[Radio Wrangler]

I heard some of it from the horse's mouth, so to speak. An old boy of the school I was at described destroying a lot of equipment while he was involved in the first stages of occupation. He was involved in a terrible discovery. They wanted to preserve enough of the equipment as evidence of what had been done, but they wanted to destroy as much as possible so that it could not be used again. Some technology was transferred, most famously Werner von Braun and the rocketry archive. It wasn't simply a case of us versus them, many families in Germany had been victims of the nazis. For them it was liberation. Some others had been enthusiastic nazis, some had just been caught up in it and not had the luxury of choice. The clean-up was complex.

Meanwhile back in Blighty, Churchill ordered the cover up of what Bletchley park had achieved, including the destruction of much of its equipment The British government wanted other countries happily using enigma/lorenz style cyphers, quite unaware that we could break them. The public heard about atomic bomb tests and new designs of jet fighters, but out of sight, GCHQ was at work.

There was some laboratory glassware at our school which had come out of Germany. It had superbly engineered ground-glass conical interconnections. Older pupils were told the name of the place it had come from.

We may think we're living in complicated times with feelings running high, but it must be quite mild compared to that period. I'm young enough to have missed it, old enough to have been brought up by the generation that didn't, and while it was still fresh in their minds. Current crops of politicians always seem, at the time, like gibbering loonies, but the generation before me had to deal with Mussolini, Hitler, Hiro Hito, and then Stalin.

I can understand how people in the clean-up phase of WWII wanted to leave little lying around that might be useful in WWIII.

David