Piercing the Fog - Air Force Historical Studies Office

Piercing the Fog
Another group appointed by Arnold to study air warfare issues was the
AAF Evaluation Board. Its task was to scrutinize the military aspects of the air
campaign in Europe. Neither the Bombing Survey nor the Evaluation Board
were intelligence agencies, but Arnold and his A-2 clearly saw the intelligence
and data-gathering value of each. To take advantage of the vast amount of
German information, the intelligence staff, with widespread support elsewhere
on the Air Staff, organized the extensive Post-Hostilities Intelligence Requirements
Survey of the German Air Force, and later of the Japanese air forces. The
posthostilities study of the Germans was to be done largely by General Spaatz’s
people in Europe, but several Air Staff offices decided to send additional teams.
To coordinate the collection and assessment of the anticipated information,
Generals Hodges in Intelligence and Kuter in Plans pushed hard for the central
AAF intelligence ~urvey.4~
According to the collection plan, the primary purpose behind this datagathering
foray was to obtain “all information pertaining to the Japanese Air
Force available in Germany.”45 This effort had two main objectives. First, the
AAF staff needed to know what technology or understanding of the Allied
military Germany had transferred to Japan. ULTRA had, from time to time,
indicated that such transfers had been made, primarily by blockade-running
submarines. Now the Air Staff believed it imperative that they confirm what had
transpired between the Axis partners. With such an understanding, the Allies
could then postulate the existence of new or previously unobserved Japanese
defenses. The second direction of these studies was to determine from the
German bombing experience how Japan, her economy, and her military might
hold up under a concentrated Allied onslaught.
The survey teams that descended upon Germany after her surrender in May
1945 found enormous collections of material, among which were indications of
the types of data the Axis nations had exchanged. At the German Air Ministry’s
offices at Berchtesgaden, Allied inspectors found documents that noted limited
transfers of air warfare material to Japan between June 1943 and March 1945.
Also reaching Washington was a report covering German proximity fuze
experimentation based on radio, optic, and acoustic principles. The American
investigators in this case noted Japan’s apparent awareness of the work, but they
doubted Japan had received either substantive data or design models. Proximity
fuzes were of concern to the AAF because if Japan had such a capability, she
would be able to increase greatly the effectiveness of her AA artillery, thereby
threatening the B-29 offensive, which most people believed would continue
into 1946. Other areas of specific intelligence and operational interest were the
extent to which missile, infrared, radar, and jet engine and aerodynamics
technology had reached Japan. The May 1945 capture of the German submarine
U-234 heightened Arnold’s interest in the subject of information transfer when
it was found that the craft carried several German and Japanese officials plus
large amounts of documentation bound for Japan. The flow of material arriving
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