Brief History of Army MI - Fort Huachuca - U.S. Army

A BRIEF HISTORY OF U.S. ARMY MILITARY INTELLIGENCEtrenches of France. A part of the newtechnology was full blown aerial surveillanceto determine enemy strongpoints and direct artillery fire. Sausage-shapedballoons with tail fins forstability were tethered in the thousandsalong the trenches and used byboth sides for observation. Observationballoons could reach an altitudeof between 1,200 and 1,800 meters,depending on whether it carried oneobserver or two. A fighter pilotnamed Frank Luke, Jr., from Phoenix,Arizona, earned the reputation asthe “Arizona Balloon Buster.”Aerial reconnaissance also includedairplanes. Cameras were aimedfrom the cockpit by photographers/observers. Most of the pictures weretaken at oblique angles rather thanpointed straight down. Fighter planeswere developed with the express purposeof shooting down the reconnaissanceplanes. The first American tacticalsurveillance flight of World WarI was made on 15 April 1918 byMajor Royce of the 1st Aero Squadron.Great importance was placed onaerial photography by both the Germansand the allies. Near the war’send, during the Meuse-Argonne offensivein 1918, the U.S. Army reportedthat 56,000 aerial shots wereprinted for use by the AmericanArmy. Between 1 July and 11 November1918, 1.3 million aerial photoswere taken. And the products wereapproaching a “real time” usefulnessas the time between a photographbeing taken and the time it was developed,printed and interpreted, wasas little as twenty minutes.The Army had formed an aerialphotography school in Ithaca, NewYork, in 1917. One of its first graduatesand instructors was 2d Lieut.George W. Goddard. Goddard pioneeredmany of the advances in aerialrecon, experimenting with infraredphotography, and long-focal lengthcamera lenses. On 20 November1925 he took the first night aerialphotograph, using a flash-powderbomb with timing fuses to light thecity of Rochester, New York, fromabove, while a camera shutter wasopened in his airplane. He foresawthe need of getting the photographsto the users in a timely manner, andin 1927 he took an aerial picture ofthe federal penitentiary at FortLeavenworth, Kansas, developed theshot in the plane, and transmitted thepicture telegraphically to New Yorkwithin twenty-three minutes. Between1936 and 1939 he worked ona stereoscopic camera that employedtwo lenses and a strip camera. Thestrip of film was electronically movedthrough the camera in synchronizationwith the plane’s ground speed,eliminating blurs that had existed before.Another champion of aerial photographybetween wars was CaptainA. W. Stevens, who devoted his timeto long-distance photography as a solutionto the vulnerability of reconplanes to both fighters and groundfire. Along with pilot Captain St.Clair Streett, he set a two-man airplanealtitude record of 37,854 feetin 1928, and later established anotherrecord for long-distance photographywhen he took a picture of MountRainier from a distance of 227 miles.One of the first intelligence manualsto be published was the TacticalInterpretation of Aerial Photographswhich came out in 1925.An Air Section within the MilitaryIntelligence Department was createdin 1926, in recognition of thegrowing importance of aerial reconnaissance.Maj. Joseph T. McNarney,Air Corps, was assigned to MID inAugust 1926 to act as chief of the newsection. He would:1. Handle all questions on policiespertaining to the use of Air personnelin combat intelligence.2. Handle in connection with theMap section all questions on policiespertaining to serial photographs andmapping.3. Handle in connection with theCommunications Section all questionson policies pertaining to codesor communications between airplanesand the ground.In Europe during World War I,the code analysts in the IntelligenceSection of the General Staff (G2) supervisedthe code compilers of theSignal Corps. Some of the men whoworked at making and breaking thecodes of the war in GHQ in the RadioIntelligence Section of G2 wereMajor Frank Moorman, later theArmy’s Chief Signal Officer, Lieut. J.Rives Childs, Corporal Joseph P.Nathan, Lieut. William F. Friedman,and Lieut. Herbert O. Yardley. Theywould form the nucleus of America’scryptology development.Back in the U.S., MI-8 was operatinga radio intelligence service witha line of listening posts along theMexican border. The 14 radio tractorsspaced along the border wereeventually replaced with permanentstations. A large station in Houlton,Maine, pulled in signals from theNorth Atlantic.Following the war, America’scryptology work would be a jointundertaking of the War and StateDepartments under Herbert O.Yardley, whose inflammatory bookabout his work christened the effortWrite Fort Huachuca Museums; U.S. Army Intelligence Center and Fort Huachuca; ATTN: ATZS-PAM; Fort Huachuca, AZ 85613-6000.23