Category: T-Force

How much was T-Force worth to the British Economy … £20 million or £2,000 million?

10 November 2010

In my last post, I wrote about an excellent new book, Otherwise Occupied, by Michael Howard who, as a young man in occupied Germany after the war, worked as Intelligence Officer for T-Force, the secret British army unit which obtained material: equipment, documents and technical know-how, from Germany to benefit the British economy.

The book raises the intriguing question of how much the material removed by T-Force was worth in monetary terms. The difference between what Michael Howard and his colleagues thought the value was at the time, and later official estimates, is striking.

In the book, Michael Howard claimed that an internal report, compiled in 1949 by staff who had worked for T-Force, proposed the extraordinary figure of £2,000 million as the total value of material removed by T-Force. He made a similar point in his review, in the RUSI  Journal, of Sean Longden’s history of T-Force, regretting that although Longden discussed the issue in his book, he did not ‘hazard a view’ as to the correct amount. An article in the Daily Express, on 9 October 1946, had suggested that the total value of property obtained by T-Force, then less than half-way into its programme, was the lower, but still substantial, amount of £100 million. Longden referred to an interview with a British official, who had said this figure was ‘niggardly’ and at the very bottom end of the scale of what had actually been achieved. This suggests a total figure for the whole programme of well into the hundreds of millions of pounds, if not quite as high as the two billion pounds estimated by Michael Howard’s former colleagues in 1949.

Figures quoted by historians for the total value of reparations obtained by Britain from Germany are very much lower than this. UK official receipts for reparations from Germany after the Second World War totalled just over £30 million. Alan Bullock quoted a similar figure of £29 million, in his biography of Ernest Bevin, the British Foreign Secretary.

There would seem to be four possible reasons for this discrepancy.

Firstly, like was not compared with like. Most of the material removed by T-Force by-passed the official system which allocated reparations from Germany among the western allies. This was co-ordinated by an organisation known as IARA, the ‘Inter Allied Reparations Agency’, created on 14 January 1946, consisting of representatives from 18 countries claiming a share in reparations from Germany.

Material obtained on the battlefield was classified as ‘booty’, rather than as reparations, and could be unilaterally removed by the victors for their own use. As John Farquharson has described in an article in the Journal of Contemporary History, the victorious allies failed to agree on exactly what comprised ‘booty’ or a ‘battlefield’ in modern warfare, but eventually accepted the fairly wide definition that booty consisted of: ‘any material of whatever nature and wherever situated’ intended for use in war. In March 1946 a more narrow definition of ‘booty’ was adopted by the British. According to Farquharson:

‘There is no doubt that up to that date [March 1946] large amounts of information, technical research facilities and prototype machines were confiscated as booty by the British authorities in Germany, and that some of what disappeared did not come under the heading of purely military usage. Until 1 January 1946 the war against Japan validated (at least in theory) such actions, but confiscation continued even after that date. … However, it is true that whatever industrial machinery found its way to Britain under this rubric prior to March 1946, thereafter booty excluded such material. Unilateral removals of industrial prototypes and so on were now carried out as reparations, chargeable to Britain at IARA.’

Eventually an official figure of £48,000 was produced, in 1951, for the value of material removed as ‘booty’ (but excluding anything removed before 1 January 1946, when no satisfactory records had been kept). This figure is tiny; less than 1,000th of the £100 million quoted in the Daily Express on 9 October 1946 as the total value of property obtained by T-Force, which suggests that either the value of material removed as ‘booty’ was actually very much higher than this, or there were other reasons for the discrepancy.

A second possible explanation is that the figure quoted in the Daily Express, and the report Michael Howard recalled seeing in 1949, may both have assumed a much higher value for intangibles, (such as documents, patents and know-how transmitted by German scientists recruited by T-Force to work in Britain), than later official estimates, which did not include figures for ‘intellectual reparations’.

During the war there had been a massive expansion in industrial capacity in Britain, to manufacture arms and equipment to support the war effort, so there was no great need for additional industrial equipment such as machine tools. Quality and know-how was a different matter. According to an article in The Times on 10 December 1946, a vast quantity of information was compiled by 10,000 investigators working in Germany for BIOS, the British Intelligence Objectives Sub-Committee, supported by Michael Howard and his colleagues in T-Force. 1,400 reports were produced by BIOS on a wide range of industries including agriculture, fisheries, electrical and mechanical engineering, glass and ceramics, metals, mineral, optical and mechanical precision instruments, rubber, textiles and clothing. Industrialists were encouraged to make use of ‘Germany’s war-time advances in science and heavy industry’ at an exhibition, organised by the Board of Trade, which opened in London on 9 December 1946, and then toured the country. According to The Times, 460,000 copies of the reports had already been circulated to various institutions and 490,000 copies sold to individuals. All material was freely available so there was ‘no question of infringement of patent rights by British manufacturers.’

Given the scale of this operation, it is easy to imagine a high value could be placed on the information obtained. From an accounting perspective, however, the intangible nature of these assets and the lack of patent protection could make it difficult, if not impossible, to provide an accurate monetary assessment of how much the material obtained in this way was worth.

A third possible reason for the discrepancy, was that it was in the interest of the British government to minimise the value of reparations booked to their own account, so as not to have to share these with the 17 other Western Allies or with the Soviet Union, which, according to the Potsdam Agreement, was entitled to 25% of the total value of reparations obtained from the British Zone (in addition to 100% of the reparations from their own zone). In his article, John Farquharson described how both IARA and the Soviet Union were suspicious of the official figures produced by the British. IARA expressed ‘grave concerns’ over unaccounted removals by the occupying powers (ie Britain, France, the US and the Soviet Union) and ‘fictitious figures’ were given by the British government to the Soviet Union, at the March 1947 meeting of the quadripartite Council of Foreign Ministers.

Michael Howard was quite forthright in his review in the RUSI Journal as to what he considered had happened. Whatever the correct number was for the value of material obtained by T-Force, he wrote: ‘it was one that His Majesty’s Government intended to conceal…’

‘The parallel operations of the Russians, who were not members of the IARA in Brussels, but took whatever they wanted by way of unilateral reparations as well as booty, were on a scale calculated to have been ten times that of T-Force. As the British had been openly critical of the Russian wholesale sacking of any territory under their control, public disclosure of any definitive figure for our own calculations would have made us appear embarrassingly hypocritical. Any unilateral reparations taken by the British were meant to be declared to the IARA in Brussels and deducted from their multilateral reparations entitlement. In the 1961 final report of the IARA, the British total was shown as $180 million, equivalent at the rate of exchange prevailing in 1946-48 to £45 million. It had already reached that sum by the end of 1946, as shown in their annual report for that year. This meant either that they had not declared much of what had been taken, or that they had declared absurdly low values, or both. If the total suggested in 1949 [by his former colleagues] had been published, they were at risk of being found out in a deception.’

Fourthly, the official figures may have been broadly correct and the estimates by the Daily Express and Michael Howard’s former colleagues exaggerated. This is the conclusion John Farquharson reached at the end of his article, writing that: ‘Britain's tangible gains from Germany did not amount to any great worth … How far the gap was covered by intellectual reparations cannot be determined with any accuracy’ he continued, as patent information was generally published and made available to all and it was not reasonable to expect to UK to book a financial benefit for something that was shared with others. In the same way, he argued, the UK received no royalty payments for the discovery of penicillin or Whittle’s work on jet engines, as the work on both of these was undertaken in the UK, but the benefits shared with other countries. In addition, he wrote, British payments to its own zone in Germany totalled £140 million by April 1947, far in excess of the official receipts from reparations of around £30 million.

References:

Michael Howard, Otherwise Occupied: Letters Home from the Ruins of Nazi Germany, (Tiverton: Old Street Publishing, 2010)

Sean Longden, T-Force: the Race for Nazi War Secrets, 1945 (London: Constable, 2009)

John E. Farquharson, ‘Governed or Exploited? The British Acquisition of German Technology, 1945-48’, Journal of Contemporary History, Vol.32, No.1, (1997), pp 23-42

Michael Howard, ‘Review of Sean Longden, T-Force: the Race for Nazi War Secrets 1945’, RUSI Journal, (December 2008), pp 108-110

Michael Howard – Otherwise Occupied

19th October 2010

I first heard from Michael Howard in October 2008, when he emailed me to say he was personally ‘an alumnus of Nachkriegsdeutschland '46/7’ and asked if I would send him a copy of my MA dissertation on ‘Winning the Peace’. He thought it would be of interest to his U3A (University of the Third Age) group, which was studying the ‘Aftermath of Conflict’ in various times and places.

I was very happy to do so, and since then he has been kind enough to share with me some memories of the time he spent in Germany in 1946-47, as Intelligence Officer for T-Force, the secret British army unit first set up in 1944 to investigate and secure research laboratories and factories by-passed by the front-line troops as they advanced into Germany and which later ‘evacuated’ to Britain a large quantity of equipment, machinery, documents and key individuals and scientists.

Michael Howard has now published his memoirs of this time as Otherwise Occupied: Letters Home from the Ruins of Nazi Germany. Remarkably, the 67 letters he wrote home between February 1946 and December 1947 were kept by his mother and these letters, reprinted word for word, provide the chronological framework for the book, with the author commenting, explaining and elucidating various points in the letters to provide the context, or to highlight aspects that now appear important or amusing.

As a result, the book has the authenticity of a contemporary record, (he was only 19 years old when he was first posted to Germany), while the commentary helps the story flow and makes it easy to read, explaining the background to events and who were the various people mentioned in the letters.

The book tells two stories, both equally fascinating. The first is his contribution to the history of T-Force, one of the very few aspects of the Second World War which is still largely neglected by historians. At first, as he wrote to his mother, he was pleased to be given a job that was not a ‘liability to the taxpayer’ and the consequences of which had ‘a considerable and direct bearing on our economic recovery'. By the time he left Germany, his work had become his hobby and he carried on ‘evacuating’ material, as his personal contribution to British economic recovery, in the face of increasing resistance from senior officers and administrators, as the world changed around him and the official British policy was to help promote economic recovery in Germany, rather than extracting what they could in the way of reparations.

The second is a love-story, which ended in neither consummation nor tragedy, of his romance with the daughter of the local doctor, whose house had been requisitioned as accommodation for British officers. The doctor and his family were evicted from the house but were allowed to keep the use of his consulting room and the garden. As his relationship with the doctor’s daughter developed he found, as he wrote to his mother, that ‘to sit in the [officers’] mess evening after evening, discussing the three inch mortar, or the war strength of the armoured division, or re-fighting this or that battle, is infinitely tedious. I would rather spend my time talking to a pleasant and intelligent German than a stupid and uncongenial Englishman.’ It is an unusual love-story, because the power of social conventions, on both sides, persuaded them to control their passions and go their separate ways, she to train as a doctor and he to take up his university place at Cambridge. Since then they have stayed in touch, as friends, for over sixty years.

References

Michael Howard, Otherwise Occupied: Letters Home from the Ruins of Nazi Germany, (Tiverton: Old Street Publishing, 2010)

The book is published by Old Street Publishing. Copies are available and can be bought from Amazon and other web booksellers.

John Bayley: In Another Country

18th January 2009

How useful is a work of fiction as a historical source? It’s difficult enough to work out how accurate supposedly factual accounts are, especially if they were written long after the events they describe. Fiction doesn’t even claim to be an accurate record of “how it really was.” On the other hand, the atmosphere of a place, and the thoughts and feelings of the people who were there, can sometimes emerge more strongly from fiction, than from official documents or other factual sources, in which much may be assumed, but never expressed directly and therefore remains hidden.

John Bayley is now best known now as the husband of Iris Murdoch and author of the best-selling books 'Iris: A Memoir of Iris Murdoch', and 'Elegy for Iris', in which he told the story of her decline in old age due to Alzheimer’s Disease. He is also a distinguished literary critic, fellow of New College Oxford and from 1974-1992 was Warton Professor of English at Oxford University.

'In Another Country', was his first, and for a long time his only, novel. It was published in 1955 and reissued by Oxford Univeristy Press as a "Twentieth Century Classic" in 1986. The novel is set in Germany in 1945 in "the first cold winter of peace" and is based on John Bayley’s own experiences there, as a young officer at the end of the war. 

I am no literary critic, but the book is clearly well written. In the introduction to the 1986 edition, A N Wilson, who was taught by John Bayley at Oxford and later wrote his own biography of Iris Murdoch, quoted the novelist Elizabeth Bowen, speaking with “a most distinguished and personalized stammer, which caused her voice to seize up suddenly on key words” once asking him:

“‘Have you read John’s novel?’
‘No’
‘Well it’s very …’
‘Good’ I clumsily prompted her again
‘It’s quite brilliant”’. She said sharply, as if I had contradicted her. ‘It is a great pity that he has never written any more.’”

The title of the book comes from Christopher Marlowe’s play The Jew of Malta, (act 4, scene 1). The relevant passage is:

Barnadine: Thou hast committed …
Barabas:    Fornication? But that was in another country, and besides the wench is dead.

A girl does die in the book, though not, perhaps, the one the reader expects.

This is not the place to re-tell the story of the novel. Suffice it to say that the hero is Oliver Childers, a young lieutenant in the British military forces in Germany. John Bayley himself worked in T-Force, an exclusive unit with the job of identifying German scientists who could be useful to Britain at the end of the war. The fictional hero of the book appears to do something very similar, but his work is of no concern at all to Oliver, and is described in the book as follows:

“P(I)15 was chiefly engaged in reporting on the condition and prospects of the local industries which had survived bombardment. More ambitiously and in collaboration with other units that bore the code P, it sometimes set about the absorption of a technician, a process, or a whole plant, whose services were coveted back in England. But such undertakings were obscure and protracted, dating from a past too remote for the longest memory of the present staff: even the Colonel, who had been in charge nearly four months, could not remember beginning or finishing anything of this kind. What the unit did was ultimately mysterious to itself, but it was a tranquil mystery – no one yearned to behold the completed pattern, the larger meaning. Like conveyor-belt workers who attend their passing bits and pieces and remain indifferent to the nature of the final product, the personnel of P(I) 15 dealt with their daily stint of letters, files and samples, and looked no further. ”

Germany appears as almost a make-believe place, in the interlude between the war and his inevitable return to England:

“But Germany was like the films, or a story about exposure in lifeboats or thirst in the desert – neither mind nor body really believed it. Perhaps it was bad for you not to believe. Perhaps they were laying up trouble for themselves at home. As he talked with his colleagues Oliver had often wondered about that, and half dreaded his approaching demobilisation.”

The main theme of the book is how the various people in the unit related to each other, on a personal basis, and Oliver’s own relationship with Liese, a young German woman. As with all good novels, it can be interpreted in different ways and works on many levels, but above all, it seemed to me, it describes one (fictional) young man’s attempt to make sense of his life, and what to do next. After various events in Germany, some of which involve him directly, some indirectly, some quite dramatic, but described with great understatement, he returns to his parents' suburban house in England and half-heartedly tries to find a job.  

“Life was all before him – but that was just the trouble.”

He loses his job, but keeps the girl, and the book ends with an uncertain future ahead of him.

“‘Which way do we go?’
Oliver drew a deep breath. ‘We’ll decide that when we get outside,’ he said firmly.”

In summary, it seems to me, John Bayley’s novel, In Another Country, is a useful reminder to historians that, for some young British men in Germany at the end of the war, the work they did was insignificant and of little concern. In stark contrast with the high and noble claims of senior officers, (referred to in previous posts on this blog), that what they were doing was “fighting a battle to save the soul of Germany”, these young men were concerned, above all, with their own personal relationships with friends, colleagues and sometimes, lovers, how they could re-build their lives at the end of the war and what would happen to them when they got home.

References:

John Bayley, In Another Country, first published by Constable & Co, 1955. Republished by Oxford University Press, 1986, with an introduction by A N Wilson

For two other, completely different and contrasting descriptions of T-Force, see:

Ian Cobain writing in The Guardian on 29th August 2007

Tom Bower, The Paperclip Conspiracy: The Battle for the Spoils and Secrets of Nazi Germany, (Paladin, 1988) (First Published by Michael Joseph Ltd, 1987)