GERMAN-JAPANESE MILITARY R&D COOPERATION

From: rkrouse@netcom.com (Robert K. Rouse)

According to Renato Vesco again, Germany was sharing a great deal of the advances in weaponry with their allies the Italians during the war. At the Fiat experimental facility at lake La Garda, a facility that fittingly bore the name of air martial Hermann Goering, the Italians were experimenting with numerous advanced weapons, rockets and airplanes, created in Germany. In a similar fashion, the Germans kept a close contact with the Japanese military establishment and were supplying it with many advanced weapons. I have discovered for example a photo of a copy of the manned version of the V-1 - the Reichenberg - produced in Japan by Mitsubishi. The best fighter in the world - the push-pull twin propeller Domier-335 was duplicated at the Kawashima works. Or a photo of Japanese high ranking Imperial navy officers inspecting the latest German radar station.

A Japanese friend of mine in Los Angeles related to me the story of his friend's father, who worked as technician in an aircraft research bureau in Japan during the war. In July of 1945, two and a half months after the war ended in Germany, a huge German transport submarine brought to Japan the latest of German inventions - two spherical wingless flying devices. The Japanese R&D team put the machines together, following the German instructions, and... there was something very bizarre and other-earthy standing in front of them - a ball shaped flying device without wings or propellers, that nobody knew how it flied. The fuel was added, the start button of this unmanned machine was pressed* and it .... disappeared with a roar and flames without a in the sky. The team never saw it again. The engineers were so frightened by the unexpected might of the machine, that they promptly dynamited the second prototype and choose to forget the whole incident.