Piercing the Fog - Air Force Historical Studies Office

Piercing the Fog
the first two cases, MacArthur and Nimitz were very senior officers with strong
personalities; their command structures were too well insulated and tightly
controlled by their staffs. In the last instance, CBI was too far removed from
Washington; both the Americans and British were too busy elsewhere, and Lord
Louis Montbatten’s South East Asia Command had a firm hold on affairs in his
region.I7
The agreement was the basis for regularizing over time the methods of
handling and securing ULTRA and conforming it to the manner that the British
had developed at BP. Where handling systems in the SWPA had previously
been rather lax in comparison with those found in Europe and the Mediterranean,
the agreement formed the basis for new, more stringent and more
technically secure procedures that used approved War Department transmission
equipment and circuits. New sensitivity about handling ULTRA was followed by
the arrival from MIS in Washington of Army SSOs to serve in many more
places in the Pacific and Far East than they had served previously. At last, SSOs
could now be found with MacArthur’s GHQ, at Kenney’s FEAF headquarters,
and at the headquarters of both the Fifth and Thirteenth Air Forces. In mid-
November 1944, the SSO assigned to GHQ SWPA, Capt. Phil Graham, wrote
to Colonel Clarke in Washington that Kenney was very happy with the
additional service, especially the direct access to OB compilations and the
special studies such as those on jet propulsion and aviation fuel additives like
butanol that had now become available. At first hesitant about the intrusion into
his territory, Graham noted that FEAF’s A-2, Colonel Cain, became a willing,
even happy, user of the MIS services. Understanding the nature of Japanese
alcohol and butanol production led to a Fifth Air Force campaign to destroy
such manufacturing sites on Formosa. By mid-July 1945,75 percent of alcohol
production capacity on Formosa had been eliminated, and Fifth Air Force units
were paying special attention to shipping the product to Japan. RAF SLUs also
arrived in Australia to give Australian forces their own ULTRA transmission
systems, to allow Australia direct access to ULTRA data from London, and to
lessen Australia’s dependence on what had become the American-dominated
intelligence operation at GHQ SWPA. Although some might have looked upon
the RAF SLUs in Australia as a violation of the agreement, more than anything
else, the service they provided was largely one of secure transmission, an
extension of the British Commonwealth’s facilities from India. The RAF SLUs
did, however, accompany Australian forces to Morotai and New Guinea late in
1944.18
The agreement did not automatically clarify questions of authority in
Washington, nor did all of these changes occur in rapid order. After the signing
of the document, several weeks passed during which the intelligence staffs
haggled over responsibility, until the members of the JCS JIC finally settled the
issue in July 1944. The Americans divided air intelligence assessment tasks
among the various service offices they believed best able to deal with specific
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