Piercing the Fog - Air Force Historical Studies Office

Building an Air Intelligence Organization
degree. . . . It was generally accepted that CIU provided at least 80 percent of
the total information on German activities and installations.” Brown returned
to Washington in December 1941 to organize the AAF photointelligence
program. He also advised on the selection of personnel for training in the new
Air Intelligence School, favoring the British philosophy that people with
backgrounds in science and research were best suited for ph~tointerpretation.~’
Formal AAF air intelligence training began quite precipitously. On
December 8, 1941, a ten-day photointerpreter course began in makeshift
facilities at Bolling Field. Many of the students, newly commissioned AAF
Combat Command officers, had been pilots in World War I. The AAF Air
Intelligence School was formally established at Bolling on January 13, 1942,
with the first class scheduled to arrive two weeks later. Fortunately, the
president of the University of Maryland in College Park offered the necessary
facilities for the first class. The acceptance of this offer delayed the school’s
opening until February 16, 1942.58
Air Force leaders recognized that the facilities at College Park would not
be adequate for the expansion due to come. Even before the first class of 33
officers had graduated from the college course, the AAF paid $300,000 to
purchase the Harrisburg Academy in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, for the new site
of air intelligence training. Officially designated the Army Air Forces Air
Intelligence School, the Harrisburg school was better known as the photointer-
pretation school, since that was two-thirds of its original curriculum; the
additional one-third was combat intelligence training. At first, photointerpreta-
tion training was considered the responsibility of the OCAC Intelligence
Division, but in the evolving AAF, training became the responsibility of the
newly created AAF Technical Training Command?’
The evolution of the Air Intelligence School reflected the confusion and
often conflicting demands characteristic of all aspects of the American war
effort in these months. Its first commandant, Col. Egmont F. Koenig, was the
only Regular Army officer assigned to the school, and the only officers who had
any military experience were former national guardsmen with some flying
background or officers drawn into military service from civilian life before
America entered the war. Koenig originally intended to copy the RAF system
in which older, successful businessmen were selected for intelligence duties at
the squadron, group, and command levels. The first class of sixty-eight students
which began training in April 1942 were “all men of affairs, intensely patriotic,
and unfailing in their devotion to duty.” They included lawyers, bankers,
businessmen, and even mayors. All were commissioned directly from civilian
life and required some military indoctrination during their six-week course.
Most of the 183 students in the second Harrisburg class also came straight from
civil life, but the AAF then decided future intelligence officers had to be
graduates of the AAF Officer Candidate School (OCS). Most of the 293 officers
in the third class, which began in August, had received indoctrination at OCS.
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