The Second World War is a period filled with intriguing stories of espionage,
and treasure hunting, and rescue operations. However, not every such story
gets to become a Hollywood war movie. Some of these heroic tales are still shrouded in secrecy
and one such untold story is of a secret mission to seize Nazi map data. Today on Nutty History,
let’s find out who and what was HOUGHTEAM and how they helped Allies to win the big war.
Like every quest, this one also starts with an emperor’s court. And not just any emperor but
the legendary Charlamagne himself. The battle of Aachen was an important turning point in
the history of the second world war. This was the beginning of the collapse of the Nazi aggression.
For twenty days between the 2nd and 21st of October 1944, the American forces besieged
the city which was once the imperial seat of the legendary king Charlamagne.
Hitler considered it a matter of pride and ordered the German troops to defend the city
at all costs. And though the city ultimately fell to the Americans, the five thousand German
troops had put up a tenacious defense before ultimately surrendering. As American tanks
rolled into the narrow streets of the ancient city which were filled with rubble and debris,
U.S. Army Major Floyd W. Hough and two of the men under his command were seeking a library. These
three men weren’t very optimistic about finding the establishment and its contents still intact.
Wherever they looked, they found once a beautiful city of Aachen in shambles and broken. According
to Major Hough, 98% of the city was demolished. The library was supposed to be at the Technical
University of the city. When Major Hough and his team arrived there, they found it heavily
damaged by the American bombs but somehow thousands of books were still intact inside.
However, before they could check up on books, Major Hough came across some peculiar
multiple bundles of folders stacked outside the library. These bundles appeared to be left
behind hastily by escaping Germans and fortunately contained exact data that Major Hough and his team
were looking for. Major Floyd W Hough was not your regular army man. He didn’t have the build of a
perfect soldier, neither was he much experienced in the subject of fighting wars. He was a short
man with a funny mustache and he had a degree in civil engineering from Cornell. Before the war, he
was leading surveying expeditions in the American west for the US Government and charting the
rainforests of South America for oil companies. During the war, however, Major Hough was the
leader of a military intelligence team made up of carefully selected individuals. Their name will go
down in the history books as HOUGHTEAM. The top four of this team were a geographer, a linguist,
a dapper military attaché, and the Engineer Hough himself. There was also a Japanese interpreter
spy who was borrowed by the military from the Office of Strategic Services, the precursor
agency to the CIA. The other ten were enlisted men and the remaining four were Ritchie Boys!
The Ritchie Boys were European immigrants who fled to the United States to escape Nazi persecution,
just like some of the members of the titular team of Inglorious Basterds. They were trained at a
secret Military Intelligence Training Center at Camp Ritchie, Maryland. Thus, the name,
Ritchie Boys. They were given special training in interrogation and other psychological operations.
HOUGHTEAM’s job was to question European civilians about the movement of enemy troops, translate
captured documents and interrogate prisoners of war. The Ritchie Boys saw this as a second chance
at defeating Hitler. HOUGHTEAM wielded special blue passes that were issued by the Supreme
Headquarters Allied Expeditionary Force. The Supreme Headquarters Allied Expeditionary Force
or SHAEF was the headquarters of the Commander of Allied forces in northwest Europe, from late 1943
until the end of World War II under the command of the U.S., General Dwight D. Eisenhower throughout
its existence. The special blue passes allowed the HOUGHTEAM to freely roam and scout battlefields
along with 1800 pounds of cameras and other equipment for creating microfilm records.
They also carried about eleven thousand index cards which detailed the holdings of the Army
Map Services as well as their potential targets: technical universities, government institutes,
libraries, and other academic or record-keeping establishments. The index cards also named German
scientists that may potentially cooperate with the Americans. However, all of this was a top-secret
job! Not a lot of people in the allied army were aware of what these geeks-looking odd soldiers
were doing with their cameras and notes in the middle of the battlefield. Their mission was such
a closely guarded secret that one member was told not to open the envelope containing his orders
until two hours after his plane departed for Europe. Talk about the element of surprise.
The documents that HOUGHTEAM found at the doorstep of the Technical University of Aachen were the
first of many remarkable successes for them. Their achievements not only helped to bring the
end of the war closer but also helped to cast the shape of the world order that will follow the war.
However, as the whole mission was very hush-hush, the exact scope and impact of
the information discovered by HOUGHTEAM at Aachen are publicly unknown. Still,
it is pretty clear that these bundles HOUGHTEAM found at Aachen were pretty much like Ark of
The Covenant of scientific information. Perhaps the largest cache of geographic data the United
States ever obtained from an enemy power in wartime. For most of the 20th century, warfare
was highly dependent on location data. Today, we are used to having GPS on our phones and vehicles
but back then things were different. Before the US military launched its first GPS satellite in 1978,
maps were the most important tool of an army, and information was everything.
The more accurate the location data was, the more precise and deadly the strike on the enemy could
be. As Germans were obsessed with warfare for the last two decades and had invaded multiple
countries in Europe including the Soviet Union during this war, Hough and his team’s
work was no less significant than Alan Turing’s deciphering of the Enigma machine. By gathering
and synthesizing definitive geodetic data over long distances while helping to coordinate air,
ground, and naval forces the HOUGHTEAM was changing the tides single-handedly with
their knowledge and findings. But just winning the war wasn’t HOUGHTEAM’s ultimate objective.
Through this mission, they had an opportunity to create a unified geodetic network that covered the
entire globe. In such a system, any point on Earth’s surface could be defined by numerical
coordinates and its distance and direction from any other point calculated with precision.
This capability would prove incredibly useful for any long-distance human endeavor,
including guiding missiles to a target on another continent, as the Cold War would soon demand.
After the fall of Aachen, Nazi troops counterattacked desperately causing Allied lines
to suffer heavy losses at the Battle of the Bulge in Belgium and Luxembourg. Then came the winter,
which made things worse for Major Hough and his team so they had to hole up in
Paris till March of 1945 after Allied power finally muscled their way towards the Rhine
into the German heartland. Meanwhile, Major Hough assisted Belgians to record survey data
and secret lists of artillery coordinates and then discreetly shared the findings
with Washington. When the French city of Strasbourg was recaptured by the Allies,
his men removed a cache of top-quality German survey equipment before the French had a chance
to claim the gear for themselves. But the most industrious success of HOUGHTEAM’s
efforts was to gain access for one member into the pope’s private library at the Vatican, which was
strictly off-limits to members of any military, owing to the Vatican’s status of neutrality.
Their mission resumed in Bonn where they found German geodesists surprisingly helpful and
cooperative. The common German populous felt as eager to get rid of the Nazi regime to HOUGHTEAM
as the rest of the world. After disappointments in Frankfurt and Cologne, they found a stash
of vital data in Wiesbaden that helped the US seventh Army’s operation in the Rhine. Afterwards
HOUGHTEAM made contact with Reichsamt für Landesaufnahme or RfL, the German national survey
agency. Hough and his men interrogated several captured RfL officials, including the institute’s
president, Wilhelm Vollmar. Although not everyone was willing to betray the Nazis, some officers
willingly cooperated and revealed names of small and insignificant villages which weren’t on Major
Hough’s list. At Friedrichroda and Waltershausen, HOUGHTEAM found the entire archive of the RfL,
which represented the German government’s best survey data of its own territory in the midst of
valleys. Interestingly, not even Berlin was aware of the archive being hidden here. For Major Hough,
this was one of his biggest accomplishments… yet. As the next name HOUGHTEAM extracted out of
RfL’s officers was … Saalfeld. While HOUGHTEAM was wandering from city to city in search of precious
geodetic data, their main objective was sitting in Saalfeld waiting for their arrival. The mayor
of the town welcomed the team with open arms and led them to the warehouse where mother lode
was expecting them. These were the records of the German military and unlike the archive of civilian
RfL, they extended well beyond Germany’s pre war borders, into Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union.
The material had been moved from Berlin to save it from Allied bombs. Major Hough assessed the
situation and immediately called for 150 men for evacuation of this irreplaceable data. With the
Red Army marching towards Berlin and recently liberated Soviet and Polish Prisoners of War
looting homes and arson the buildings in smaller towns and villages, HOUGHTEAM was on the clock.
As previously agreed upon by the Allied nations the town would have to be turned
over to the Soviets at the end of the war. If Hough didn’t get the maps and data out quickly,
the Americans would never see them again. Hough borrowed every truck, plane, and man he could
find as quickly as possible. US or German, they didn’t care if the recruit was willing.
By May 8, the day Germany officially surrendered, they had shipped 35 two-and-a-half-ton capacity
truckloads of maps, data, and instruments 75 miles south to Bamberg, a town safely within
the American occupation zone. By June 1st, they’d moved 250 tons of captured material safely out of
Saalfeld and elsewhere in Thuringia. On July 2nd, 1945, when the Soviets arrived at Saalfeld they
found the warehouse pretty much empty as HOUGHTEAM managed to transport everything they wanted
by midnight, July 1st. In Bamberg’s city hall, Hough established a new headquarters for the team
and commandeered nearly an acre of storage space for sorting the captured material. The team culled
this to 90 tons of maps, aerial photographs, high-quality geodetic survey instruments,
and reams of printed data, which they packed into 1,200 boxes to be shipped to the Army Map Service
in Washington. The haul included complete geodetic coverage of more than a dozen European countries
and states, including Russia, and several more in North Africa and the Middle East.
Hough later estimated that 95 percent of this data was new to the U.S. military. The team
also captured seven giant contraptions called stereoplanigraphs—cutting-edge
technology used to create topographic maps from aerial photos. The models captured in
Saalfeld were made by Zeiss, the renowned German optics firm which helped in transportation.
The war ended but the mission for Major Hough didn’t, with help of captured German Geodesists,
Hough began working on datum, a geodetic network covering the entire world.
It was a near-impossible task with technology that existed in 1945,
but Hough recruited more people and more datums were added to the records. Major Hough resumed
his position as head of the Geodetic Division of the Army Map Service after returning to Washington
but continued to work internationally on the diplomatic front to complete the geodetic network.
The work reached a culmination in 1951, with the completion of the European Datum, or ED50, which
united the continent in a common geodetic network for the first time. The ED50, in turn, became
part of the foundation for a new global coordinate system known as the Universal Transverse Mercator,
the standard coordinate system used by the U.S. military and NATO. This was GPS before GPS.
Despite their accomplishments, the exploits of HOUGHTEAM have been only briefly noted
by a handful of historians, and their story has been largely forgotten even within the military
geospatial community. A cost that they paid for working in secrecy. But it is certain to say
that without Major Hough and his team, the cold war would have been a very different chapter
of the history for the USA. Do you think Major Hugh and his team of geeks deserve a war movie
like Saving Private Ryan, Monuments Men, and Inglorious Basterds? Tell us in the comments.
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if you think this story deserves to be heard. Oh and thanks for watching Nutty History.