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

Afterword: What Became of All These Good Men?

[ 443 ] AFTERWORD What Became of All These Good Men? Colonel Harold E.Watson (later Major General Watson) continued his pursuit of building a lasting technical intelligence organization for the United States Air Force. Wright Field, renamed Wright-Patterson Air Force Base in 1947, remained Watson’s focus for the remainder of his career. Watson headed the Collection Division of Air Technical Service Command’s Technical Intelligence Directorate, T-2, in 1945. He then attended the Industrial College of the Armed Forces at Fort McNair, Washington, D.C., served a tour of duty in the Pentagon, and returned in 1949 for three more years as the T-2 director, this time assuming the position previously held by his friend and former boss, General Donald L. Putt. In May 1951, T-2 became the Air Technical Intelligence Center, ATIC. While T-2 had focused on the exploitation of German technology,ATIC shifted its sights toward the Soviet Union. The most notable project under Watson as ATIC’s commander was the evaluation of the Soviet MiG-15 jet fighter. ATIC engineers made estimates of the fighter’s performance from pictures and information gained from various sources, but what they really wanted was a MiG—pilot and all. At first the ATIC engineers had to console themselves with some MiG engine parts recovered by an intrepid ATI team in Korea. The question was, what kind of an engine was the MiG-15 using? It was suspected that the British had sold a copy of their Nene engine to the Soviets before relations soured and that a Soviet version of the Nene powered the MiG. Recalled Fred McIntosh, “We had a team in Korea, two men. They went behind the lines to bring out some parts of a crashed MiG. The aircraft had dug itself into soft ground but the engine was accessible. The problem was how to get it out. One of the two had a couple of hand grenades, and he threw them up the tailpipe of the wrecked MiG, breaking loose some parts. They brought out a rotor, part of a turbine wheel, the shroud, and some other pieces. I went out to Travis AFB in California in April 1951 in a C-54 and picked up the pieces for analysis. That confirmed the Nene engine theory.” The Rolls-Royce Nene engine adapted by the Soviets for use in the MiG-15 used centrifugal rather than axial flow and first flew in 1947. Fred McIntosh had been released from active duty in 1946, and, like many of his fellow World War II flyers, he was recalled to active duty in March 1951, after North Korea invaded its southern sibling. Watson got hold of McIntosh and put him to work in T-2 setting up a school for technical analysts, turning a group of Air Force reservists, engineers, photographers, and Russian linguists into old-fashioned ATI specialists. In July 1951 a joint British-American operation recovered the better part of a MiG from the mud of the Ch’ongch’on River estuary, using a cherry picker mounted on a barge. The MiG parts included the forward section of the fuselage, both wings, landing gear, the tail assembly, its 23mm gun, and lots of bits and pieces. “I was running our technical analyst school,” McIntosh recalled, “when Colonel Watson got a phone call from Travis that the Navy had recovered a MiG-15. I and another officer grabbed a C-54 and flew from Wright-Patterson to Travis Air Force Base. The MiG was at Travis all right, in bamboo baskets, mostly in bits and pieces. I forget how many baskets there were, but we damn near filled the entire airplane .When we got back to Wright-Patterson we gave all that stuff to the engineers at ATIC to make sense of it. Watson gave the engineers ten days, and it quickly became obvious that they had trouble putting that airplane back together. About this time we were through with our school. We put on a graduation party on the Great Miami River that runs through Dayton. One of our boys was from Louisiana and had a barrel of shrimp and all that stuff brought up from the bayous. We were having a great time and the beer was flowing freely when Watson showed up.‘I got some good news for you, Major,’ he said.‘You and your schoolkids have to help us put that airplane back together. I need to know...