Captured German & Japanese Air Technical Documents
In the final days of World War II, the advancing Allies captured a number of German and Japanese documents on various technical subjects. The United States Army Air Force (later the United States Air Force) had a number of these documents microfilmed by the Air Documents Division, Technical Information Section (T-2), Air Materiel Command, at Wright Field, Ohio (now Wright-Patterson AFB). This microfilm series, which includes more than 5,000 reels of microfilm, contains documents pertaining to aircraft and aeronautical subjects, including aircraft manuals, flight test reports, and engineering studies of aircraft. The material does not include complete sets of engineering drawings for aircraft. Most of the documents are in the original language, while most indexing and title pages are in English.
Accessing this collection:
- Plan your visit to the Archives
- Submit a research request to our reference desk
- Order Reproductions
- Fee Schedule
The quality of the original microfilm is variable, and is occasionally so bad as to be unreproducible. Some individual microfilm frames are blurred due to camera operator error. The document indexing information is not always completely accurate. The page count information for an individual document might be incorrect, or in some cases nonexistent. Some typographical errors in the original document indexing information point to the wrong microfilm reels; the staff will spend some time attempting to discern the proper location, but we are not always able to resolve the error.