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

30. The Way Things Changed

[ 422 ] THE WAY THINGS CHANGED “It was in the Battle of the Bulge. We were cowering in our foxholes when my sergeant called out,‘Here come the Krauts.’ And I was looking up for airplanes, but I couldn’t hear the sound of motors. And then I thought, What on God’s earth is that? One of the new German jets passed right above me, didn’t have a propeller in front. Didn’t fire on us. He was going to bomb somewhere behind us. The Germans are so far ahead of us, I thought, and still they are losing the war. Later that morning I saw some B-17s high above us. Then two of them seemed to drop out of the formation of about forty, a wing came off one, then they disappeared from sight. Weeks later I got a V-mail and my mother wrote that my cousin, a B-17 bombardier, had been killed over Germany. I wondered if it was my cousin’s plane I saw going down. I wondered if I would ever make it out alive.” Private Robert Drew did make it out alive and he had every right to wonder why the Germans seemed to be so far ahead in their technology.1 In March 1946, in an address to the Dayton, Ohio, Civitan Club, Colonel Harold Watson asked a question similar to the thought that crossed Private Drew’s mind when he looked up from his cold, soggy foxhole in the winter of 1944 to see an Me-262 jet fighter passing 30 The Way Things Changed [ 423 ] overhead at treetop level. “Germans flew the first jet propelled airplane before the German army marched against Poland,”Watson said to his listeners. “Revolutionary developments in aeronautical engineering were in progress in Germany for a long time before we fired our first shot against the Nazis. Yet, a long time after that shot—after we had managed with considerable difficulty to gain the upper hand over our enemies—there we were, out in no-man’s-land, scrambling around for the secrets of Nazi airpower while Nazi bullets whistled in our ears. Why were we out there then? Why hadn’t we learned those secrets before that late date? We wouldn’t listen to the few people who told us we were wrong. We wouldn’t listen to Charles Lindbergh. We wouldn’t listen to Eddie Rickenbacker. We wouldn’t listen to the foreign correspondents who told us in newspapers and magazines and books that Germany was cooking up something that was treacherous . . . . Of course we won the war, but we must remember that we had a great deal of pure luck on our side.”Watson concluded his presentation by asking his listeners, “Do we want to trust to luck again?”2 Not if Watson had a say in the matter, and he did. As chief of the T-2 Collection Division at Wright Field, Hal Watson was instrumental in the establishment of the Analysis Division within T-2 late in 1945. He wanted to ensure that the nearly one thousand tons of captured German documents, films, blueprints, and detailed drawings were properly examined and analyzed and that the findings were put to the best possible use, not only in the Wright Field laboratories, but also that they were made available to private industry—a partnership he felt strongly about and deemed essential for America’s security. Referring to the captured German data,Watson said,“If we can evaluate this information and disseminate it properly and promptly, we can cut years from the time that our own engineers would devote to research on problems which have already been scientifically investigated.”3 The second initiative Watson pushed was the creation of ATLOs, Air Technical Liaison Officers, who would be located at selected The Way Things Changed [ 424 ] embassies throughout the world to report on developments in air and missile technology. Watson’s idea fell on fertile ground and was readily supported by his peers and friends who sat in key positions at Wright Field and in Washington. Only two months after his presentation at the Dayton Civitan Club, in May 1946 Headquarters Army Air Forces informed Lieutenant General Nathan F. Twining, the commanding general of the newly established Air Materiel Command at Wright Field, that the “plan for attaching ATL Officers to selected embassies and legations has the...