Sorry about the slow response:
Yes I did but my script copying one file at a time started working so you were probably right that there was some temporary Google problem. However, the final part of the puzzle for the orginal post:
was that I had to install a Google Drive third party app: "Merge Google Documents" which allowed me to concatenate the individual files into one big doc - although if there were more than 80 smaller docs, I had to do it in more than one step . .