Frontline Intelligence in WW2 – (3) Allied T Forces (Keith Ellison)

Strasbourg was Phase 1 of a four-stage operational plan for the T Force. They moved on to operations against Frankenthal-Ludwigshafen, Mannheim, Heidelberg, Karlsruhe and Wurzburg in Phase 2; Stuttgart, Munich, and Berchtesgarden in Phase 3; Augsburg and Ulm were designated as part of the last phase (though this phase may not have been completed).

Col Pumpelly and his T Force entered Ludwigshafen around Mar 22. The 6-AG SCIU picked up several Gestapo officials and transported them back to a building they had commandeered in Frankenthal. They used one of the political prisoners released from this prison as a spotter to identify Gestapo and Sicherheitsdienst in Ludwigshafen. The city had been bombed once or twice daily for over four months, and there was literally not a single building standing in a town that was not undamaged, and most of them were knocked flat. (36) The remaining population had been living inside their underground shelters for months. (The Alsos Mission won the race against the T Force at the IG Farben Plant in Ludwigshafen, arriving a day earlier, on Mach 23).

On Mar 25, the T Force entered Mannheim, and took the Daimler-Benz Factory on Mar 26, as their HQ. Capt Quirk of the 6-AG SCIU had to divert to Kaiserslautern and then Vittel to deal with three captured German agents. They then moved to Trois-Epées to see several captured men from SS-Sturmbannführer Otto Skorzeny’s sabotage unit, along with some items of their equipment. This included a cane made from plastic explosive with a time delay detonator and an overcoat made of soft plastic explosive material resembling rubber. They contained enough explosives to destroy a ten-room house. (37) This explosive was called Nipolit. According to the Official History of the British Security Service, written immediately post-war, the Allies had only obtained their first sample of this explosive in September 1944, when a sample disguised as a leather belt was acquired by a Turkish double agent. Samples were later obtained in many other forms, including underwater bombs twenty feet long and six feet in diameter as well as hand grenades! (38)

In Heidelberg, in Apr 1945, the T Force was able to locate important documents and personnel of Brown Boveri & Company and IG Farben, both regarded as important intelligence targets. Much of the captured material collected here was transported back to the USA for exploitation and was microfilmed before being returned to the new German government. Munich had been entered on Apr 30 and the radio station, which had still been operating, was seized. In May the T Force helped with the liberation of the Dachau Concentration Camp and went with the US 7-A elements into the Nazi Redoubt Region, where they uncovered tons of valuable documents hidden in caves and sunk to the bottom of lakes in special containers. (39) Lt Raymond F Newkirk and Sgt James Utrecht of X2 OSS were assigned as an SCIU to Y Force, 6-AG. These men, together with Maj McGettigan of T Force conducted a number of interrogations at Hermann Goering’s Staff HQ, from which they identified the location of Goering’s hidden art treasures in the Berchtesgaden area (Goering himself had surrendered to the US Army in Berchtesgaden). Although very well hidden, the artwork was unprotected from the damp conditions and would have been ruined if it had not been found so promptly. The loot was passed to the care of US 7-A and the OSS X2 Art Unit was informed. (40) According to OSS records the OSS SCI units operating with T Forces at 6 and the 12-AGs seized large quantities of counter-espionage material, which was forwarded through Army Documents channels to the Counter-intelligence War Room in London.

The head of the War Room estimated that one such T Force operation, concluded in three days, netted identifying information on more than 20.000 German intelligence personnel. This virtually doubled the information on German intelligence personnel which had been made available through all previous Allied counter-espionage operations during the war. (41)

DIVIDING THE SPOILS – FRIENDS AND FOES

As the stories of the 30 AU and the Alsos Mission have hinted, the Allies were in a race for technical intelligence. The numerous British and American intelligence collecting teams under the umbrella of the T Forces were often working in competition, not only with the French and the Russians but also with each other. As well as CI units like the SCIUs, CIC, and FSS, T Forces were responsible for scientific and technical teams such as

– CIOS
– Alsos
– Chemical Warfare Services
– Enemy Equipment Intelligence Service (EEIS) – located Axis equipment, such as new aircraft, tanks, ammunition, metalworking equipment, etc. for evaluation and to instruct Allied personnel in its use. Later, the unit was used to evaluate German industrial equipment in general
– US Army Ordnance Rocket Branch

– Strategic Bombing Survey Teams (investigating the effects of the bombing on the German Economy)
– Technical Industrial Intelligence Branch (TIIB; later the TIIC, Technical Industrial Intelligence Committee) – was established as an agency of the Joint Chiefs of Staff but transferred to the Department of Commerce in January 1946. Its task was to investigate German industries and obtain any information that might be of interest to American companies. The Annual Report of the Secretary of Commerce for 1946 talks about 3.500.000 pages that TIIB selected for copying. (42) TIIB collected more than 300.000 pounds of German equipment and product samples as well as 200 tons of materials captured by the Army and Navy;
– Navy Technical Mission, Europe – originally a part of the Alsos Mission, assigned to investigate German advances in synthetic fuels and lubricants of interest to the Navy
– TOM (Technical Oil Mission) – A non-military group sponsored by the US Bureau of Mines made up of American and British petroleum experts and charged with investigating the industrial production of synthetic fuels and lubricants from coal using the Fischer-Tropsch method, and other specialists such as the 30 AU and (MIST) Mission d’Information Scientifique et Technique.

Under the auspices of CIOS, the French government deployed their Mission d’Information Scientifique et Technique (MIST) in occupied Germany during the second half of 1945, tracking down atomic scientists and secret weapons on behalf of the French. The 30 AU personnel reported that they had been successful in small teams searching their targets in the Paris area immediately after the occupation, but after several days they found several of their targets already searched and cleaned out by the French Deuxième Bureau. They claimed that the documents seized from these targets were never made available to the British or the Americans. (43)