Book description
In 1945, as the Allied forces approached the German border having
fought so bravely following the successful Normandy landings, it was
decided that an elite unit was needed to work alongside the frontline
soldiers as they headed east: they were called Target-Force. Until now
their story has never appeared in any histories of the period.
Through extensive archival work and after interviewing many of
the soldiers who tell their story here for the first time, historian
Sean Longden can finally reveal the previously unknown story of the
men who were sent into Germany to seize and secure highly developed
Nazi military technology, key factories and scientists.
T-Force was born out of the chaos of war torn Europe in 1945,
and it is no wonder the story reads like a spy thriller: the unit was
top secret and originated from a plan belonging to the Naval
intelligence officer, Ian Fleming, later the creator of James Bond.
The unit was selected from the remnants of the infantry after Normandy
and included drivers, sappers, bomb disposal experts, commandos and
teams of expert scientists, specialists and engineers. What they
discovered would not only shock the allied army but also play a huge
role in the opening years of the Cold War.
Between March and summer 1945, the unit was constantly at work
seizing targets in towns such as Bremen, Celle, Hamburg and Hanover,
where they uncovered a secret laboratory hidden beneath a straw
covered floor of a barn, vast blast furnaces in Ruhr Valley steel
works that were dismantled and shipped back to England, and a fully
functioning aircraft factory operating in two miles of underground
tunnels. They went in search of codebooks that could decrypt the
enemy's signals; new technology such as jet propelled engines, and
mini submarines. They also hunted down the men behind these
extraordinary feats: nearly 1,000 top scientists, some smuggled out of
the Soviet Zone in unmarked lorries, including Werner Von Braun, the
brains behind the V1 and V2 rockets who was to become a key figure in
the American space race, Otto Hahn, Germany's foremost expert in
nuclear fission and Helmut Walther, the man who inspired Ian Fleming's Moonraker.
Sean Longden's riveting history will change the story of how the
second World War was won and how the first battles of the Cold War
were fought; it reads like the finest espionage thriller of the era.
