Piercing the Fog - Air Force Historical Studies Office

Building an Air Intelligence Organization
Tunis, Bizerta, Italy, and Sicily, often down to the cargoes of individual
vessels.243 ULTRA’S reports on the daily supply situation of German ground and
air forces gave commanders like Doolittle an almost unparalleled luxury in
selecting air interdiction targets.
Considering the apparently all-pervasive nature of ULTRA, one must resist
the temptation to ascribe Allied victory in North Africa to this source alone.
ULTRA was a unique means of looking inside the enemy’s command structure
and his logistical apparatus. But this capability, invaluable as it was, did not
itself guarantee the outcome. ULTRA was most useful when it could be
combined with one of the many other sources of intelligence to corroborate,
confirm, explain, or establish a link between seemingly disparate pieces of a
puzzle. Group Captain Humphreys stressed in his postwar evaluation that the
basis of Allied intelligence success had been “the comprehensive fusion of
Intelligence from all sources, clarified by the powerful light cast upon the whole
situation by ‘U.”’244
As the lack of Allied progress from November through February demonstrated,
even the best intelligence could not replace inadequate planning and
force employment. The very uniqueness of this source limited its immediate
tactical value, especially in the antishipping campaign. To prevent the enemy
from realizing that his high-level messages were being read, commanders
approved no mission unless it could be explained by a solidly plausible second
source of which the enemy should have been reasonably aware. No ship could
be attacked unless the enemy would be able to understand the attack on some
basis other than the possible compromise of encrypted messages. One of the
values of reconnaissance was that it provided this second alternative source.
Even so, commanders with access to ULTRA information could not send too
many reconnaissance flights directly to specific locations identified by ULTRA.
Most ULTRA targets were covered with general missions not limited to these
specific locations. Naval surface forces and fighter sweeps operated within the
same parameters.245
Despite these elaborate precautionary deceptions, the increasing effectiveness
of the interdiction campaign eventually raised serious questions in the
minds of some enemy commanders. In March 1943, Field Marshal Albrecht
Kesselring charged recent convoys had been “betrayed to the enemy.” As
evidence, he pointed out that Allied heavy bombers had recently appeared north
of Bizerta just as a convoy was transiting that area, and an Allied surface force
turned up where no enemy activity had been observed “for weeks.”246
Fortunately for the Allies, the Germans were so confident of the security of their
Enigma machine that they concluded after investigation that Italian forces had
inadvertently leaked information. Rommel especially seems to have been
predisposed to accuse the Italians of duplicity. His and similar attitudes very
possibly hampered any attempt at hardheaded countermeasure^?^^ Shortly
before his death, in his notes of his campaigns, Rommel speculated on the
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