Someone wrote to Wright Field recently, saying he understood this country had got together quite a collection of enemy war secrets, that many were now on public sale, and could he, please, be sent everything on German jet engines. 'The Army Air Forces' answered: Sorry - but that would be fifty tons." Moreover, that fifty tons was just a small portion. Wright Field is working from a documents "mother lode" of fifteen hundred tons. It is estimated that over a million separate items ... very likely contain practically all the scientific, industrial, and military secrets of Germany. What did we find? The head of the communications unit ... showed me then what had been two of the most closely-guarded technical secrets of the war: the infra-red device which the Germans invented for seeing at night, and the remarkable diminutive generator which operated it. The diminutive generator - five inches across - stepped up current from an ordinary flashlight battery to 15,000 volts. It had a walnut-sized motor which spun a rotor at 10,000 rpm. The generator then ran 3,000 hours! "As for medical secrets in this collection," one Army-surgeon has remarked, "some of them will save American medicine years of research; some of them are revolutionary - like, for instance, the German technique for treatment after prolonged and usually fatal exposure to cold." This discovery ... reversed everything medical science thought about the subject. And in aeronautics and guided missiles [the secrets] proved to be downright alarming. Army Air Force experts declare publicly that in rocket power and guided missiles the Nazis were ahead of us by at least ten years.
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