no_nomen
December 18th, 2003, 01:02 AM
.
German War Secrets by the Thousands
Harper's Magazine October, 1946 Page 329
http://www.corax.org/revisionism/do...an_secrets.html
SECRETS BY THE THOUSANDS
C. Lester Walker
Harper's readers are familiar with Mr. Walker's articles and the skillful mechanics of the Allied war. He now gives us a look at some of the disconcertingly effective tricks that were hidden up the enemy sleeve.
Someone wrote to Wright Field recently, saying he understood this country had got together quite a collection of enemy war secrets, that many were now on public sale, and could he, please, be sent everything on German jet engines. The Air Documents Division of the Army Air Forces answered:
"Sorry -- but that would be fifty tons."
Moreover, that fifty tons was just a small portion of what is today undoubtedly the biggest collection of captured enemy war secrets ever assembled. If you always thought of war secrets -- as who hasn't? -- as coming in sixes and sevens, as a few items of information readily handed on to the properly interested authorities, it may interest you to learn that the war secrets in this collection run into the thousands, that the mass of documents is mountainous, and that there was never before been anything quite comparable to it.
One Washington official has called it "the greatest single source of this type of material in the world, the first orderly exploitation of an entire country's brain-power."
Here are some outstanding examples from the war secrets collection.
The head of the communications unit of Technical Industrial Intelligence Branch opened his desk drawer and took out the tiniest vacuum tube I had ever seen. It was about half thumb-size.
"Notice it is heavy porcelain -- not glass -- and thus virtually indestructible. It is a thousand watt -- one-tenth the size of similar American tube. Today our manufacturers know the secret of making it.... And here's something...."
He pulled some brown, papery-looking ribbon off a spool. It was a quarter-inch wide, with a dull and a shiny side.
"That's Magnetophone tape," he said. "It's plastic, metallized on one side with iron oxide. In Germany that supplanted phonograph recordings. A day's Radio program can be magnetized on one reel. You can demagnetize it, wipe it off and put a new program on at any time. No needle; so absolutely no noise or record wear. An hour-long reel costs fifty cents." He showed me then what had been two of the most closely-guarded technical secrets of the war: the infra-red device which the Germans invented for seeing at night, and the remarkable diminutive generator which operated it. German cars could drive at any speed in a total blackout, seeing objects clear as day two hundred meters ahead. Tanks with this device could spot targets two miles away. As a sniper scope it enabled German riflemen to pick off a man in total blackness.
There was a sighting tube, and a selenium screen out front. The screen caught the incoming infra-red light, which drove electrons .from the selenium along the tube to another screen which was electrically charged and fluorescent. A visible image appeared on this screen. Its clearness and its accuracy for aiming purposes were phenomenal. Inside the tube, distortion of the stream of electrons by the earth's magnetism was even allowed for!
The diminutive generator -- five inches across -- stepped up current from an ordinary flashlight battery to 15,000 volts. It had. 'a walnut-sized motor which spun a rotor at 10,000 rpm -- so fast that originally it had destroyed all lubricants with the great amount of ozone it produced. The Germans had developed a new grease: chlorinated paraffin oil. The generator then ran 3,000 hours!
A canvas bag on the sniper's back housed the device. His rifle had two triggers. He pressed one for a few seconds to operate the generator and the scope.. Then the other to kill his man in the dark. "That captured secret," my guide de-dared, "we first used at Okinawa -- to-the bewilderment of the Japs."
We got, in addition, among these prize secrets, the technique and the machine for making the world's most remarkable electric condenser. Millions of condensers are essential to the radio and radar industry. Our condensers were always made of metal foil. This one is made of .paper, coated with 1/250,000 of an inch of vaporized zinc. Forty per cent smaller, twenty per cent cheaper than our condensers, it is also self-healing. That is, if a breakdown occurs (like a fuse blowing out), the zinc film evaporates, the paper immediately insulates, and the condenser is right again. It: keeps on working through multiple breakdown -- at fifty per cent higher voltage than our condensers! To most American radio experts this is magic, double-distilled.
Mica was another thing. None is mined in Germany, so during the war our Signal Corps was mystified. Where was Germany getting it?
One, day certain piece of mica was handed to one of our experts in the U.S. Bureau of Mines for analysis and opinion. "Natural mica," he reported, "and no impurities."
But the mica was synthetic. the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Silicate Research had discovered how to make it and -- something which had always eluded scientists -- in large sheets.
We know now, thanks to FIAT teams, that ingredients of natural mica were melted in crucibles of carbon capable of taking 2,350 degrees of heat, and then -- this was the real secret -- cooled in a special way. Complete absence of vibration was the first essential. Then two forces directly perpendicular to each other were applied. One, vertically, was a controlled gradient of temperature in the cooling. At right angles to this, horizontally, was introduced a magnetic field. This forced the formation of the crystals in large laminated sheets on that plane.
"You see this . . .the head of Communications Unit, TIIB, said to me. It was metal, and looked like a complicated doll's house with the roof off. "It is the chassis or frame, for a radio. To make the same thing, Americans would machine cut, hollow, shape, fit -- a dozen different processes. This is done on a press in one operation. It is called the 'cold extrusion' process. We do it with some soft, splattery metals. But by this process the Germans do it with cold steel! Thousands of parts now made as castings or drop forgings or from malleable iron can now be made this way. The production speed increase is a little matter of one thousand per cent."
This one war secret alone, many American steel men believe, will revolutionize dozens of our metal fabrication industries.
In textiles the war secrets collection has produced so many revelations, that American textile men are a little dizzy. There is a German rayon-weaving machine, discovered a year ago by the American 'Knitting Machine' Team, which increases production in relation to floor space by one hundred and fifty percent. Their "Links-Links" loom produces a ladderless, run-proof hosiery. New German needle-making machinery, it is thought will revolutionize that business in both the United Kingdom and the United States. There is a German method for pulling the wool from sheepskins without injury to hide or fiber, by use of an enzyme. Formerly the "puller" -- a trade secret -- was made from animal pancreas from American packing houses. During the war the Nazis made it from a mold called aspergil paraciticus, which they seeded in bran. It results not only in better wool, but in ten per cent greater yield.
Another discovery was a way to put a crimp in viscose rayon fibers which gives them the appearance, warmth, wear resistance, and reaction-to-dyes of wool. The secret here, our investigators found, was the addition to the cellulose of twenty-five per cent fish protein.
But of all the industrial secrets, perhaps, the biggest windfall came from the laboratories and plants of the great German cartel, I. G. Farbenindustrie. Never before, it is claimed, was there such a store-house of secret information. It covers liquid and solid fuels, metallurgy, synthetic rubber, textiles, chemicals, plastics. drugs, dyes. One American dye authority declares:
"It. includes the production know-how and the secret formulas for over fifty thousand dyes. Many of them are faster and better than ours. Many are colors we were never able to make. The American dye industry will be advanced at least ten years."
III
IN MATTERS of food, medicine, and branches of the military art the finds of the search teams were no less impressive. And in aeronautics and guided missiles they proved to be downright alarming.
Much, much more cont. at URL below.
http://www.corax.org/revisionism/do...an_secrets.html
Or go to this URL and search for SECRETS BY THE THOUSANDS:
http://www.corax.org/revisionism/search.html
.
German War Secrets by the Thousands
Harper's Magazine October, 1946 Page 329
http://www.corax.org/revisionism/do...an_secrets.html
SECRETS BY THE THOUSANDS
C. Lester Walker
Harper's readers are familiar with Mr. Walker's articles and the skillful mechanics of the Allied war. He now gives us a look at some of the disconcertingly effective tricks that were hidden up the enemy sleeve.
Someone wrote to Wright Field recently, saying he understood this country had got together quite a collection of enemy war secrets, that many were now on public sale, and could he, please, be sent everything on German jet engines. The Air Documents Division of the Army Air Forces answered:
"Sorry -- but that would be fifty tons."
Moreover, that fifty tons was just a small portion of what is today undoubtedly the biggest collection of captured enemy war secrets ever assembled. If you always thought of war secrets -- as who hasn't? -- as coming in sixes and sevens, as a few items of information readily handed on to the properly interested authorities, it may interest you to learn that the war secrets in this collection run into the thousands, that the mass of documents is mountainous, and that there was never before been anything quite comparable to it.
One Washington official has called it "the greatest single source of this type of material in the world, the first orderly exploitation of an entire country's brain-power."
Here are some outstanding examples from the war secrets collection.
The head of the communications unit of Technical Industrial Intelligence Branch opened his desk drawer and took out the tiniest vacuum tube I had ever seen. It was about half thumb-size.
"Notice it is heavy porcelain -- not glass -- and thus virtually indestructible. It is a thousand watt -- one-tenth the size of similar American tube. Today our manufacturers know the secret of making it.... And here's something...."
He pulled some brown, papery-looking ribbon off a spool. It was a quarter-inch wide, with a dull and a shiny side.
"That's Magnetophone tape," he said. "It's plastic, metallized on one side with iron oxide. In Germany that supplanted phonograph recordings. A day's Radio program can be magnetized on one reel. You can demagnetize it, wipe it off and put a new program on at any time. No needle; so absolutely no noise or record wear. An hour-long reel costs fifty cents." He showed me then what had been two of the most closely-guarded technical secrets of the war: the infra-red device which the Germans invented for seeing at night, and the remarkable diminutive generator which operated it. German cars could drive at any speed in a total blackout, seeing objects clear as day two hundred meters ahead. Tanks with this device could spot targets two miles away. As a sniper scope it enabled German riflemen to pick off a man in total blackness.
There was a sighting tube, and a selenium screen out front. The screen caught the incoming infra-red light, which drove electrons .from the selenium along the tube to another screen which was electrically charged and fluorescent. A visible image appeared on this screen. Its clearness and its accuracy for aiming purposes were phenomenal. Inside the tube, distortion of the stream of electrons by the earth's magnetism was even allowed for!
The diminutive generator -- five inches across -- stepped up current from an ordinary flashlight battery to 15,000 volts. It had. 'a walnut-sized motor which spun a rotor at 10,000 rpm -- so fast that originally it had destroyed all lubricants with the great amount of ozone it produced. The Germans had developed a new grease: chlorinated paraffin oil. The generator then ran 3,000 hours!
A canvas bag on the sniper's back housed the device. His rifle had two triggers. He pressed one for a few seconds to operate the generator and the scope.. Then the other to kill his man in the dark. "That captured secret," my guide de-dared, "we first used at Okinawa -- to-the bewilderment of the Japs."
We got, in addition, among these prize secrets, the technique and the machine for making the world's most remarkable electric condenser. Millions of condensers are essential to the radio and radar industry. Our condensers were always made of metal foil. This one is made of .paper, coated with 1/250,000 of an inch of vaporized zinc. Forty per cent smaller, twenty per cent cheaper than our condensers, it is also self-healing. That is, if a breakdown occurs (like a fuse blowing out), the zinc film evaporates, the paper immediately insulates, and the condenser is right again. It: keeps on working through multiple breakdown -- at fifty per cent higher voltage than our condensers! To most American radio experts this is magic, double-distilled.
Mica was another thing. None is mined in Germany, so during the war our Signal Corps was mystified. Where was Germany getting it?
One, day certain piece of mica was handed to one of our experts in the U.S. Bureau of Mines for analysis and opinion. "Natural mica," he reported, "and no impurities."
But the mica was synthetic. the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Silicate Research had discovered how to make it and -- something which had always eluded scientists -- in large sheets.
We know now, thanks to FIAT teams, that ingredients of natural mica were melted in crucibles of carbon capable of taking 2,350 degrees of heat, and then -- this was the real secret -- cooled in a special way. Complete absence of vibration was the first essential. Then two forces directly perpendicular to each other were applied. One, vertically, was a controlled gradient of temperature in the cooling. At right angles to this, horizontally, was introduced a magnetic field. This forced the formation of the crystals in large laminated sheets on that plane.
"You see this . . .the head of Communications Unit, TIIB, said to me. It was metal, and looked like a complicated doll's house with the roof off. "It is the chassis or frame, for a radio. To make the same thing, Americans would machine cut, hollow, shape, fit -- a dozen different processes. This is done on a press in one operation. It is called the 'cold extrusion' process. We do it with some soft, splattery metals. But by this process the Germans do it with cold steel! Thousands of parts now made as castings or drop forgings or from malleable iron can now be made this way. The production speed increase is a little matter of one thousand per cent."
This one war secret alone, many American steel men believe, will revolutionize dozens of our metal fabrication industries.
In textiles the war secrets collection has produced so many revelations, that American textile men are a little dizzy. There is a German rayon-weaving machine, discovered a year ago by the American 'Knitting Machine' Team, which increases production in relation to floor space by one hundred and fifty percent. Their "Links-Links" loom produces a ladderless, run-proof hosiery. New German needle-making machinery, it is thought will revolutionize that business in both the United Kingdom and the United States. There is a German method for pulling the wool from sheepskins without injury to hide or fiber, by use of an enzyme. Formerly the "puller" -- a trade secret -- was made from animal pancreas from American packing houses. During the war the Nazis made it from a mold called aspergil paraciticus, which they seeded in bran. It results not only in better wool, but in ten per cent greater yield.
Another discovery was a way to put a crimp in viscose rayon fibers which gives them the appearance, warmth, wear resistance, and reaction-to-dyes of wool. The secret here, our investigators found, was the addition to the cellulose of twenty-five per cent fish protein.
But of all the industrial secrets, perhaps, the biggest windfall came from the laboratories and plants of the great German cartel, I. G. Farbenindustrie. Never before, it is claimed, was there such a store-house of secret information. It covers liquid and solid fuels, metallurgy, synthetic rubber, textiles, chemicals, plastics. drugs, dyes. One American dye authority declares:
"It. includes the production know-how and the secret formulas for over fifty thousand dyes. Many of them are faster and better than ours. Many are colors we were never able to make. The American dye industry will be advanced at least ten years."
III
IN MATTERS of food, medicine, and branches of the military art the finds of the search teams were no less impressive. And in aeronautics and guided missiles they proved to be downright alarming.
Much, much more cont. at URL below.
http://www.corax.org/revisionism/do...an_secrets.html
Or go to this URL and search for SECRETS BY THE THOUSANDS:
http://www.corax.org/revisionism/search.html
.