Piercing the Fog - Air Force Historical Studies Office

The European Theater of Operations
already serious delays in the Luftwuffe’s training program.”’ Also in October,
a detailed study by the Air Ministry’s A.I.3(b) section suggested even a
projected increase from 2,000 to 2,600 single-engine fighters would not
represent a serious problem for Allied operations overall. Recognizing that the
introduction of jet aircraft would increase “the enemy’s ability on occasion to
inflict loss,” A.I.3(b) concluded that jets would probably be used for ground
attack and therefore they constituted “no appreciable threat to daylight raids”
through the end of December.”’
The USSTAF director of operations incorporated the evaluations of both
EOU and A.I.3(b) into a report to the deputy commander for operations in early
November. He argued that the threat to deep penetration attacks would certainly
be no more and probably be less serious than it had been in the previous year.
That the enemy fighter force was not operating to capacity dictated unrelenting
efforts against Contributing further to the reluctance to attack the aircraft
industry was the recognition that its dispersal was the most successful defensive
measure the enemy had ~ndertaken.’~’
Although USSTAF succeeded after the summer of 1944 in maintaining the
German oil industry and all its components as the number one priority, the last
phase of the strategic air war in Europe was marked by an expanding and often
shifting array of target categories. The selection of these targets and their
varying priorities, determined largely by developments in the land war,
increased the demands on all aspects of intelligence. These demands included
recommending priorities among and within target systems, preparing vastly
increased amounts of materials to support individual operations, and the everexpanding
requirements to analyze bomb damage and monitor the condition of
previously hit areas.
When ordnance depots became a priority for the strategic air bombers, for
example, the Allied CIU at Medmenham developed more than a hundred new
objective folders (in hundreds of copies each). Between early December 1944
and February 1945, emphasis on the German transportation system resulted in
almost 200 new targets, from bridges to marshaling yards to stations.252 In
January 1945 the Eighth Air Force A-2 advised USSTAF it would need four
times the already prodigious photoreconnaissance support it had received over
the past few months.253
To identify the most significant targets and recommend priorities for them,
the Allies created the Combined Strategic Targets Committee (CSTC) in
October 1944. The CSTC incorporated as “working committees” the Joint Oil
Targets and Jockey Committees, as well as several new groups that emerged
and sometimes rather quickly disbanded to meet the changing situation in the
winter of 1944-1945: POL depots, army equipment, armored fighting vehicles
(AFVs), and communications (e.g., transportation). Composed of intelligence
and operations representatives of those commands involved in conducting
strategic air operations (including SHAEF), the CSTC was charged to provide
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