Piercing the Fog - Air Force Historical Studies Office

Planning the Defeat of Japan
areas. AAF intelligence acquired primary responsibility for the following:
enemy airfield information and reporting; air facilities and air route data
through Alaska ‘and Siberia to China and through Asia or Africa to Japan;
aviation target material; and target damage assessment of strategic targets
(except shipping). The Army G-2 became responsible for aerial photointerpretation
for the SWPA and Asiatic theaters, for POW interrogation, for processing
captured Japanese documents, and for aircraft nameplate analysis (i.e.,
determining production rate and location of manufacture). The Director of
Naval Intelligence dealt with air facilities and route data across the Pacific to
Japan and China; for building terrain and relief models (used for crew target
recognition training); for the status and target damage assessment of Japanese
shipping (a natural outgrowth of naval ULTRA); for aerial photointerpretation
covering North, Central, and South Pacific theaters; and for technical intelli-
gence (i.e., the study of captured Japanese equipment and weapons).”
Many of the senior AAF staff officers in Washington thought the agreement
satisfactory if only because it protected the most important AAF concerns, most
notably, strategic intelligence to support the B-29 program. Some objected,
with one of the strongest opinions coming from General McDonald, Spaatz’s
intelligence chief in London. In June 1944, McDonald had learned of the
agreement before all of the organizational details had been settled when he saw
an Air Ministry directive on the subject. The British officer who composed the
paper in London, Group Capt. A. J. Miley, was under the impression that the
agreement gave the U.S. Navy “primary responsibility on behalf of both British
and U.S. Services for intelligence on the Japanese Air Forces.” McDonald,
seeing the official British document, became livid. He wrote White a highly
critical letter (apparently with Spaatz’s approval and support), noting that he
and others found “it difficult to see the propriety of the Navy’s position in this
over-all air intelligence [arrangement].” McDonald believed that the AAF had
by far the best U.S. air intelligence organization, and he held that giving the
show to the Navy was “an anachronism almost too discordant to suffer.”
McDonald’s real concern, and possibly also that of Spaatz and others in
USSTAF, came at the end of the letter when he said, “It seems to me that when
a Service gives away dominion over its intelligence . . . it has in fact given up
its independence.” Independence for the AAF was the burr under McDonald’s
saddle blanket, and infringement pained him. The airmen’s unhappiness with
domination by the Army had come to the surface as McDonald saw the AAF
once more on the outside. General White settled the immediate problem with
a call to the director of intelligence at the British Joint Staff Mission across
town, and he cabled McDonald the same night to point out the error and calm
the people in Europe. That did not resolve the irritation at the more deep-seated
issues.20 The problem of G-2-A-2 relations remained at the surface of the A-2
staff‘s work throughout the war.
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