1122 Book Reviews TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURE ransacked the technical literature. His research in archival materials is more limited. The National Archives records on the subject are extensive, particularly those of the Rubber Reserve Corporation during World War II. Many readers also would have appreciated some account of the federal government’s natural rubber program between 1941 and 1946 since it has direct relevance to the synthetic rubber program. The voluminous records of this guayule project still lie largely unexploited in Department of Agriculture and U.S. Forest Service records. In fact, the program has been revived in recent years. But within the narrow confines of Morris’s framework, he has executed a very competent study that will be widely appreciated by historians of technology. Gerald D. Nash Dr. Nash is Presidential Professor of History at the University of New Mexico. During 1990-91 he served as the George Bancroft Professor of American History at the University of Gottingen. Among his recent books is World War ¡1 and the West: Reshaping the Economy (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1990). Science, Technology, and Reparations: Exploitation and Plunder in Postwar Germany. By John Gimbel. Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1990. Pp. xv + 280; notes, appendix, bibliography, index. $29.50. In late 1944, the British and Americans planned a huge exercise to gather technical information in former German-occupied territory. The most famous of these missions was the top-secret Alsos team, which hunted for evidence of the German A-bomb project, and Project Paperclip, which located the German rocket technologists and persuaded most of them, including their leader Wernher von Braun, to emigrate to the United States. Nevertheless, the targets also included many sites of industrial and commercial importance, for instance, the factories of the chemical giant I. G. Farben. The western Allies wanted German military technology that could be used to shorten the war againstJapan and also wanted to make sure that these advances did not fall into the hands of the Red Army. The first aim was rendered unnecessary by the sudden end of the Pacific war, and the second was largely unsuccessful; the Soviets were able to collect sufficient information about German rocket technology and nerve gas production to set up their own programs. By the summer of 1945, however, the Americans (and to a lesser extent the British) became determined to make the Germans “pay” for the war. This tendency was increased by the growing Cold War with the Soviet Union. Carefully selected teams visited target compa nies in occupied Germany; they were followed by individuals acting largely on their own (or their company’s) initiative. Vast volumes of TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURE Book Reviews 1123 technical documents (and/or microfilms) were taken to London. Scientists, technologists, and executives were interviewed in Germany and London. It was confidently predicted that this exercise would reap large rewards for American industry without resorting to the crude Soviet methods of deporting the plants and their personnel to the homeland. The excitement had died down by the early 1950s, and the Americans became more concerned about reviving the West German economy than making the Germans pay. The “Nazi” I. G. Farben was replaced by the “good” BASF, Bayer, and Hoechst. The technical intelligence teams (T-force, CIOS, FIAT, and BIOS) were largely forgotten, except by a few historians interested in synthetic oil. The hundreds of meters of documents collected by BIOS lay dusty and unwanted in rural Yorkshire until they were recently taken over by the Imperial War Museum. The small band of historians who have studied this program have usually assumed it was successful in the military area—notably the V-l (predecessor of the Cruise missile) and the V-2 rocket, and also nerve gas—but its commercial value for American companies was limited. John Gimbel has given us a concise and clearly written survey of this intelligence operation, including Project Paperclip (but not Alsos), with a particular focus on the role played by American firms inter ested in German “know-how.” This history is painstakingly researched and well structured. My only complaint is that it is too short (the main text is only 186 pages long) and too broad in its...
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Apr 26, 2016
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