Given the close call nature of the Battle of France IOTL, a fairly popular topic of discussion here over the past longish while has been the outcome of a failure of Fall Rot to actually allow Germany to occupy continental France, however that offensive manages to fail. There seems to be a fair consensus that if France doesn’t fall then Germany will have a bad time, Japan may not ever attack the United States and will simply keep grinding itself to death in China, and generally World War II will look a lot less like World War II, though there’s still plenty of discussion on all these topics.
But I’m not asking about any of that. Just suppose that Fall Rot does fail, France doesn’t fall, and Germany gets ground down under superior Allied economics over the next few years. Obviously, there’s going to be at least some period of occupation following the war, and obviously the Allies are going to want to extract technical and economic value from Germany. All of the pre-war influences that caused them to believe that German science and technology was sophisticated, advanced, and worth learning about still exist, even if Germany probably doesn’t end up producing many of the technologies that became famous during the war, like jet aircraft or ballistic missiles. Additionally, the economic and political factors that further spurred on Allied efforts to learn from German technologies, like British war debts leading to a desire to make their industry more productive and competitive, or French desires to develop their scientific capability as a form of global soft power, would also seem to still exist and be important, if perhaps not as much as IOTL.
Now, IOTL the British and French both made significant efforts to extract scientific and technical knowledge and information from Germany, but had quite different approaches to the subject. The British followed the approach of the United States and sent agents to copy scientific and technical information from Germany industry and, to some extent, the German military, as well as traveling to German industrial centers to produce reports on how they did things and bringing over German scientists and engineers to set up labs and research institutes in Britain. This turned out not to work very well, largely because of “tacit knowledge,” that is the kind of skills or expertise that people develop by doing things and either don’t think to record or which are difficult to record and communicate through writing or similar forms of communication. Later on, the British therefore switched to sending out experts to German industrial centers to learn how to do things, then come back to their normal place of employment to help introduce new techniques and capabilities. This seems to have worked better, but overall this approach of trying to simply import German know-how appears to have worked poorly when employed by not just Britain, but also the United States and Soviet Union when they employed similar programs.
The French, by contrast, had a notion—well accepted now in the sociology of science—that science is, so to speak, embedded in a cultural matrix that cannot simply be lifted up and moved to another country the way you might move a building. Combined with their comparatively limited resources, they came up with the idea of inserting French scientists into German research institutes, both preexisting and newly founded, to both learn from the Germans and provide intelligence on what decisions the Germans were making so that the occupation authorities could control their activities. While in the short-run this wasn’t very successful (the French decided to insert graduate students and postdocs, in modern terms, who both lacked authority and were clearly outsiders and therefore left out of decision-making), in the long-run this seems to have been very successful in building up connections between the German and French scientific communities on both personal and formal levels, forming a portion of the post-war cooperation to led to the European Union.
Now, if France never falls then France is clearly going to have a much louder voice in the post-war occupation, especially if the Soviet Union and the United States never become involved. While this means that they won’t face some of the same resource limitations that they did IOTL, the beliefs that led them to the approach they adopted IOTL will still be there, and therefore I suspect that they will take a substantially similar approach, but on a larger scale. Additionally, their desire to keep Germany down, so to speak, will be more influential, which again tends to point to the expansion of this scheme to a larger scale, by inserting students into most of the Max-Planck institutes, for example.
More interestingly, and (finally!) getting to the point of this post, I was wondering whether the louder French voice in planning sessions might lead to Britain adopting some of the same methods. IOTL, the French indifference to British and American efforts tended to be interpreted as underhanded maliciousness, but part of the reason for this was the Anglo-American “special relationship,” which ITTL would be less relevant (again, assuming that the United States isn’t involved in the occupation). Without this, I was wondering if the British might listen more to the French, particularly their less than enthusiastic response to the Anglo-American approach, and participate to at least some degree in the French student training program. It seems to me that this might lead down the road to a certain degree of greater cooperation between Britain and the Continent, obviously in terms of science and technology but perhaps in other areas? Could you, perhaps, see a highly integrated system of scientific education and research across Britain, France, and Germany, perhaps also including the Low Countries, Czechoslovakia, and maybe Poland, long before any idea of the Bologna Process was developed IOTL?
(The vast majority of the information on OTL used in this post came from Douglas O’Reagan, both in the form of a lecture I recently attended and, as a more detailed reference, his Ph.D. dissertation, which covers most of the same ground. If this topic sounds interesting, I recommend reading the latter, which seems based on my skimming to be quite reasonably readable, or the book he's recently had published)
But I’m not asking about any of that. Just suppose that Fall Rot does fail, France doesn’t fall, and Germany gets ground down under superior Allied economics over the next few years. Obviously, there’s going to be at least some period of occupation following the war, and obviously the Allies are going to want to extract technical and economic value from Germany. All of the pre-war influences that caused them to believe that German science and technology was sophisticated, advanced, and worth learning about still exist, even if Germany probably doesn’t end up producing many of the technologies that became famous during the war, like jet aircraft or ballistic missiles. Additionally, the economic and political factors that further spurred on Allied efforts to learn from German technologies, like British war debts leading to a desire to make their industry more productive and competitive, or French desires to develop their scientific capability as a form of global soft power, would also seem to still exist and be important, if perhaps not as much as IOTL.
Now, IOTL the British and French both made significant efforts to extract scientific and technical knowledge and information from Germany, but had quite different approaches to the subject. The British followed the approach of the United States and sent agents to copy scientific and technical information from Germany industry and, to some extent, the German military, as well as traveling to German industrial centers to produce reports on how they did things and bringing over German scientists and engineers to set up labs and research institutes in Britain. This turned out not to work very well, largely because of “tacit knowledge,” that is the kind of skills or expertise that people develop by doing things and either don’t think to record or which are difficult to record and communicate through writing or similar forms of communication. Later on, the British therefore switched to sending out experts to German industrial centers to learn how to do things, then come back to their normal place of employment to help introduce new techniques and capabilities. This seems to have worked better, but overall this approach of trying to simply import German know-how appears to have worked poorly when employed by not just Britain, but also the United States and Soviet Union when they employed similar programs.
The French, by contrast, had a notion—well accepted now in the sociology of science—that science is, so to speak, embedded in a cultural matrix that cannot simply be lifted up and moved to another country the way you might move a building. Combined with their comparatively limited resources, they came up with the idea of inserting French scientists into German research institutes, both preexisting and newly founded, to both learn from the Germans and provide intelligence on what decisions the Germans were making so that the occupation authorities could control their activities. While in the short-run this wasn’t very successful (the French decided to insert graduate students and postdocs, in modern terms, who both lacked authority and were clearly outsiders and therefore left out of decision-making), in the long-run this seems to have been very successful in building up connections between the German and French scientific communities on both personal and formal levels, forming a portion of the post-war cooperation to led to the European Union.
Now, if France never falls then France is clearly going to have a much louder voice in the post-war occupation, especially if the Soviet Union and the United States never become involved. While this means that they won’t face some of the same resource limitations that they did IOTL, the beliefs that led them to the approach they adopted IOTL will still be there, and therefore I suspect that they will take a substantially similar approach, but on a larger scale. Additionally, their desire to keep Germany down, so to speak, will be more influential, which again tends to point to the expansion of this scheme to a larger scale, by inserting students into most of the Max-Planck institutes, for example.
More interestingly, and (finally!) getting to the point of this post, I was wondering whether the louder French voice in planning sessions might lead to Britain adopting some of the same methods. IOTL, the French indifference to British and American efforts tended to be interpreted as underhanded maliciousness, but part of the reason for this was the Anglo-American “special relationship,” which ITTL would be less relevant (again, assuming that the United States isn’t involved in the occupation). Without this, I was wondering if the British might listen more to the French, particularly their less than enthusiastic response to the Anglo-American approach, and participate to at least some degree in the French student training program. It seems to me that this might lead down the road to a certain degree of greater cooperation between Britain and the Continent, obviously in terms of science and technology but perhaps in other areas? Could you, perhaps, see a highly integrated system of scientific education and research across Britain, France, and Germany, perhaps also including the Low Countries, Czechoslovakia, and maybe Poland, long before any idea of the Bologna Process was developed IOTL?
(The vast majority of the information on OTL used in this post came from Douglas O’Reagan, both in the form of a lecture I recently attended and, as a more detailed reference, his Ph.D. dissertation, which covers most of the same ground. If this topic sounds interesting, I recommend reading the latter, which seems based on my skimming to be quite reasonably readable, or the book he's recently had published)