Piercing the Fog - Air Force Historical Studies Office

Piercing the Fog
means of obtaining and processing the information required, and as to the Air
Corps intelligence procedure.” Despite the embarrassment attendant on General
Hodges’s transfer from Europe to the A-2 job, he, too, had been requested as
a member of the August 1939 intelligence study board. Hodges as well as White
understood the relationship among intelligence collection, analysis, and
dissemination for air operations.’
Arnold, the commanding general who presided over the AAF throughout
the war, quickly came to appreciate the importance of comprehensive, well-
founded air intelligence. At first he lacked the time to pursue the subject
extensively and was not privy to all the intelligence that pertained to the AAF.
Writing after the war, he noted that before the conflict began, “. . . one of the
most wasteful weaknesses in our whole setup was our lack of a proper Air
Intelligence Organization. . . . I know now there were American journalists and
ordinary travelers in Germany who knew more about the Luftwaffe’ s prepara-
tions than I, the Assistant Chief of the United States Army Air Corps.” Arnold’s
postwar assessment of the information gained from the Spanish Civil War was
that the U.S. Army’s flyers knew less than half of what they should have about
German air operations. He regretted that the Army had no effective way to
rectify that situation, since the attach6 system usually provided only the most
cursory and inadequate reports6
Before the war, Arnold was busy trying to coax money from Congress and
obtain support within the Army for greater aircraft production and crew
training. He did not then have access to the products of what came to be called
the MAGIC Diplomatic Summaries and to the other decryption efforts that were,
as yet, extremely limited. As Arnold admitted in his postwar autobiography, he
did not fully understand the thrust of the Japanese air and naval expansion
within her mandated Pacific territories. He quickly acquired a greater apprecia-
tion of intelligence; it was he who arranged for the aerial photography of
Japanese islands by B-17s en route to the Philippines in November 1941. In
1942, when he dispatched Cooper to be Chennault’s chief of staff (Cooper
simultaneously served as the A-2 in China), Arnold took advantage of Colonel
Cooper’s prewar experience in Russia. Cooper, the peripatetic adventurer, flyer,
and motion-picture director, was to learn all he could of the Soviet-Japanese
situation in Siberia, including the locations of Soviet airfields the United States
might be able to use. He was to report his information directly and secretly to
Arn01d.~
Throughout the war, Arnold continued his personal intelligence-gathering
efforts, either through agents like Colonel Cooper or personally in his
conversations with other commanders or world leaders. The commanding
general remained displeased with the official arrangement of his A-2’s
relationship to the War Department’s G-2. The G-2, so he believed, had not
allowed the AAF’s intelligence office freedom of operation to perform air
intelligence work as it saw fit because the G-2 feared such duplication would
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