Operation Lusty

Operation LUSTY (LUftwaffe Secret TechnologY) was the United States Army Air Forces effort to capture and evaluate German aeronautical technology during and after World War II.

During World War II, the U.S. Army Air Forces Intelligence Service sent teams to Europe to gain access to enemy aircraft, technical and scientific reports, research facilities, and weapons for study in the United States. The Air Technical Intelligence (ATI) teams, trained at the Technical Intelligence School at Wright Field, Ohio, collected enemy equipment to learn about Germany's technical developments. The ATI teams competed with 32 allied technical intelligence groups to gain information and equipment recovered from crash sites.

As the war concluded, the various intelligence teams, including the ATI, shifted from tactical intelligence to post hostilities investigations. Exploitation intelligence increased dramatically.

On 22 April 1945, the USAAF combined technical and post-hostilities intelligence objectives under the Exploitation Division with the code name Lusty. Operation Lusty began with the aim of exploiting captured German scientific documents, research facilities, and aircraft. The Operation had two teams.

Team One, under the leadership of Colonel Harold E. Watson, a former Wright Field test pilot, collected enemy aircraft and weapons for further examination in the United States.

Team Two recruited scientists, collected documents and investigated facilities.

In 1944 intelligence experts at Wright Field had developed lists of advanced aviation equipment they wanted to examine. Watson and his crew, nicknamed "Watson's Whizzers," composed of pilots, engineers and maintenance men, used these "Black Lists" to collect aircraft. Watson organized his Whizzers into two sections. One collected jet aircraft and the other procured piston-engine aircraft and nonflyable jet and rocket equipment.

After the war, the Whizzers added Luftwaffe test pilots to the team. One was Hauptmann Heinz Braur. On 8 May 1945, Braur flew 70 women, children and wounded troops to Munich-Riem airport. After he landed, Braur was approached by one of Watson's men who gave him the choice of either going to a prison camp or flying with the Whizzers. Braur thought flying preferable. Three Messerschmitt employees also joined the Whizzers: Karl Baur, the Chief Test Pilot of Experimental Aircraft, test pilot Ludwig Hoffman, and engineering superintendent Gerhard Coulis. Test pilot Herman Kersting joined later. When the Whizzers located nine Messerschmitt Me 262 jet aircraft at Lechfeld airfield near Augsburg, these German test pilots had the expertise to fly them. It is also interesting to note that it has been alleged and partially substantiated by declassified documents that the Whizzers recruited captured Luftwaffe personnel and pilots held at Fort Bliss, Texas, to go into what would become the British, French and Soviet controlled areas after V-E Day, to fly out, hide, or otherwise remove all "black listed" planes, secret weapons equipment and supporting documents to the U.S controlled areas some 4 months before Germany's surrender.

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