Oral History—The Alsos Mission

I reported to the old ship model basin at the Washington Navy Yard in 1939. The new model basin at nearby Carder- °ek, Maryland, was still under construction. I was a half-breed—I had been trained as both an engineer and as a naval constructor. I had wrangled with the question of whether to follow the line officer path or concentrate on research, and the technical side won. Over the next several years we studied such things as the vibration of battleships, how explosion bubbles damage a ship, and optimum propeller design.

In the spring of 1944 two of us from the model basin and two other naval officers were called upon to be the Navy members of a scientific team that was being called the Alsos Mission—“alsos” means “grove” in Greek. We were supposed to go to Europe to find out how far the Germans had gotten with their atomic bomb project, because the United States was scared to death that they might have been way ahead because of their two-year head start.

The leader of our group was Dr. Sam Goudsmit, a Dutchman who had been involved in nuclear physical research for years. The administrative head was Army Colonel Boris Pash, a hard-charger who Was “Mr. Yes-I-Can-Do-It.” Most of the other members were scientific types—the head of the Bureau of Standards, the chairman of the chemical engineering department at M.I.T. All of us had top ultra clearances, but were on the fringes of this thing; nobody was actually connected with the building of the real bomb. We were the investigators, and the Manhattan District people were going to be the digesters.

The day Paris was liberated, in late August 1944, the four of us from the Navy landed at Orly Airport in Paris. 1 was familiar with the city, so I drove us straight to the Ambassador Hotel, which had just become the Allied headquarters of the ComZone—the communication zone. Everything was laid out for us. They were going to give us such-and- such type of equipment. We were not to displace any French. They assigned us to a hotel—the Etoile—that had been occupied by the Germans. As it turned out, the Etoile was a German cathouse, so we went back to the Ambassador for another lodging assignment.

At our new hotel, the Royal Monseau, the maitre ’d, Antoine, practically hugged us, he was so glad to see us. He had no food to offer, but turned our C rations and K rations into a six-course dinner. He made prune whip—a fluffy pudding dessert—out of the old prune bars that we used to have to eat.

Within the next few days the rest of the scientists arrived. About one-quarter of the total number of those involved with Alsos were scientists; at Paris we filled out with the necessary auxiliary personnel. Sam Goudsmit and several others called on Joliot-Curie, the son-in-law of Madame Marie Curie, whose laboratory had been taken over by the Germans working on chemical matters. A couple of us Navy types went down to Bordeaux where a German destroyer, the Z-39, had been captured in dock. We gave a quick look and then turned it over to the British for a more thorough evaluation.

Things were slow until the fall of 1944. The Allies had gotten as far as Strasbourg, where they ran across a large group of scientists that had been assembled by the Germans. These men kept meticulous records of everything they’d done. Our language beagles got in there and found that the Germans had been absolutely unable to build a nuclear bomb. All they had was a graphite pile that was supposed to produce plutonium, and it hadn’t been working very well. They also had a heavy water project up in Norway, but it had been pretty well destroyed by the attack on Narvik.

Not long after that the Alsos group was split up. The Alsos scientists continued to detail the work the Germans had done on nuclear research. The Navy members formed what was known as the Naval Technical Mission Europe, with our own separate operation. We had very good logistical support from the Army, and as most of our work was done in the British sector, got very good support from the British, as well.

We planned to evaluate Dr. Hellmuth Walter’s research at Gdynia on highspeed submarines with hydrogen peroxide, which was also used for V-l launching as well as the proportioning pumps for the V-2 rocket fuels. Dr. Wemher von Braun was working at Peenemiinde. They were very good friends and cooperated with each other completely.

The Americans had previously collaborated with the British and Soviets in every respect, relative to a technical exchange. Drs. von Braun and Walter, and their scientific cohorts, had agreed among themselves that they were not going to be captured by the Soviets. In the spring of 1945 when the Ruhr fell and the Americans crossed the Rhine, and the Soviets were advancing from the other direction, Hellmuth Walter abandoned Gdynia and retreated to Kiel. The Soviets pulled a fast one to keep us out of Gdynia, so we canceled any further technical exchanges with them.

An advanced group of the Naval Technical Mission left for Bremen. I took off with just a photographer and came up along the Ruhr. I had never seen such devastation. There was not a single window intact. Most of the water lines had been broken. The population lined up in the street to get water from a single spigot. The Germans had been blowing up bridges all the way to try and prevent the Allies’ advance, so the first question we’d ask whenever we came to a fork in the road was, “1st der brticke kaput?” We met quite a few dead ends.

The first of our group reached Bremen at night, and found that British combat troops had gone through that day. I arrived the next day. Those first few nights were pandemonium, because as the troops passed through, they released all the slaves—Frenchmen and Lowlanders— that the Germans had working in the shipyards and in area camps. By the second night all these former slaves were drunker than skunks, having found the warehouse where the Germans stored liquor they had stolen from France. 1 was asleep that second night when I got a call from the senior watch officer. It seems that my photographer had joined in the drinking and was now wandering around town waving his pistol. It became my responsibility to disarm him. Fortunately he gave up his gun to me peaceably.

At Bremen—not a major target of ours—we visited the shipyards, which were mostly used for commercial shipping. There were some floating cranes and other things that we were interested in, so we catalogued them and got all that information.

When we heard that Hamburg was about to fall, we started for that city. There the devastation was even worse. The Ruhr had been pinpoint bombed by our Air Force. The British had saturation bombed Hamburg, and 85,000 people died in the fire storm that consumed almost all of the center of the city. It was the most upsetting thing you can imagine, to see all this devastation and tremendous carnage around you, because they had not had time to clean up after the troops went through. The German civilians were doing the best they could to take care of the survivors, setting up emergency hospitals. This was in April, and it was still pretty damn chilly in northern Germany.

We were a 75-man task force which included four British officers, four American officers of which I was in charge, and many Royal Marines. There was a young major in charge of the 30th Assault Unit of the Royal Marines who was full of beans, and whom I enjoyed tremendously. We had gotten word that Kiel was pretty well opened. However, the surrender had not taken place, and we did not know it at the time, but we were supposed to stay 100 miles back from the Elbe in accordance with the agreement that the Russians and the Americans were not going to touch and fight each other. Since we didn’t know this, we decided to go on up to Kiel, all 75 of us. We were self-sufficient—we carried our own gasoline, rations, and guns for protection. When we got to Kiel, we decided that in view of the fact that we were 100 miles behind German lines, the best thing to do would be to live in the submarine pen. We went in and cleared out the Germans, and lived there for the few days we were there.

By this time Hitler was dead in his bunker in Berlin, and Admiral Karl Donitz had taken over as head of state, transferring his headquarters to Flensburg up on the Danish border. We knew that the government had pretty well collapsed. In the meantime, this young commander of the 30th Assault Unit decided that there was a very good chance that he might be court-martialed for not knowing that we should not be 100 miles ahead of the front lines. Fortunately the Germans hadn’t fired on us on our way north, so we hadn’t really been engaged in combat. When we located Hellmuth Walter at the Walter Werke, this major decided to call on the commander of the German forces in Kiel. He went over and negotiated the surrender of 150,000 Germans in the local garrison to our 75-man task force. So instead of getting a court-martial, he got a commendation.

At the Walter Werke, Dr. Walter welcomed us to a degree. The first thing he said to me was, “When are you going to let me get back into operation so we can help you lick the Russians?” Obviously he saw on which side our bread was really buttered. Unfortunately we had orders that he was not to continue working. He did tell us quite a lot about his research. There was word that we weren’t supposed to fraternize with the enemy, but I knew we weren’t going to get anywhere by antagonism, so I gave him some tea. We had plenty of both coffee and tea, and they had very little. The Walters had just had a baby—their fifth child. His wife was a lovely person. She appreciated the tea very much. It helped a great deal in setting up a situation where we could talk.

While he was helpful, Dr. Walter refused to discuss the combustion chambers, which were a major part of his hydrogen peroxide propulsion system. He had been personally responsible for setting up the manufacture of this throughout Germany. This propulsion system was also used in the Messerschmitt 163 rocket airplane. So I got the gang together, the senior group of American and British officers, and we went up to Flensburg in our Jeeps. When we got there, we saw this big German command car go by with its top down. I recognized Donitz as he drove by, and took a picture, but I only got the back of his head. The fellow I wanted to talk to was the head of the Navy. When we found the Navy headquarters, it turned out that the commander in chief of the German Navy was on his way to Compiegne to participate in the surrender. We talked with Admiral Otto Backenkohler, the Vice Chief of Naval Operations. He whistled up the chief of each of the major bureaus that had to do with shipbuilding, torpedoes, and ordnance. The major thing we wanted to know was what they had given to the Japanese; what surprises we could expect. Admiral Backenkohler was a little reluctant at first, but after we began discussing the problems we’d had with the Japanese, he decided that it would be wise to cooperate, even though Germany hadn’t surrendered yet. I asked him to sign a release for scientists like Dr. Walter, releasing them from their oath of secrecy. He signed approximately 50 of these, so that each person in our group who needed it for debriefing purposes would have one. All I had to do was pull out this paper to show Hellmuth Walter and he was quite willing to discuss the combustion chamber. But our enterprising young major had made inquiries and discovered that there was a whole trainload of these chambers on a siding way up in the peninsula. He took a group of Royal Marines there, loaded the vehicles onto a train manned by German engineers, and came chugging into Kiel, right on in to the Walter Werke. To the front of the train he’d attached a banner reading, “30th Assault Unit Special.” The U. S. Navy chose not to pursue hydrogen peroxide as a method of propelling submarines; our first priority was a nuclear- propelled submarine, a true vessel of unlimited speed and endurance submerged. The British, however, were interested, so they moved Hellmuth Walter and his submarine setup to Vickers Armstrong in England for further evaluation.

While I was in Flensburg, I interrogated the head of the German submarine force. He could not understand how our Bay of Biscay offensive of 1943 had succeeded so well that of all the submarines he had sent out, only 5% returned. I attribute this to our combined air-sea operations, where we used radar in aircraft as well as in ships so that no German submarine could sortie without being detected, even with snorkel. The Germans had no idea, at first, that we had aircraft radar—radar that small. To them, radar took a whole roomful of equipment.

I asked how extensively they had cooperated with Japan. 1 learned of a group of German submarines, whose lead ballast had been replaced with gold, that were dispatched to Japan. This gold was to be used to enlist additional support from Japan, and to purchase materiel that was in short supply in Germany. Many of these subs were sunk on their way to Japan.

From April 1945 until that December, when I came home, I was in London as the assistant naval attaché, and was the only engineer on the Commander Naval Forces Europe staff. Life in Britain was bleak; they were still on rationing. I felt so sorry for the British, because it really was an austere situation. And yet I attended several meetings where the British were encouraging—and the Australians wanted—a large migration of British citizens to Australia and New Zealand, but they wouldn’t go. England was their home, and they were going to stay in spite of how tough it was. The government had hoped to reduce imports to the U.K. and be able to tighten their belts more, but it did not happen because this migration did not take place in the numbers they’d hoped for. Of course, after the defeat of Winston Churchill in July, things got even worse under Clement Attlee, the new Labour Party Prime Minister, particularly when his government began to nationalize things. There was a story circulating at that time. Churchill, who was still a member of Parliament, went to the men’s room in the House of Commons. As he entered the room, he saw Prime Minister Attlee standing at the first urinal. Churchill went all the way down to the other end to do his business. When he left, he found Attlee waiting outside. Attlee said, “Winston, I know we have our differences on the floor of the House, but I didn’t know we were so personally obnoxious to each other that you’d go out of your way to avoid me.” Churchill said, “Clement, you know the trouble with you fellows is that whenever you see anything large and running well, you want to nationalize it.”