Piercing the Fog - Air Force Historical Studies Office

INTRODUCTION
CREATING THE ARMY AIR FORCES’ (AAF’s) intelligence organization
in World War I1 proved a complicated undertaking, requiring new skills and
technologies to meet a host of demands. Fashioned and completed within four
years, the novel enterprise helped shape the conduct and outcome of that
conflict. Beginning the war with a handful of people pursuing information in
Washington, air intelligence ended the war with thousands of men and women
processing enormous amounts of data and analyzing millions of photographs for
what would soon become America’s newest and most technically oriented
armed service.
Finding that his service had an inadequate understanding of potential enemy
air forces, in May 1939 Maj. Gen. Henry H. “Hap” Arnold, Chief of the U.S.
Army Air Corps,* began establishing personal contacts with those who might
help provide it. That month Arnold met unobtrusively at West Point with
Charles A. Lindbergh, the first man to fly solo across the Atlantic and recently
returned from a celebrated tour of Germany. During the meeting, Arnold later
noted, Lindbergh provided more information about the German Air Force’s
“equipment, apparent plans, leaders, training methods and present defects” than
Arnold had as yet received from any other source.’ The Army Air Corps began
studying its intelligence requirements that summer, but it had hardly defined
them before Americaentered World War 11. Once in the conflict, in conjunction
with other services and in different regions of the world, the AAF greatly
increased its ability to collect, analyze, and disseminate the information and
material that came to be called air intelligence.
Defining intelligence as it affected air operations was one of the first steps
in creating an intelligence system. Air intelligence included all the information
about an opponent and his military, air, and naval forces that could reduce risk
or uncertainty in planning and conducting air combat operations. Commanders
have always sought such information, but for the AAF the demands of
intelligence gathering and analysis in World War I1 were beyond the ken of
most of the officers who had served between the wars. When America formally
*The Army Air Corps became the AAF with an Air Staff in June 1941. With
reorganization of the Army on March 9, 1942, the AAF became coequal with the
Army Ground Forces and Army Services of Supply (later the Army Service Forces).