Operation LUSTY

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 ATI teams competed with 32 allied technical intelligence groups to gain information and equipment recovered from crash sites.

[1] 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.

[1] 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.

[1] 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 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 to U.S. controlled areas all "black listed" planes, secret weapons equipment and supporting documents, some four months before Germany's surrender.

In Operation Sea Horse the British loaned them the originally American-built escort carrier HMS Reaper, first commissioned for the US Navy as the USS Winjah.

[1] It is possible that, as part of Lusty, both an American-captured example of the Junkers Ju 290 four-engined maritime patrol aircraft, and a captured prototype example of the Heinkel He 177A-7 (Werknummer 550 256), a late war development of the Luftwaffe's only operational heavy bomber, had been ferried from Europe to the Park Ridge Depot, only to both be similarly crushed flat and buried under the modern O'Hare airport runways.