Trichel, Gervais (Transcript)

Trichel, Gervais (Transcript)

Role of US Army Ordinance in rocket research in WW Ii. Details of evacuation of V-2s and German engineers after the end of war. Post-war rocket developments USA with German team

University of Alabama in Huntsville Archives and Special Collections, Huntsville, Alabama

1972-04-28

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Interviews

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ohc_crst_000027_T

Gervais Trichel

28 April [1971?]

Birmingham, Michigan

February-March 1944 I visited England in connection with small rockets being produced for the invasion. Dr. Allyn Crowe [Alwyn Crow] was the head of rocket work at the Ministry of Supply at that time. He showed me a photograph from a reconnaissance airplane of what appeared to be a large rocket on the island of Peenemunde. Crowe said that it was a Trojan Horse. “From our computation of it, its weight would be over 100 tons. By no means that we can visualize could it get off the ground.” One of the things that convinced the British that it was fake was that it was too convenient – being left in the open for photo reconnaissance. They considered it to be an instrument of psychological warfare. Another thing which convinced them was that their airfields on the French [coase?] were camouflaged – they even went to the trouble to build dummy aerodromes out of canvas and cardboard. (Trichel at that time was serving as military attache in Britain – in France). The British raided the camouflaged airfield (‘bombed the hell out of it’) and then – after the raid, dropped a wooden bomb on the dummy airfield. [Anyway?], the British figured the same thing was happening in Peenemunde.

Dr. Sorenson was visiting in Sweden when the Swedish rocket fell. He was able to persuade the Swedes to turn it over to him certain pieces of the rocket were recovered.

These pieces wound up in my office in Washington. We had pieces of the framework and pieces of the propulsion motor – enough to realize that it was not a solid structure but an aircraft type construction.

We then decided that we needed someone studying this thing. We didn’t want to interrupt Cal Tech. Instead we went to the General Electric Company and got them to undertake a contract to investigate and correlate the information we had about this rocket. They set up a project under Dr. Porter. They built an artist’s conception of the rocket. We then very rapidly accumulated parts from [English?] recoveries so that long before the invasion, GE had a very good idea of what the V-2 was like.
We were not aware of the English activities although we had liaison

Trichel -2

people in England, who supplied constant streams of information from (wreckage). But we did have reciprocal activities with the British.

With the Invasion coming about, the Ordnance Department asked to set up investigation teams to study tanks, weapons, etc., including the Buzz Bomb and the V-2. GE was given this assignment. The GE team did a very good job. They did something no one else did.

GE had for many years had manufacturing facilities in Germany through its international operation. They had in their organization technical people who lived in Germany, who spoke German and generally, knew where things were. Henry Saylor – Chief Ordnance officer of the Expeditionary Force complimented me: “You're probably the only ones there who didn’t have to be spoon fed or hand carried around.” They knew what to ask about, who to ask, and how to ask it.

Porter’s group was well organized. They had 5-6 months working on reconstituting the V-2 problem – year’s effort.

After the capture of Nordhausen, we got a message from Sayler’s office, saying that they had a factory and could get samples of the material we wanted. He had a large group of the people involved, there. It was their opinion that this group ought to be brought to the US. We (Barnes and I) immediately agreed and reacted to their word. We went cables to Sayler’s office to get at least 100 complete missiles and enough to assemble another 100 in spare parts, and to ship them to the US. Toftoy got 1500 European railroad cars full of stuff out of there before the British or Air Force found out.

Then the British found out through their work mission, they made a strong plea to send it to England to test fire it there. We felt it should come here to the US. Meanwhile the Air Force found out. We told them, yes that we had “it”, but not how many. We even agreed to give Wright Field one German ^and 5 to the British which was quite a generous offer until they found out how many we had.

Typed Transcript of Interview