Inside the buildings, soldiers discovered state-of-the-art aircraft laboratories, including entire warehouses filled with airplane parts and rocket fuel. There were wind and weapons tunnels that were radically more advanced than anything the Army Air Forces had at Wright Field. The oldest division in the United States Army had unexpectedly happened upon the most scientifically advanced aeronautics laboratory in the world. It was called the Hermann G?ring Aeronautical Research Center at V?lkenrode. The Allies had never heard of it before. It didn’t appear on any CIOS Black List. It was an incredible find.
At first, it seemed as if the place had been abandoned. But after an hour of looking around, the soldiers came upon the institute’s scientific director, a man named Adolf Busemann. Busemann told the soldiers that this facility was called V?lkenrode for short, and that it had been up and running for ten years. A team of Army Air Forces technical intelligence experts, working as part of a mission called Operation Lusty and stationed in Saint-Germain, France, was dispatched to investigate. By now the U.S. Strategic Air Forces in Europe had destroyed the Luftwaffe, and the bombing campaign had essentially stopped. Its commander, General Carl A. “Tooey” Spaatz, had just received a fourth star for his success commanding the largest fleet of combat aircraft ever assembled for war. Now Spaatz had a new mission for his field commanders. “Operation Lusty,” Spaatz wrote in a memo, was “in effect,” and everyone “not engaged in critical operational duties” was to seek out “technical and scientific intelligence [that would be] of material assistance in the prosecution of the war against Japan.” The man Spaatz chose to lead the hunt for Luftwaffe scientists and engineers was Colonel Donald L. Putt.
When Putt arrived at V?lkenrode on April 22, 1945, he was thrilled by what he saw. All he could think about was how quickly he could get all this equipment back to the United States. Putt was a legendary test pilot who had been at Wright Field since 1933, assigned to various branches, including the Flying Branch. He had walked away from a deadly air crash that killed his colleagues and left him with second-degree burn scars on his face and neck. Putt was a hard-charging, Type A personality—a tiger among men. “He displayed the ability to withstand great emotional shock, to absorb it, and take in stride,” explained a colleague from Wright Field. Putt was also intellectually gifted, with a degree in electrical engineering from the Carnegie Institute of Technology and a master’s in aeronautical engineering from the California Institute of Technology. As an older man, Donald Putt recalled the prewar mind-set regarding pilots who were also engineers. “Then, the philosophy was, ‘Don’t put an engineering pilot in the cockpit, because he tries to figure out why things happen.’ ” But when the air wars in Europe and Japan escalated, the Army Air Forces found itself in need of fast, out-of-the-box thinking from American pilot-engineers like Putt. The Army Air Forces put the old philosophy to the side and Putt’s expertise to use. In 1944, Putt’s career milestone arrived when he was put in charge of modifying a B-29 bomber so that it could deliver an extraordinarily heavy, Top Secret payload on Japan. This payload was eventually revealed to be the atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. After Putt finished his B-29 bomber retrofitting jobs, in January 1945, he was sent overseas as director of technical services for the Air Service Command. Now here he was in the last week of April 1945 at V?lkenrode.
With his engineer’s expertise, Putt was able to clearly judge the revolutionary nature of the technology he was looking at. Most astonishing to Putt were V?lkenrode’s seven wind tunnels that had allowed the Luftwaffe to study how a swept-back wing would behave at the speed at which an aircraft broke the sound barrier. This transition place, between Mach 0.8 and Mach 1.2, was still unknown to American fliers in 1945. When Putt learned from V?lkenrode’s director, Adolf Busemann, that the sound barrier had already been breached by German scientists in these wind tunnels, he was amazed. Putt knew immediately that the facility had “the most superb instruments and test equipment” in the world.