Piercing the Fog - Air Force Historical Studies Office

Piercing the Fog
tion, along with some ULTRA guidance, Eighth Air Force bombers attacked
suspected supply depots at Nucourt and Saint Leu-d’Esserent in France in late
June, with RAF Bomber Command following up several nights later. Such was
the paucity of intelligence that several other missions, flown mostly by Bomber
Command, turned out to have gone against inactive 10cations.’~~
On the basis of EOUMEW analysis derived from American OSS and
British Special Intelligence Service agents, Polish intelligence, British sources
in Switzerland, and estimates of reduced output of goods formerly produced in
suspected plants, Eighth Air Force and RAF Bomber Command also flew
several missions into Germany itself. Most combined British and American
tactical air forces missions continued to be against the modified launch sites as
they were dis~overed.’~’
Throughout this period, the British had controlled the intelligence-gathering
and analysis processes and the operational decisions on targeting. When the Air
Ministry sought to modify the CROSSBOW arrangements in mid-July, the
Americans took the opportunity to initiate a fundamental reorganization. The
British suggested that CROSSBOW come under their Assistant Director of
Intelligence (Science), Dr. R. V. Jones, with an American scientist as his
deputy.I5’ The Americans insisted on a combined British-American committee
composed of uniformed operational and intelligence representatives from the
Air Ministry and HQ USSTAF.
In a personal memorandum to Maj. Gen. Frederick Anderson, McDonald
poured out his exasperation over the handling of the V-weapon situation.
Referring to the “impractical applications of security” which had always
pervaded BODYLINE and CROSSBOW, McDonald enumerated examples of a
persistent failure by the British to keep their American counterparts involved or
even informed. These included “inadequate dissemination of intelligence,”
“misapplication of forces,” the “lag over damage assessment . . . [which]
resulted in unnecessary duplication of attack and wasteful bombing effort,” and
“too little voice by this headquarters in matters of CROSSBOW policy.”’52 After
a series of memoranda and, undoubtedly, personal discussions among
McDonald, Anderson, and Spaatz and between HQ USSTAF and the RAF (as
well as Tedder in his role as Deputy Supreme Allied Commander), McDonald
summarized the American position in a letter to his Air Ministry counterpart,
the ACAS (I): “Frankly, I da not believe that anything less than a joint and
balanced Anglo-American CROSSBOW Committee, formed exclusively from
representatives of the Air Staff and USSTAF . . . will answer the
requirement .r’153
The new CROSSBOW committee, organized along the lines the Americans
had suggested, held its first meeting on July 21,1944. Out of this session came
a reordering of priorities. The weight of evidence was now clearly against
efforts to knock out the modified sites. A USSTAF intelligence paper dated July
16, 1944, admitted they were as yet unable to fully evaluate the impact of air
222