that decision was not reached until shortly before the flattop departed Cherbourg. On July 12 the loading of HMS Reaper was completed, but the carrier remained in port for another...