Piercing the Fog - Air Force Historical Studies Office

Piercing the Fog
the fall of 1943, cryptographic intelligence played a far less important role in
Washington than it did in Europe. For the AAF staff, concerned more with
logistics, training, and deployment matters, this hardly constituted a serious
flaw in their day-to-day work or in the AAF’s headquarters operations.
From his Washington office, Arnold kept a close eye on his men in the
field. The air commanders in war theaters, and Allied airmen as well, could
expect to hear from him if he believed their judgment wanting. In the autumn
of 1943, he became exasperated at what he saw as the inadequate use of combat
intelligence during the Regensburg raid. Before the attack on Regensburg,
Arnold had been pushing Ira Eaker to step up the level of bombing directed at
GAF production sources as a way of reducing Germany’s air power prior to an
invasion of Europe. At the same time, Arnold had sought to have Portal use his
RAF fighter force offensively, to help protect the bombers as far as their range
would allow. On October 14, 1943, he wrote Portal to express some of his
unhappiness with the progress of the CBO. After chiding Portal for not
following up on his previous pleas for greater fighter involvement, Arnold
remonstrated:
In the case of the Regensburg raid [of August 17, in which the Eighth Air
Force lost thirty-six B-17~1, for example, it was known in England that
fighters had moved south from Denmark and north from Brest to German
and northern French bases to meet the Regensburg bombers and to stop
them on their withdrawal. At the time, we apparently had the great
majority of the German fighter force on known airdromes refueling at
known periods of time. Nothing was done about it. Why should not all of
our medium bombers and vast numbers of your Spits (equipped with belly
tanks and bombs) have smashed the Germans while they were pinned to
their refueling airdromes?”
The difficulty of organizing such a precise fighter and medium-bomber attack
on a truly fleeting target, and the possibility that doing so might have tipped off
the Lufhyaffe to the compromise of its encrypted radio transmissions, seems not
to have influenced Arnold’s opinion. The biting tone of the letter was pure Hap
Arnold, reflecting the pressure under which he operated and his ever-present
drive for accomplishment. The letter also showed his wish that intelligence data
be used promptly and advantageously, an attitude which he retained throughout
the war. It is possible, and perhaps likely, that this incident between Arnold and
Portal brought Arnold’s full, formal initiation into the ULTRA world. Based on
Arnold’s remarks to Portal, it is doubtful that he was fully aware of the extent,
function, and rules regarding the sensitivity of ULTRA in mid-October. Yet he
could not have been excluded indefinitely, and Portal, or perhaps Spaatz seeking
to avert future conflict, may have suggested Arnold’s entry into ULTRA
knowledge. At some point after October 1943 (possibly in December 1943 or
January 1944), the AAF’s commanding general and his A-2 regularly saw and
understood the origin of the special signals intelligence attachments to the
MAGIC Summaries.”
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