Thus a lot of the early jets of the Soviet Union, while into the 1950s, where designed by teams of Russian and German Engineers. The top Scientists, like von Braun, had access to fuel and cars to escape to American lines, lower level engineers did not have such access and fell in with the Russians. Thus the Soviet Union was competitive with the West as far a non computer technology till it collapsed in 1989. The US and Britain were well ahead of the Germans on computer technology and had been since the 1890s (punch cards were a HUGE improvements over traditional paper records, reducing the counting of the US Census for nine years to a 1 and 1/2 in 1890).
Now, von Braun did have access to IBM computers in the 1950s to design his rockets. something the Russians had to do by hand. It was those old IBM main frames that permitted the US to send a rocket to the moon and to land and return men from the moon.
Side Note: During the period 1944-1950 the two leading ROCKET scientists were in America. Von Braun noted the V2, which is her worked on, had a problem with stability, a problem the American Goddard had solved BEFORE WWII. Goddard's right hand man, a Chinese national, was given a US Colonel Commission and he was the person who decided if someone had knowledge the American needed as to Rockets (he picked von Braun to come to the US). When China fell to the Communists in 1949, he was basically ignored for he appears to have favored the Communists over the nationalists. Anyway, after being FORBIDDEN to return to China from 1950 onward, we exchanged him for a B-29 crew that had been shot down in a spy mission over China. The Joint Chiefs of Staff opposed the exchange, he was considered to dangerous to be handled over the the Chinese. In China he started and developed the Chinese Rocket program and appears to have helped the Russians in the late 1950s till China and Russia became hostile to each other after 1964.
Just a comment, we did get the top brains, but NOT the workers who did the actual work AND we gave up the top Rocket Scientist to the Chinese at the same time.
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