What they discovered would not only shock the allied army but also play a huge role in the opening years of the Cold War. Between March and summer 1945, the unit was constantly at work seizing targets in towns such as Bremen, Celle, Hamburg and Hanover, where they uncovered a secret laboratory hidden beneath a straw covered floor of a barn, vast blast furnaces in Ruhr Valley steel works that were dismantled and shipped back to England, and a fully functioning aircraft factory operating in two miles of underground tunnels. They went in search of codebooks that could decrypt the enemy's signals; new technology such as jet propelled engines, and mini submarines. They also hunted down the men behind these extraordinary feats: nearly 1,000 top scientists, some smuggled out of the Soviet Zone in unmarked lorries, including Werner Von Braun, the brains behind the V1 and V2 rockets who was to become a key figure in the American space race, Otto Hahn, Germany's foremost expert in nuclear fission and Helmut Walther, the man who inspired Ian Fleming's "Moonraker".
Sean Longden's riveting history will change the story of how the Second World War was won and how the first battles of the Cold War were fought; it reads like the finest espionage thriller of the era.