American Raiders: The Race to Capture the Luftwaffe's Secrets

At the close of World War II, Allied forces faced frightening German secret weapons. When Hitler's war machine began to collapse, the race was on to snatch these secrets before the Soviet Red Army found them.

The last battle of World War II was not for military victory but for the technology of the Third Reich. In American Raiders, Wolfgang Samuel assembles from official Air Force records and survivors' interviews the largely untold stories of the disarmament of the Luftwaffe and of Operation Lusty—the hunt for Nazi technologies. In April 1945 American armies were on the brink of winning their greatest military victory, yet America's technological backwardness was shocking when measured against that of the retreating enemy. Senior officers knew the seemingly overwhelming victory was less than it appeared.

Two intrepid American Army Air Forces colonels set out to regain America's technological edge. One, Harold E. Watson, went after the German jets; the other, Donald L. Putt, went after the Nazis' intellectual capital. With the help of German and American pilots, Watson brought the jets to America; Putt succeeded in bringing the German scientists to the Army Air Forces' aircraft test and evaluation center. A fighter pilot, Lloyd Wenzel, a Texan of German descent, then turned these enemy aliens into productive American citizens.

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