Winston
Lorenzo von Matterhorn
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The Untold Story of the Secret Mission to Seize Nazi Map Data
How a covert U.S. Army intelligence unit canvassed war-torn Europe, capturing intelligence with incalculable strategic value
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/untold-story-secret-mission-seize-nazi-map-data-180973317/
Captured data could give the Americans a pivotal advantage in realizing what would become one of geodesy’s ultimate goals—creating a unified geodetic network that covered the entire globe. In such a system, any point on Earth’s surface could be defined by numerical coordinates, and its distance and direction from any other point calculated with precision. This capability would prove incredibly useful for any long-distance human endeavor, including guiding missiles to a target on another continent, as the Cold War would soon demand.
[snip]
They had found nothing less than the central map and geodetic data repository for the German Army—the mother lode. The records of the German military, unlike those of the mostly civilian RfL, extended well beyond Germany’s prewar borders, into Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union. The material had been moved from Berlin to save it from Allied bombs.
By now the Red Army was attacking Berlin. The war would soon be over, and another problem for Hough was that Saalfeld was well inside the soon-to-be-Soviet occupation zone, as previously agreed upon by the Allied nations. In other words, the town would have to be turned over to the Soviets at the end of the war. If Hough didn’t get the maps and data out quickly, the Americans would never see them again.
In the following days, Hough and his men put together a major transport operation. He borrowed trucks, small planes and enlisted men from U.S. Army units in the area, and conscripted dozens of German civilians to help with the loading. By May 8, the day Germany officially surrendered, they had shipped 35 two-and-a-half-ton capacity truckloads of maps, data and instruments 75 miles south, to Bamberg, a town safely within the American occupation zone. By June 1, they’d moved 250 tons of captured material safely out of Saalfeld and elsewhere in Thuringia.
In Bamberg’s city hall, Hough established a new headquarters for the team, and commandeered nearly an acre of storage space for sorting the captured material. The team culled this to 90 tons of maps, aerial photographs, high-quality geodetic survey instruments and reams of printed data, which they packed into 1,200 boxes to be shipped to the Army Map Service in Washington.
The haul included complete geodetic coverage of more than a dozen European countries and states, including Russia, and several more in North Africa and the Middle East. Hough later estimated that 95 percent of this data was new to the U.S. military. It also included approximately 100,000 maps covering all of Europe, Asiatic Russia, parts of North Africa, and scattered coverage of other parts of the world. The Soviets took possession of Saalfeld on July 2. HOUGHTEAM was still moving material out of the region on July 1.
The team also captured seven giant contraptions called stereoplanigraphs—cutting-edge technology used to create topographic maps from aerial photos. Bristling with knobs and adjustable arms, each machine was big enough to fill a room and required two people to operate. A complex interior system of lenses and filters combined images from overlapping aerial photos to make high-precision measurements of elevation differences between hills and valleys and other features of the terrain. The models captured in Saalfeld were made by Zeiss, the renowned German optics firm; Hough estimated their combined value at $500,000 (nearly $7 million today). He ordered a furniture factory in Saalfeld to build shipping crates, and sent one of his officers to fetch an engineer from Zeiss headquarters to oversee the disassembly and safe packing of the precious optical equipment.
Hough’s team shipped 371 boxes of captured German equipment to the U.S., including this stereoplanigraph made by renowned German optics firm Zeiss. (Photo - The National Archives):
How a covert U.S. Army intelligence unit canvassed war-torn Europe, capturing intelligence with incalculable strategic value
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/untold-story-secret-mission-seize-nazi-map-data-180973317/
Captured data could give the Americans a pivotal advantage in realizing what would become one of geodesy’s ultimate goals—creating a unified geodetic network that covered the entire globe. In such a system, any point on Earth’s surface could be defined by numerical coordinates, and its distance and direction from any other point calculated with precision. This capability would prove incredibly useful for any long-distance human endeavor, including guiding missiles to a target on another continent, as the Cold War would soon demand.
[snip]
They had found nothing less than the central map and geodetic data repository for the German Army—the mother lode. The records of the German military, unlike those of the mostly civilian RfL, extended well beyond Germany’s prewar borders, into Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union. The material had been moved from Berlin to save it from Allied bombs.
By now the Red Army was attacking Berlin. The war would soon be over, and another problem for Hough was that Saalfeld was well inside the soon-to-be-Soviet occupation zone, as previously agreed upon by the Allied nations. In other words, the town would have to be turned over to the Soviets at the end of the war. If Hough didn’t get the maps and data out quickly, the Americans would never see them again.
In the following days, Hough and his men put together a major transport operation. He borrowed trucks, small planes and enlisted men from U.S. Army units in the area, and conscripted dozens of German civilians to help with the loading. By May 8, the day Germany officially surrendered, they had shipped 35 two-and-a-half-ton capacity truckloads of maps, data and instruments 75 miles south, to Bamberg, a town safely within the American occupation zone. By June 1, they’d moved 250 tons of captured material safely out of Saalfeld and elsewhere in Thuringia.
In Bamberg’s city hall, Hough established a new headquarters for the team, and commandeered nearly an acre of storage space for sorting the captured material. The team culled this to 90 tons of maps, aerial photographs, high-quality geodetic survey instruments and reams of printed data, which they packed into 1,200 boxes to be shipped to the Army Map Service in Washington.
The haul included complete geodetic coverage of more than a dozen European countries and states, including Russia, and several more in North Africa and the Middle East. Hough later estimated that 95 percent of this data was new to the U.S. military. It also included approximately 100,000 maps covering all of Europe, Asiatic Russia, parts of North Africa, and scattered coverage of other parts of the world. The Soviets took possession of Saalfeld on July 2. HOUGHTEAM was still moving material out of the region on July 1.
The team also captured seven giant contraptions called stereoplanigraphs—cutting-edge technology used to create topographic maps from aerial photos. Bristling with knobs and adjustable arms, each machine was big enough to fill a room and required two people to operate. A complex interior system of lenses and filters combined images from overlapping aerial photos to make high-precision measurements of elevation differences between hills and valleys and other features of the terrain. The models captured in Saalfeld were made by Zeiss, the renowned German optics firm; Hough estimated their combined value at $500,000 (nearly $7 million today). He ordered a furniture factory in Saalfeld to build shipping crates, and sent one of his officers to fetch an engineer from Zeiss headquarters to oversee the disassembly and safe packing of the precious optical equipment.
Hough’s team shipped 371 boxes of captured German equipment to the U.S., including this stereoplanigraph made by renowned German optics firm Zeiss. (Photo - The National Archives):
