Piercing the Fog - Air Force Historical Studies Office

Piercing the Fog
turned out to be Me 163s. The first Me 262 was discovered by photointerpreters
early in 1944.265
Through the rest of 1943 and into 1944, Allied intelligence continued to
receive reports of a variety of jet aircraft, several of which they expected to
appear in limited service during 1944. These included the He 280 (which never
reached production), the Arado Ar 234 (which came into service primarily in
a reconnaissance version in the summer of 1944), the Me 163 (a short-range,
rocket-powered interceptor that proved of limited value), and the Me 262
(potentially the most serious threat). The bulk of the information on these
aircraft came from HUMINT sources (often confirmed by photoreconnaissance)
and captured documents (including notes of a lecture by General Adolph
Galland given in Caen, France, in 1943). By early 1944 the Allies had firm
information on the Me 262’s engines, airframe, armament, and flight characteristics
as well as extensive data on the Me 163.266 Because none of these
machines was yet operational, ULTRA provided few insights. But by the middle
of July, with both the Me 163 and Me 262 operational (although not yet in
service with combat squadrons), Air Ministry Intelligence warned, “The
development of jet-propulsion in Germany is assuming important
proportions.”267 Y intercepts in early October 1944 gave advanced warning that
the Me 262 was going into combat units in both its fighter-bomber and its
interceptor roles. American daylight bomber formations experienced their first
assault by Me 262s on November 1 .268
While Hitler had intended to employ the Me 262 (and the Ar 234) as
ground-attack weapons, American airmen focused on its potential as a fighterinterceptor.
In July, Spaatz wrote to Arnold advising that the employment of
large numbers of jets in this role would give the initiative in the strategic air war
back to the Lufhyuffe.26y By September, the USSTAF commander deemed the
potential danger sufficiently acute to advise his superior of the measures he
intended to take, should the situation “reach the point where losses become
intolerable.”270 For the moment, the primary threat was to Allied reconnaissance.
Of ten MAAF reconnaissance missions flown in the Munich area the
week preceding Spaatz’s letter, Me 262s had succeeded in shooting down three
of the six they attacked.
One way to reduce the looming threat was to attack the sources of these
new weapons. In his directive to the commanders of Eighth and Fifteenth Air
Forces on September 1, Spaatz had given jet production installations a priority
second only to By the end of the month, it was obvious that dispersal and
the movement to underground production centers (for which jets were given top
priority) limited the effectiveness of such attacks, and these installations were
dropped from their original priority.272 Under the prevailing assumption that the
war would be over by the end of the year, in the first week of November
Spaatz’s director of operations agreed with an assessment by A.I.3(b) that there
appeared to be “no appreciable threat to daylight raids by 1st January 1945.”273
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