Piercing the Fog - Air Force Historical Studies Office

Building an Air Intelligence Organization
As American intelligence personnel arrived in the United Kingdom, some
took positions with either the RAF or Air Ministry intelligence organizations;
others attended training programs within British units.’6 RAF officers joined
A-2 sections within HQ Eighth Air Force and VIII Bomber and Fighter
Commands. The original intent of this exchange had been to allow the
newcomers to learn British procedures, but it quickly developed into a true
combined (allied) arrangement. So effectively did this integration evolve that,
according to the official British history of wartime intelligence, several sections
within the Air Ministry’s Air Intelligence, including groups responsible for OB,
operational intelligence, and tactical and technical intelligence, were “virtually
Anglo-American organization^."^'
Nor was this integration confined to staff levels. Recognizing the
elaborateness of signals intelligence and the sophistication the British had
already achieved, Eighth Air Force did not establish an equivalent to their ally’s
radio intercept branch, the famous Y-Service, but it received signals intelligence
from that organization.*” Similarly, rather than build a photointerpretation
capability from scratch, American officers and enlisted men were assigned to
the existing British organization at Medmenham, the CIU. In fact, as early as
June 1941, before the United States had entered the war, Americans had begun
photointerpretation training with the British, with eleven officers completing the
course by October of that year.” By June 1943, thirty personnel from the AAF
would be at Medmenham as well as thirty from the U.S. Army and eleven from
the U.S. Navy.w
American airmen had already recognized the value of aerial photography
through their observations of British air operations. Although they had largely
ignored aerial photography in the 1930s, when it had threatened to divert
aviation resources to civilian mapping projects, they knew, in the words of a
member of the original Eighth Air Force contingent, that photoreconnaissance
and interpretation were “essential to the preparation of target material and for
briefing combat crews; the maintenance of systematic checks on enemy airfield
activity, shipping and troop movements; the acquisition of information on
enemy aircraft production; the location of enemy ground defense installations;
and for the assessment of damage from Allied bombing of enemy targets.””
While Eighth Air Force eventually established its own photoreconnaissance
units, the war in North Africa siphoned away two of them before they could
begin operations from the United Kingdom. Until March 1943, the Eighth
depended on RAF support; as of the end of that month, RAF photorecce aircraft
had flown 117 sorties specifically for Eighth Air Force requirements.’* Even
after American photographic flying units became established, all photographic
interpretation in the United Kingdom remained the province of CIU (eventually
redesignated the Allied CIU).
*See Chapter 2 for discussion of the organization of signals intelligence.
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