Secret Nazi Technology which could have changed the course of WWII
Gary Hyland and Anton Gill,
Headline Books, 1998, £18.99
Thirty years ago schoolboys built model aeroplanes. The most common and popular were, for the Airfix generation, the main combat types of the last great war – Spitfires, Me109s, Mustangs, Zeros, Lancasters, Flying Fortresses etc etc. Every town had its model shop where pocket money get spent. Today’s children have moved away to computer games. Plastic kits are now the preserve of middle-aged adult enthusiasts. Manufacturers produce obscure, expensive items – aircraft that only flew in prototype form, aircraft that were only designed and never built, and push heavily German types from the 1944/45 era.(1)
Last Talons of the Eagle is the perfect book to tie in with this fad. On one level it’s a reasonable retread and does have the benefit of some political background and context. But nothing too weighty or exploratory is attempted and, contrary to the title, none of this is secret and virtually all of it has been in the public domain for decades.(2) The definitive works on the use of Nazi scientists and technicians remain Bower and Simpson.(3) There is nothing here to touch Myrha’s recent works on the Horten brothers or genuinely secret Third Reich aerial/rocketry projects.(4)
Hyland and Gill are good at chatty anecdotes. Chapter IV starts, ‘…Picture this: July 1945 and the war is still on…’ We then get some speculation on the (supposedly) covert origins of the B-2 Stealth Bomber(5) before sinking on p. 190 into a debate, for the nth time, on whether or not ‘Foo fighters’ ever existed.(6) Given that the only source for this was a Reuters press release that appeared in the South Wales Argus on 13 December 1944, and given that a gigantic edifice of UFO speculation totters on these tiny foundations, the inclusion of such an item severely jeopardises any claim the authors have to writing a serious historical work. Have they never heard of St. Elmo’s Fire? Or could a simple explanation just be legitimate disinformation from Allied intelligence agencies? And what about the Germans’ known experiments with TV and radio-controlled anti-aircraft missiles? A top secret Nazi project is probably the least likely explanation.
Some fresh information does emerge. The Russians captured an intact DFS 346 (a very high altitude reconnaissance jet) in 1945 and flew it on trials from 1946-52. It was ‘cigar shaped’. Hyland and Gill don’t mention that it flew, from time to time, in the Baltic area, and that the first post-war UFO flap was actually in Stockholm in 1946/7.(7) Oh, well.
And, to go back to the title, could these have changed the course of WWII? Why do we have to have a ‘what if’ version of history? If Hitler had been rational the rockets and jets would have appeared earlier….but if he had been rational he wouldn’t have declared war on the USA, or attacked the Soviet Union, or have come to power in 1933. On paper it is worth remembering that many of these prototypes did not actually have a better performance than other more conventional aircraft. They were also more expensive to build and more difficult (for pilots and ground crews) to acclimatise to. That’s why they appeared too late.
This book is an OK introduction to a complex and still under-explored field. But it more than slightly glamorises its subject matter with a gloating ‘how-wonderful-and-advanced-the-Nazis’-technology-was’ approach.
Although this book comes with an index it has no footnotes, no bibliography and, alarmingly, no references.
Notes
- The current fad for miniature memorabilia connected with the Third Reich also appears to carry over into a conspiracy/cover-up fetish. A 1/72 scale model of the (alleged) Roswell saucer crash, marketed by the US company Testors is available from most branches of Beatties. This raises the prospect of a kind of ‘virtual history’ emerging, celebrated, retrospectively, by plastic kits. What next……a scale model of the Kennedy assassination (with a lone gunman)?
- The pioneering work in this field was Green’s War Planes of the Second World War, Vols 1-6 (MacDonald and Co, 1960/62) – a staple of most reference libraries in the ’60s. Green showed long ago just how many ‘flying wings’ (or other unorthodox configurations) were under consideration by many nations during the 1939-45 period. German Aircraft of the Second World War, Smith and Kay (Putnam 1972) includes virtually all the information in Last Talons of the Eagle.
- See Tom Bower, Blind Eye to Murder – Britain, America and the Purging of Nazi Germany, a Pledge Betrayed (1981) and The Paperclip Conspiracy (1984) and Christopher Simpson, Blowback – America’s Recruitment of Nazis and its Effects on the Cold War (1988)
- Myrha – who describes himself as ex-US Marine Corps and ‘a member of the US intelligence community’ – has so far authored The Horten Brothers and their all wing aircraft (1988) and Secret Aircraft Projects of the Third Reich (1997). Both are published by Schiffer Military/Aviation History, based in Pennsylvania, USA. Schiffer appear to have access to a variety of documents and photographs from a number of middle-ranking Third Reich survivors.
- It is often forgotten that between 1941 and 1950 Northrop Aviation spent huge amounts of money on the B-35 (propeller) and B-49 (jet) flying wing bombers. Both were abandoned in favour of the B-52 which quite simply was easier to fly, faster, and had a greater range and bomb load.
- In support of this Hyland and Gill quote Renato Vesco, author of Intercept UFO and clearly an aviation buff of some standing. Vesco is co-author, with David Hatcher Childress, of Man Made UFOs 1944-1994 -50 Years of Suppression, and appears to have contributed the more technical and serious portion of the text. Childress, however is a major exponent of Hoerbigerian themes…lost civilisations, anti-gravity, free energy, Nikola Tesla etc.
- See Timothy Good, Above Top Secret – the Worldwide UFO Cover-up (1987) pp. 20-23