Piercing the Fog - Air Force Historical Studies Office

Introduction
enemies. The Army (War Department) and Navy (Navy Department) each
provided for its own intelligence needs; the War Department’s General Staff
G-2, or Army Intelligence, also fulfilled AAF intelligence needs. The G-2
office had expanded from 22 people in 1939 to 500 in December 1941. With
such rapid growth, few on the G-2 staff were proficient in intelligence work.2
Before the war, the Air Staff had but a small office, the Information Division,
only a part of which attempted to establish contacts with federal agencies able
to provide facts and reports about foreign air power. Fewer than a dozen people
formed this rudimentary air intelligence ~ffice.~
A good example of the inadequacy of the ramshackle prewar intelligence
structure of the AAF can be seen in the preparation of the air requirements
annex to the War Department’s Victory Program, generally called AWPD-1.
That air plan, drawn up by a small group of officers during the summer of 1941,
was the initial AAF blueprint for air warfare during World War 11. AWD-1 ’s
basic premise was to secure victory in Europe by the application of enough
high-altitude aerial bombardment to break down the industrial and economic
structure of Germany while holding the Japanese at bay in the Far East. The
plan envisioned destroying Germany’s electric power production, her
transportation system, and her ability to process petroleum and manufacture
synthetic oil products. AWPD-1 was not an operations plan that laid out such
things as logistics, command arrangements, and base assignments; rather, it
stated the overall purposes of the air offensive and estimated the numbers and
types of aircraft, the amount of bombs needed, the trained people and the overall
time required, and the general target categories and numbers of installations to
be attacked. After the war, Haywood S . Hansell, Jr., one of the plan’s authors
and an officer who had worked in Arnold’s prewar air intelligence office, noted
that not only was strategic intelligence sparse, but the planners had not realized
what immense demands their air plan would make upon the wholly inexperi-
enced air intelligence office. AWPD-1 itself made no provision for gathering
target information, organizing photointerpretation to support the reconnaissance
aircraft, or determining whether targets selected were the correct ones and
whether attacks on them had actually achieved the hoped-for result^.^ In tactical
air warfare, air intelligence specialists had to deal with a wide range of tactical
problems.
The absence of a central, coordinated intelligence operation doubtless
contributed to the disaster at Pearl Harbor and in the Philippine Islands, where
in one day the Japanese destroyed virtually the whole of the AAF’s strategic and
tactical air capability in the Far East. Throughout the war, no central intelli-
gence activity served either the armed forces or national policy. Prewar creation
of the office of the Coordinator of Information (later called the Office of
Strategic Services [OSS]) and the Joint Intelligence Committee of the Joint
Army-Navy Board (later the Joint Chiefs of Staff [JCS]) were too little and far
too late to solve the problem in the early years of fighting. The OSS was itself
3