Operation Big

Operation Big was an operation of the Alsos Mission, the Allied seizure of facilities, materiel, and personnel related to the German nuclear weapon project during World War II. It was tasked with sweeping several targeted towns in the area of southwest Germany designated to the French First Army, including Hechingen, Bisingen, Haigerloch, and Tailfingen.

Operating behind German lines the U.S. task force successfully carried out its mission of seizing or destroying all project related assets and capturing its top scientists in the last week of April and first week of May, 1945.

Shortly after the liberation of Paris it was decided to bomb German nuclear facilities wherever they lay in order to deprive the Soviet Union of their technology and personnel, unless American troops could get to them first. Worried that French forces might beat the US to Werner Heisenberg's laboratory in Hechingen, Alsos chief Lt-Col Boris Pash hastily organized a flying column of combat engineers from the 1269th Engineer Combat Battalion, the U.S. Sixth Army Group's T-Force intelligence assault force ("Task Force A"). His team reached Horb three days later and headed for Haigerloch while the French forward troops occupied themselves with looking for members of the Vichy Government twenty miles deeper into Württemberg in the Sigmaringen enclave.

Pash and his engineers, accompanied by the Sixth Army Group's Chief of Intelligence, General Eugene Harrison, overran Haigerloch on 23 April 1945.

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