Piercing the Fog - Air Force Historical Studies Office

Piercing the Fog
benefits to the bureau from the “recent receipt from the War Department of
labor saving machinery [punch-card tabulating equipment] .” To this the
Australians added ULTRA experience in the form of the Australian Special
Wireless Group, which had seen considerable experience against the Germans
in North Africa and the Near East. The group included some British personnel
who had escaped from Singapore. Thus from its inception, CB was multinationa1.’04
The personnel in CB greatly outnumbered those in Special Branch; CB
grew from 1,000 in 1943 to more than 4,000 by war’s end. Special Branch never
exceeded more than a few hundred. Americans comprised 50 percent of CB’s
personnel. At MacArthur’s insistence, the U.S. Navy was excluded from the
regular work. The presence of aU.S. Navy Liaison Officer with SWPA, Captain
Arthur H. McCollum, allowed the regular interchange of information between
FRUPac and CB, intelligence that went directly to MacArthur and his G-2.’05
Given the Allies’ rather desperate and chaotic state in the SWPA in 1942, it is
not surprising that CB at first operated without a formal charter. Its code
breakers initially produced data from low-level message traffic. From this and
rudimentary traffic analysis came what was known at SWPA as RABID
intelligence. In light of the essentially defensive SWPA mission during 1942,
RABID offered little tactical information for MacArthur. The general did,
however, become concerned with its casual handling by the Australians,
warning his Australian land commander that “the Australian agencies normally
disseminate information to echelons that have no immediate use there~f.”’~
Concerned at a possible compromise of RABID, and therefore of CB, MacArthur
placed the organization and the function under the supervision of his G-2, Maj.
Gen. Charles A. Willoughby, and charged him with future control and content
of the intelligence gleaned from Akin’s effort. This arrangement remained in
force throughout the war. What the SWPA commander had done, of course, was
to take the same steps that were being taken in Washington with the establishment
of Special Branch under Col. McCormack.
To control this form of intelligence, MacArthur’ s G-2 decided initially to
use a special daily report based upon CB-generated intelligence known at
SWPA as the BJ Report. Given his own passion for centralization, Willoughby
soon replaced this with a daily Special Intelligence Bulletin which became
known in SWPA as the Willoughby Bulletin.”” He severely limited dbtribution
within SWPA to MacArthur, Sutherland, and the G-3. Initially excluded from
regular review of the Willoughby Bulletin was MacArthur’s SWPA air deputy
and Fifth Air Force commander, Maj. Gen. George C. Kenney.
Willoughby could not ignore SIGINT for the simple reason that he lacked
other conventional intelligence sources. In 1942 and through 1943, most of the
Allies’ other data on the enemy came from the Allied Intelligence Bureau,
which oversaw the coast-watching activities, and the Allied Translator and
Interpreter Section, which sought to exploit captured documents and POW
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