The goal of Combined Intelligence Objectives Subcommittee was to investigate all things related to German science. Target types ran the gamut: radar, missiles, aircraft, medicine, bombs and fuses, chemical and biological weapons labs. And while CIOS remained an official joint venture, there were other groups in the mix, with competing interests at hand.
Running parallel to CIOS operations were dozens of secret intelligence-gathering operations, mostly American. The Pentagon’s Special Mission V-2 was but one example. By late March 1945, Colonel Trichel, chief of U.S. Army Ordnance, Rocket Branch, had dispatched his team to Europe. Likewise, U.S. Naval Technical Intelligence had officers in Paris preparing for its own highly classified hunt for any intelligence regarding the Henschel Hs 293, a guided missile developed by the Nazis and designed to sink or damage enemy ships. The U.S. Army Air Forces (AAF) were still heavily engaged in strategic bombing campaigns, but a small group from Wright Field, near Dayton, Ohio, was laying plans to locate and capture Luftwaffe equipment and engineers. Spearheading Top Secret missions for British intelligence was a group of commandos called 30 Assault Unit, led by Ian Fleming, the personal assistant to the director of British naval intelligence and future author of the James Bond novels. Sometimes, the members of these parallel missions worked in consort with CIOS officers in the field. Certainly, they took full advantage of all the information CIOS made available, including its Black Lists. But each mission almost always put its individual objectives and goals first. The result, some officers joked, was CHAOS for CIOS.
What began as a gentlemanly collaboration among Allies quickly transformed into one of the greatest competitions for information about weapons-related research in the history of war. Once the Rhine River was crossed, the hunt for Nazi science became a free-for-all.
On its search for chemical weapons, Alsos scientists crossed the Rhine on the heels of the Third Army. They traveled in a small convoy of army jeeps. “The area was not in good shape,” Colonel Pash recalled after the war. “Buildings of the town shook from the shock waves generated by the gun explosions,” and “stalled or broken-down vehicles added to the confusion created by the wrecked armor and trucks of the retreating Nazis.” Entering Ludwigshafen, one of the Alsos jeeps became separated from its convoy and ran smack into the line of fire of a German antitank gun. Hardly expecting a single jeep to appear on the road without a tank accompanying it, the Germans were apparently caught off-guard. “A single salvo and the few machine-gun bursts went wide,” Pash recalled after the war.
The Alsos scientists had heard that T-Forces units were close behind them and were making arrangements for a large team of technical experts to arrive under the CIOS banner. The Alsos scientists were determined to get to the IG Farben factory first. But what they ended up finding in Ludwigshafen was disappointing to them. Not only had the factory been heavily damaged by Allied bombing raids, but filing cabinets were empty. Paperwork had been destroyed or removed. There were no chemical weapons found.
The following morning, March 24, 1945, while at breakfast, the Alsos team met up with the T-Forces and the CIOS team. Both had come to inspect the Farben factory. “It was interesting to watch the effect of bombshells casually dropped by our scientists,” Pash recalled, “sounding something like… ‘Oh sure, You’ll be able to go to the Farben plant tomorrow, after the T-Forces secures it. You’ll find it interesting. We know, because we were there yesterday.’ ” The rivalry between the teams was evident.