29 October 2006

Fischer-Tropsch

I have just about got Uncle Dick's truck back to the condition that I think he would have appreciated. The new stainless exhaust is custom made to fit. The brakes work now, both primary and secondary. Stopping is a good thing, if you need to do that when you are going fast.

I consider the truck to be a sort of rolling memorial to what Dick and his squadron-mates did a long time ago.

I applied for another garage parking spot in the basement of Big Pink months ago so I could bring it inside. There have been enough residents who have passed away or moved out in the intervening time that I am nearing the top of the list. Once I can bring the truck inside, I will have the paint and some minor cosmetic work done, and that should be just about it. Mechanically, the little Syclone truck is humming like a son-of-a-gun.

I would like to have it done by the 2nd of November, but I don't think it is going to happen. That is a special day. I can't explain the whole thing at once, since the story is complicated. It goes from Versailles through a large industrial concern, and then to pure terror. So let me give you a little background on why Dick went where he did that day, and why he was so scared about doing it that he almost turned back.

I happened to run across a reference in the paper this morning on synthetic fuels. The article talked about the Fischer-Tropsch process for turning coal into high-grade vehicle fuel. Since the latest fuel crisis, I have kept an eye on the supply of premium gas, which is required for the high-performance engines lke the one in the Syclone.

The 4.3 liter turbo V-8 engine drinks hi-test gas, preferring 93 octane or better, when I can get it. That is a problem these days. We are going to have to learn how to get along without it, or figure out a way to produce it from something other than Middle East crude.

In 1925, Professor Franz Fischer, founding director of the Kaiser-Wilhelm Institute of Coal Research in Mulheim an der Ruhr, and his head of department, Dr Hans Tropsch, applied for a patent describing a process to produce liquid hydrocarbons from carbon monoxide gas and hydrogen using metal catalysts.

You could say that it was the Versailles treaty, and the realization among certain military and industrial men that a world-beating military machine needed a reliable source of fuel that prompted the research. Eventually, the I.G. Farben concern picked up the patents, and went into the business of making synthetic fuel, electing a Nazi government, and utilizing slave labor.

In the 1930's, Farben's predecessor company began to construct a massive complex to produce synthetic fuel near a town in middle Germany called Meresburg.

It was an old city on the river Saale, and the presence of large coal deposits made it a natural for chemical work. It held the record for many years as the dirtiest city in East Germany, which is where the vagaries of war and the advance of the Reds Army placed it.

In 1944, it was among the three most heavily defended cities in Hitler's Reich. Merseburg had a cathedral and a castle, but that was the only charm in the town. Otherwise, the place was surrounded by one of the most bleak landscapes in Europe and it bristled with 88mm cannons that could throw a shell 40,000 feet in the air. It was a gray and dusty place, and it reeked of chemicals. The Saale was discolored by toxic effluents.

More than ninety percent of Germany's aviation gasoline, and half its total petroleum during the War come from synthetic fuel plants. Meresburg was the largest of twenty-five facilities. At its peak in early 1944, the German synthetic fuels effort produced more than 124,000 barrels per day.

The Germans knew how important it was to protect the plants. The leadership of the Allied Air Forces knew how important it was to take them out. The Generals were prepared to take heavy casualties in order to do so.

Dick was stationed at Lavenham, England, about 35 miles east of Cambridge, a member of the 837th Squadron, 487th Bomb Group, 4th Wing, 3rd Division of the Eighth Air Force, United State Army Air Corps.

Dick had just changed aircraft. The squadron transitioned from B-24H/J Liberator models to B-17G's Flying Forts after D-Day. After a brief training stand-down in September, the squadron was back in action over the Continent. In October, they visited Bremen, Kassell, Lutzendorf, Cologne and Hamm, supporting the advancing armies.

Those were missions 25-29, and Dick was a lead pilot on all of them. By the end of October, 1944, the emphasis changed from supporting the ground forces to strategic assault on Hitler's life blood.

On November first, 1944, the weather forecast appeared favorable for operations over Europe. The decision was made to proceed with a thousand-plane mission the next day. The alert order began to filter down to dozens of organizations, and ordnance began to move from the bunkers to the aircraft.

Dick knew that his squadron was on alert, though he did not know where he was going. A sergeant walked through the Nissan huts, waking up the crews at 3:30 for 4:30 pre-briefing. Some of the guys braced themselves with a drink from a stash concealed in the locker. Others didn't. Some were groggy from the sleeping pills the Docs handed out to make them sleep.

Dick needed one more to get his thirty. One more mission and it was home, and his wife Barbara, and a world where no one was trying to kill him.

There was coffee in the pre-dawn darkness, and the red glow of the cigarettes that Dick hated. There was the walk to the briefing theatre, and nervous tension so thick it hung in the air like the smoke, sour smelling. The air intelligence guys had made the navigation plot of the mission on a giant map, with the rendezvous points to marshall the eight hundred bmbers and two hundred fighter escorts. The map, and the target was concealed behind a curtain for security reasons.

There were a couple hundred guys on the benches, all of them anxious to learn their fate. Was it going to be a milk run, or Berlin?

When the curtain was pulled back there were groans and curses. The mission for the second of November was the I.G. Farben synthetic oil plant at Meresburg, the Leuna Werk. The flak blossomed in the heavens above it like ugly red flowers, and hot steel ripped through aircraft and broke them to pieces and detonated the bombs they carried within, making the men within them disappear into vapor, or hurling them from the sky like dolls.

Everyone on the benches knew that a quarter of them had been condemned to death over a dirty little town in the middle of Germany. They just didn't know who.

Mission Meresburg.

Copyright 2006 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com

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