Strategic Internationalism and the Transfer of Technical Knowledge: The United States, Germany, and Aerodynamics after World War I

"After World War I there was no real attempt by the victors to exploit Germany for technical and scientific knowledge." So read the introductory sentence of a proposed press release by the United States Joint Intelligence Objectives Agency in 1946.¹ It was supposed to show how different the situation was after World War II, when Allied intelligence experts made efforts "for the complete exploitation of Germany for technical information." In an operation known as Project Paperclip, the victors transferred tons of technical documents and hardware, together with hundreds of engineers and scientists, to the United States for the benefit of research laboratories run by the army, navy, air force, other government agencies, and industry. While we know today about Project Paperclip and other World War II-era efforts to acquire scientific and technical information from Germany, our knowledge of comparable activities during and after World War I is rather sketchy.

The assertion that the victors made no "real" attempt after World War I to gain advantage from the scientific and technological knowledge of the defeated enemies suggests that they did direct at least some efforts toward that goal. Aeronautics, in particular, was a technology in which the United States hoped to benefit in the aftermath of the war. Despite the spectacular flight of the Wright brothers at Kitty Hawk in 1903, American aviation had a slow start. Long before World War I the United States had begun to fall behind, and with the outbreak of war in Europe military aviation in the belligerent nations rapidly expanded. When the United States entered the war in 1917, American aircraft producers had a virtually nonexistent industrial capacity with which to meet Allied requests for thousands of airplanes. American backwardness was apparent not only with regard to industrial production. News of European advances in aerodynamic research, at Ludwig Prandtl's Göttingen laboratory for example, intensified awareness of American technical inferiority.

It has been argued that the crucial events that allowed the United States to catch up with Europe were Harry Guggenheim's generous funding of new aerodynamic research centers, such as the California Institute of Technology's Guggenheim Aeronautical Laboratory, and the recruitment of Prandtl's legendary pupil Theodore von Kármán to be director of that laboratory in the late 1920s.² Although I do not play down Guggenheim's and von Kármán's importance, my focus in this article is on American efforts to catch up with Europe a decade earlier.

The transfer of knowledge of aerodynamics from Europe to the United States started during World War I, along with other scientific-intelligence-gathering efforts, under the auspices of the National Research Council (NRC). After the war, the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics (NACA) organized aeronautical intelligence as a regular peacetime activity, establishing offices for the purpose in Washington and in Paris. The Paris office, which has attracted little interest among historians outside those concerned with the history of NACA, served as an overseas base from which to benefit from European aeronautical progress.³ NACA's first initiative in Germany was the establishment of relations with Prandtl's institute—at a time when the Entente powers officially boycotted German science. Initiated by the new International Research Council (IRC), this boycott transformed the Krieg der Geister ("war of the minds") into a cold war between scientists of the Entente and the Central Powers that lasted for several years after the armistice. Despite his official exclusion from international science, NACA offered Prandtl a contract for a comprehensive report on Germany's aerodynamic progress during the war, which he gladly accepted.⁴

The following analysis focuses on the internationalization of aerodynamics in the wake of World War I, from the arrival of American scientific attachés in Europe to the intelligence activity of NACA's Paris office...