Piercing the Fog - Air Force Historical Studies Office

Maj. 4 Sen. Richard C. Lindsay
Planning the Defeat of Japan
unknown sacrifice. These men were unhappy, and their performance showed it;
their value as intelligence officers was open to question.61
One need not read between many of the lines of the letter to Assistant
Secretary Lovett and the supporting documents that accompanied it to see again
the airmen’s frustration with Army control and all of its attendant encum-
brances. This time there was a difference. Unlike General White’s organiza-
tional agonies of early 1944, there now seemed a real possibility that the AAF
would escape from the Army once the war was over. To that end, the AC/AS,
Intelligence office shed its unwanted appendages. History, motion picture
services, and the operational activities that could be delegated to subordinate
commands all disappeared from the organizational chart. The A-2 office now
had two branches: the JTG and the Director of Air Intelligence. Organization-
ally and functionally, the JTG remained the same with its panel of consultants
and its evaluation and production divisions. The Director of Air Intelligence had
the counterintelligence, intelligence collection, photographic, analysis, and
technical intelligence divisions. The spring of 1945 saw AAF intelligence reach
its largest size in terms of people assigned. Once the focus of war shifted
entirely to Japan and the structure of the strategic air force in the Pacific became
firm, that staff began to diminish rapidly. By July 7,1945, in fact, Spaatz, on his
way to take over the new strategic air operation, was advised by his prospective
chief of staff, Brig. Gen. Richard C. Lindsay, that Washington’s efforts in
support of the Pacific war should be limited, replaced by intelligence analysis
in the theater, principally at the numbered air forces on Guam and Okinawa.
The centrifugal forces that large operating commands created, with local people
better apprised of situations, began to draw the work away from AAF
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