Bear Grylls: Ghost Flight

Harper’s Magazine , October 1946

SECRETS BY THE THOUSANDS

By C. Lester Walker

Someone wrote to Wright Field Airbase recently, saying he understood this country had got together quite a collection of enemy war secrets… and could he, please, be sent everything on German jet engines. The Air Documents Division of the Army Air Forces answered:

‘Sorry – but that would be fifty tons.’

Moreover, that fifty tons was just a small portion of what is today undoubtedly the biggest collection of captured enemy war secrets ever assembled. If you always thought of war secrets – and who hasn’t? – as coming in sixes and sevens… it may interest you to learn that the war secrets in this collection run into the thousands, that the mass of documents is mountainous, and that there has never before been anything quite comparable to it.

Daily Mail , March 1988

THE PAPERCLIP CONSPIRACY

By Tom Bower

The Paperclip Conspiracy was the climax of an astonishing battle between the Allies in the aftermath of the war to seize the spoils of Nazi Germany. Just weeks after Hitler’s defeat, men classified as ‘ardent Nazis’ were chosen by senior officers in the Pentagon to become respectable American citizens.

While in Britain political controversy inhibited plans to hire incriminated Germans in the drive for economic recovery, the French and Russians took on anyone regardless of their crimes, and the Americans, through a web of deceit, sanitised the murderous record of their Nazi scientists.

The proof of German technical prowess is overwhelmingly established in the hundreds of reports written by Allied investigators, who do not shy away from describing the Germans’ ‘astonishing achievements’ and ‘superb invention’.

Hitler does indeed have the last laugh on his enemies.

The Sunday Times , December 2014

VAST SECRET NAZI ‘TERROR WEAPONS’ SITE UNCOVERED IN AUSTRIA

By Bojan Pancevski

A secret underground complex built by the Nazis towards the end of the Second World War that may have been used for the development of weapons of mass destruction, including a nuclear bomb, has been uncovered in Austria.

The vast facility was discovered last week near the town of St Georgen an der Gusen. It is believed to be connected to the nearby B8 Bergkristall underground factory that produced the Messerschmitt Me 262, the first operational jet-powered fighter, which posed a brief threat to Allied air forces in the war’s closing stages. Declassified intelligence documents as well as testimony from witnesses helped excavators identify the concealed entrance.

‘This was a gigantic industrial complex and most likely the biggest secret weapons production facility of the Third Reich,’ said Andreas Sulzer, an Austrian documentary film-maker who is in charge of the excavations.

Sulzer assembled a team of historians and found further evidence of scientists working on the secret project, which was managed by SS General Hans Kammler. Kammler was in charge of Hitler’s missile programmes, including the V-2 rocket used against London in the latter stages of the war.

He was known as a brilliant but ruthless commander, who had signed off the blueprints for the gas chambers and crematoria at the Auschwitz concentration camp complex in southern Poland. Rumours persist that he was captured by the Americans and given a new identity after the war.

Sulzer’s excavation was stopped last Wednesday by local authorities, who demanded a permit for research on historic sites. But he is confident that digging can resume next month. ‘Prisoners from concentration camps across Europe were hand-picked for their special skills – physicists, chemists or other experts – to work on this monstrous project, and we owe it to the victims to finally open the site and reveal the truth,’ said Sulzer.

His eyes opened.

Slowly.

Peeling apart eyelash by eyelash, straining against the thick crust of blood that fused one with the other. Cracks sprung a fraction at a time, like broken glass over bloodshot eyeballs. The brightness seemed to scorch into his retina, as if a laser was being focused on to his eyeballs. But who by? Who were the enemy… his tormentors? And where in God’s name were they?

He couldn’t remember the slightest damn thing.

What day was it? What year was it, even? How had he got here – wherever here might be?

The sunlight hurt like hell, but at least his sight was returning to him, little by little.

The first concrete object that Will Jaeger became aware of was the cockroach. It swam into focus, looking blurry, monstrous and alien as it filled his entire vision.

As far as he could tell, his head seemed to be lying sideways on a floor. Concrete. Covered in a thick brownish scum of God only knows what. With his head at this angle, the cockroach appeared to be approaching as if it was about to crawl right inside his left eye socket.

The beast flicked its feelers towards him, at the last moment drifting out of sight, scuttling past the tip of his nose. And then Jaeger felt it claw its way up the side of his head.

The cockroach stopped somewhere around his right temple – the one that was lying furthest from the floor, fully exposed to the air.

It started feeling around with its front legs and mandibles.

As if it were searching for something. Tasting something.

Jaeger felt it begin to chew; biting into flesh; insect jaws carving their way in. He sensed the hissy, hollow clacking of the roach’s serrated mandibles, as they ripped away shreds of rotten meat. And then – as the scream left his lips soundlessly – he sensed that there were dozens more swarming over him… as if he were long dead.

Jaeger fought down the waves of nausea, one question crashing through his brain: why couldn’t he hear himself scream?

With a superhuman effort he moved his right arm.

It was just the barest fraction, but still he felt as if he were trying to lift the entire world. Each centimetre that he managed to raise it, his shoulder socket and elbow joint screamed out in agony, his muscles spasming with the puny effort he was forcing from them.

He felt like a cripple.

What in God’s name had happened to him?

What had they done to him?

Gritting his teeth, and focusing on the sheer force of will, he drew the arm towards his head, dragging his hand across his ear, scrabbling at it, desperately. The fingers made contact with… legs. Scaly, spiny, insect-savage legs, each twitching and pulsing as it tried to force the cockroach body deeper into his ear hole.

Get them out of there! Get them out! Get them OUUUUTTT!

He felt like vomiting, but there was nothing in his guts. Just a shitty dry film of near-death, which coated everything – his stomach lining, his throat, his mouth; even his nostrils.

Oh shit! His nostrils. They were trying to crawl in there too!

Jaeger cried out again. Longer. More despairing. This is not the way to die. Please God, not like this…

Again and again his fingers scrabbled at his bodily orifices, the roaches kicking and hissing their insect anger as he prised them free.