On Monday we published, "The Torpedo Factory: An Illustrated Timeline."
We add here a summary of the history of the station.
At full build out in 1945, the Alexandria Naval Torpedo Station consisted of four main buildings (1, 2, 3 and 10), and a total of 19 structures.
Perhaps contrary to popular belief, the assembly of the torpedoes (during WW 2) was done in Building 1 (torn down in 1986 and became condos). Building 2, today’s Torpedo Factory Arts Center, was storage and admin.
The assembly process was a tedious one and took skilled workers. All the plant workers worked hard and long hours. A number of Washington residents and some Alexandrians worked at the plant and even more later when it became a Records Center.
As Char Bah points out in her primer, African Americans, including many women, did their part. This would make a great further study, the great paradox of working for the US Government and all those feelings of patriotism and national pride, while at the same time living within the constraints of Jim Crow.
As written about in books such as “Iron Men and Tin Fish” by Anthony Newpower, there were persistent problems with the MK14 torpedoes. The Alexandria plant was certainly not at fault.
There were three defects - a tendency to run deeper that depth set, frequent premature detonation, and failure of the contact exploder. Adding to the problem was the fact the Navy did not fully test the torpedoes. After 21 months and much cussing from sub commanders, the problem was finally fixed in November, 1943.
Perhaps the most under-appreciated part is the period (1950-1968) of being a Federal Records Center. There were a number of types of records, including Captured German War Records.
The team of workers and historians who made up the Alexandria Microfilming Project put the files on microfilm, which were then sent to the National Archives in Washington. The originals were returned to Germany. Even before the completion, historians conducted research at the building.
A forgotten name in that story is Robert Wolfe. He was an expert on some of these records and helped researchers and prosecutors of war crimes.
Another forgotten name is Gerhard Weinberg (born 1928). After learning he was also part of the story, I sent him an email. He gave the following reply.
“I had been asked by the American Historical Association to organize the microfilming of the captured German documents then being held in the Old Torpedo Factory by the American Army before they were returned to Germany. In the summer of 1958 I was working there and had turned to a group of records that for some reason had been held separately. It was while processing these with descriptions before they were microfilmed that I held a document that had been labeled as a draft of Hitler's book Mein Kampf but was obviously not that but another book that he had dictated but never published. In my own research I had learned of the existence of such a thing and immediately recognized that this was it. It had a note on its confiscation at the Nazi Party's publishing house in Munich by the American army in whose occupation zone Munich was included. The official British representative in the torpedo factory, to whom I mentioned this important document, found out that the American Army had furnished the British government with a microfilm of it in 1945. He obtained a copy of the film which he lent to me and from which I had a print made that became the original published version issued by the Institute for Contemporary History in Munich in 1962. It took me several decades to get a publication in English. I hope this helps.”
Weinberg went on to author numerous books and articles, and became a preeminent American historian.
To say the least, the work done by Weinberg and the Alexandria microfilming committee was remarkable. Astrid M. Eckert, author of “The Struggle for the Files, The Western Allies and the Return of German Archives after the Second World War,” provides a number of observations.
One - The Alexandria microfilming project gave the fullest records of a twentieth century totalitarian regime available to students and scholars.
Two - Weinberg and his colleagues helped guarantee scholarly and international access to valuable historical sources much earlier than would otherwise have been possible. This established an important transnational foundation for postwar scholarship.
Three - The microfilming project delivered source material at a decisive moment in the development of the American historical profession.
Four - The microfilm project set a precedent and gave a dynamism to the study of German history in the US.
Dagmar Horna Perman, a Director of the project, wrote about the microfilming in 1959 (“Microfilming of German Records in the National Archives,” The American Archivist, Oct., 1959). She describes the tedious task made more difficult by damaged and separated documents. Summarizing the contents often meant referring to other files and documents. Some documents had to be transcribed before filming. In the end, over 2,000 rolls of films were produced and made available at the National Archives, as well as the finding aids.
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