Between May and July 1945, immediately after Germany's defeat in the Second World War, a British technical mission led by Sir Roy Fedden flew from England in two RAF C-47 Dakotas to inspect the defeated German aircraft industry on the ground. The Fedden Mission to Germany Final Report, published in the This Was the Enemy series in a 214-page restored edition with 132 illustrations (edited by C. Barrowman, with researchers C. MacKay and A. Morrison), presents the mission's full account of what British engineers found inside Germany's factories, research centres and underground plants.
From England by Dakota: May to July 1945
In the spring and summer of 1945, Allied technical teams moved across occupied Germany to examine aeronautical facilities before equipment, technical drawings and engineering personnel were dispersed. Fedden's team travelled across the ruined industrial landscape in two Royal Air Force C-47 Dakotas, visiting aero-engine works, airframe factories and aerodynamic laboratories between May and July 1945.
Unlike later secondary summaries, the report records the immediate engineering assessment made by specialists who inspected the sites first-hand. The edition published by Charles E. MacKay Books is neither a raw scan nor an unedited print-on-demand PDF: both the text and all 132 illustrations and technical drawings have been fully restored for legibility so researchers and aviation historians can study the diagrams and photographs alongside the text.
Jet engines, wind tunnels and underground manufacture at Nordhausen
Four subjects stand at the centre of the mission's inspection: German gas-turbine and jet-engine development, airframe manufacturing methods, high-speed wind tunnels, and the underground production complexes established late in the war. At Nordhausen, the team witnessed the grim reality of the slave-labour camps used to build aeroplanes and weapons underground.
That combination of technical examination and industrial testimony makes the report an essential primary source for readers of This was the Enemy: The Luftwaffe 1945 and This Was the Enemy Volume Two: Aeroplanes, Armament, Bombs, Downfall. Where those volumes trace Luftwaffe organisation, procurement, underground dispersal and armament across the war years, the Fedden report shows how British aeronautical engineers evaluated the surviving plant, tooling and research facilities at the moment the war in Europe ended.
Projected airframes and post-war American fighters
One of the most striking parts of the volume is its record of projected German airframes and aerodynamic layouts that never entered wartime squadron service cleanly, yet shaped post-war aviation. The restored drawings include projected configurations whose swept-wing and high-speed research was carried into post-war American aircraft manufacture, notably the Bell X-5 variable-sweep research aircraft and the Republic F-84 series.
For readers who also follow Cold War fighter and deterrent development in Sabres from the North: Mutual aid during the Cold War and Sonic to Standoff: The Evolution of the British Nuclear Deterrent, these drawings show the physical bridge between late-war German research laboratories and the first generation of post-war transonic and swept-wing jet aircraft. The mission's engineers were able to compare projected paper designs with the wind-tunnel data and structural rigs that backed them.
Coordination failure and the Cranfield collection
Popular accounts of late-war German aviation often treat its projects as a seamless technological programme. Fedden's inspection reached a sharper conclusion: it exposed severe incompetence and a lack of coordination in Nazi direction of aeronautical research, development and manufacture. Impressive wind tunnels and advanced prototypes existed alongside duplicated effort, administrative disorder and misdirected production.
The mission also had a practical British institutional purpose. It was formed to identify, select and return to Britain aeronautical examples and laboratory equipment for the new Cranfield College of Aeronautics, an effort the book candidly notes as technological looting. Equipment and examples gathered during those weeks helped equip post-war British aeronautical teaching and research.
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Choose The Fedden Mission to Germany Final Report for the primary 1945 British engineering inspection of Germany's jet engines, wind tunnels, projected airframes and Nordhausen underground works across 214 illustrated pages. Pair it with This was the Enemy: The Luftwaffe 1945, This Was the Enemy Volume Two: Aeroplanes, Armament, Bombs, Downfall and This Was The Enemy Volume Three: Supplement for the complete This Was the Enemy sequence on German air power.