Captain Michael Howard
Officer whose secret postwar unit seized German equipment from under the noses of the Soviets
CAPTAIN MICHAEL HOWARD, who has died aged 92, served with the secret unit, T-force, in the early stages of the Allied occupation of Germany.
In 1944, with the end of the war in Europe in sight, a secret order to raise a “Target Force” was issued from General Eisenhower’s Supreme HQ. As early as 1942, “intelligence commandos”, the brainchild of Ian Fleming, then in Naval Intelligence, had been given the task of seizing key items of enemy technology, including secret weapons and coding machines, in raids in the Mediterranean, North Africa, Sicily and Italy.
T-force, which came under the control of the British Intelligence Objectives Subcommittee (BIOS), was designed to work on the same principle during the occupation of Germany. Howard, based at Kamen, near Munster, operated in the provinces of North Rhine and Westphalia, which included the Ruhr.
As Intelligence Officer of No 1 T-force, with his comrades he was responsible for the evacuation of targeted material – battlefield and industrial equipment, and intellectual property such as blueprints and patents – and the efficient running of the operation in an area containing the great majority of German heavy industry. The recipients of these items were, to a large extent, deputations from countries which were part of the Allied cause.
They were often racing against time to secure research facilities before these were destroyed, or to find prominent scientists and industrialists before they fell into the hands of the Russians. Once targets had been identified, seized and guarded, T-force would bring in the assessors and investigators who had been called upon by BIOS.
An additional task was to provide accommodation, sustenance and transport to the specialists who came to identify targets, notably German machinery, that they wished to remove. Howard travelled widely throughout the devastated region and described much of it as resembling a moonscape.
Sometimes he went in search of scientists who had gone missing. There were also Nazis who were on the run and had to be rounded up, and he accompanied the civil police on raids of late night bars in search of people on the “wanted” list.
In May 1946 he organised the evacuation of seven German scientists to England. An eighth, Dr August Wingler, a chemist who had been employed by IG Farben, attempted to commit suicide and was too ill to travel. He had been awarded a medal for the discovery and patenting of dye-based pharmaceutical chemicals. These were promoted as cures for typhus and were later used at Auschwitz by Dr Mengele in his notorious “experiments”. Wingler seemed unlikely to recover his health and he was not sent for again.
Michael Henry Samuel Howard, the son of an officer in the Colonial Administrative Service, was born in Fiji on May 26 1926. He was educated at Rugby and, in September 1944, joined the Green Jackets Rifle Depot at Fulford Barracks, York, which had been moved from Winchester to enable American units to occupy the premises.
Twelve months later, after attending Octu, he was commissioned into the Rifle Brigade (RB). After serving with the 2nd Motor Training Bn and 27th Greenjackets Holding Bn, in March 1946 he was posted to Kamen. He joined 1st Bucks Bn, Oxfordshire and Buckinghamshire Light Infantry.
Increasingly, as a defeated Germany was no longer seen as the enemy and the Soviet Union became viewed as the main threat, denial to the Russians of targets of intelligence interest became policy. A team of Russians was due to visit Krupp’s Widia works at Essen. It was known that several thousand kilograms of highly refined uranium ore were lying loose there and it was important there should be no trace of it when the team arrived.
Howard organised the removal of the ore in hastily assembled mortar bomb boxes which were loaded on to a 10-ton truck and taken to an RAF base. “Arm yourself with a Sten gun,” he told the mess corporal, “sit on the boxes, and if any bastard tries to take them away from you, shoot him!”
On another occasion, a Russian reparation team was due to visit a German aluminium factory. Equipment there weighing more than 100 tons had already been requested by British Aluminium and only T-force’s heavy workload had prevented it being evacuated. Howard’s office decided that the only solution was to throw a party for the Russians before the ceremonial signing of an inventory from which details of that equipment had been deliberately excluded.
The Russians brought a crate of vodka and the British officers matched this, bottle for bottle, with German brandy. “These ingredients were
mixed,” Howard recalled, “and the unholy brew could have fuelled a V2 rocket.” The inebriated Russians cheerfully signed an incomplete inventory and within a few days the equipment had been dismantled and was on its way to a factory in Monmouth.
There was constant friction between T-force and the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration because UNNRA was determined to restore German industry while T-force was set upon dismantling it.
As the Cold War intensified, the task of rebuilding Germany became a priority and the British government became uneasy about the way in which T-force had been used as an instrument of retribution. Reference to the Force in print was discouraged, the cataloguing of targets evacuated was proscribed and the destruction of documents made the task of writing a complete history of the unit close to impossible.
Howard was gazetted captain in September 1946 and demobilised in December 1947. He then went to Peterhouse, Cambridge, as an Exhibitioner, to read Modern and Medieval Languages and, after graduating, he joined WR Grace, the American industrial conglomerate.
He worked for the company for 13 years, of which seven were spent in Central America, before moving to the Bank of London and South America, which later merged into the Lloyds Bank Group, where he worked until 1986.
In retirement, he transcribed letters in manuscript from the Peninsula Campaign for the Royal Green Jackets (Rifles) Museum and, for 15 years, he was a volunteer director and counsellor at the Great Weald Enterprise Agency.
He published Otherwise Occupied: Letters Home from the Ruins of Nazi Germany (2010), a memoir of his service in T-force.
In 1954 Michael Howard married Ann Gunter in Guatemala, during his spell in Central America. She predeceased him and he is survived by their two sons and a daughter.
Michael Howard, born May 26 1926, died August 16 2018