Little is publicly known about the true scope of the information that Hough and his team captured, or the ingenuity they displayed in securing it, because their mission was conducted in secret, and the technical material they seized circulated only among military intelligence experts and academics. The Aachen seizure was the first in a series of remarkable successes for HOUGHTEAM that promised not only to hasten the end of the war but also to shape the world order for decades to come. His team quickly microfilmed the material and sent it to the front, where Allied artillery units could immediately use it to improve their targeting. The abandoned documents included tables of exceptionally precise survey data covering German territory that the Allies had yet to reach-just what Hough was looking for. It appeared as if the Germans “had left a number of files all roped up ready to load onto trucks when they made a hasty exit,” Hough wrote. But what caught Hough’s attention were the bundles of folders stacked outside. Though it had been nearly wrecked by American bombs, thousands of books remained. In Aachen, the library that Hough was looking for was at the Technische Hochschule, or technical university. The lists also named German scientists who seemed likely to cooperate, and some who were not to be trusted. The National Archives: National Oceanic and Atmospheric AdministrationĪlong with 1,800 pounds of cameras and other equipment for creating microfilm records, HOUGHTEAM also carried 11,000 index cards detailing the holdings of the Army Map Service as well as numerous target lists of technical universities, government institutes, libraries and other places likely to have the materials they had been sent to capture. (The National Archives)ĭetail: Early in his career, Hough led survey parties across the American West, including a 1921 trip to Arizona (Hough is at right). This article is a selection from the November 2019 issue of Smithsonian magazine BuyĪn undated photograph archived with the HOUGHTEAM files. Subscribe to Smithsonian magazine now for just $12 For the refugees among them, it was a chance to leverage their language skills and cultural familiarity to defeat the enemy that had uprooted their lives. Their job was to question European civilians about the movement of enemy troops, translate captured documents and interrogate prisoners of war. At Camp Ritchie they received training in interrogation and other psychological operations. Among the Ritchie Boys, as they were known, were European immigrants who had fled to the United States to escape Nazi persecution. Others had been through the secret Military Intelligence Training Center at Camp Ritchie, Maryland. One was a Japanese interpreter on loan from the Office of Strategic Services, the spy agency precursor to the CIA. Four were highly educated civilians: an engineer, a geographer who had worked as a map curator at the University of Chicago, a linguist who spoke five languages, and the dapper son of an prominent Kentucky family who’d grown up mostly in Europe as the son of a brigadier general posted to various capitals as a military attaché. HOUGHTEAM, as the unit was known, was made up of 19 carefully selected individuals. Their mission was such a closely guarded secret that one member later recalled he was told not to open the envelope containing his orders until two hours after his plane departed for Europe. Now he was the leader of a military intelligence team wielding special blue passes, issued by Supreme Headquarters Allied Expeditionary Force, that allowed Hough and his team to move freely in the combat zone. government and charted the rainforests of South America for oil companies. A short, serious man of 46 with receding red hair and wire-rimmed glasses, Hough had a degree in civil engineering from Cornell, and before the war he led surveying expeditions in the American West for the U.S. “The city appears to be 98% destroyed,” Hough wrote in a memo to Washington. Hough and two of his men arrived in early November. Rubble still clogged the streets when U.S. Bloody building-to-building combat ensued until, finally, on October 21, 1944, Aachen became the first German city to fall into Allied hands. Tanks then rolled into the narrow streets of the ancient city, the imperial seat of Charlemagne, which Hitler had ordered defended at all costs. American planes and artillery pounded the Nazi defenses for days.
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