Piercing the Fog - Air Force Historical Studies Office

Piercing the Fog
would have capitulated is certain. What is less sure is when and under what
circumstances she would have ceased to struggle.82
Within days of Japan’s surrender announcement, General LeMay wrote
Clayton Bissell thanking him for the work that MIS had done in support of the
campaign against Japan by the XXI Bomber Command and the Twentieth Air
Force. Specifically, LeMay credited to MIS (not entirely correctly) the original
concept of aerial mining, the intelligence analysis that supported the effort, and
the rapid transfer of information that made readjustment of the mine-laying
pattern possible. LeMay also recalled that Washington passed to him via secure
radio circuits information available there that allowed for adjustments in target
planning as the air campaign progressed. The general was appropriately grateful
that MIS had gone so far as to send one of its best photointerpreters to Guam,
where he did as-needed, on-the-spot industrial analyses of any of 180 Japanese
urban areas. Another specialist came to do the same for studies of Japanese
petroleum production. Of particular interest in LeMay ’s letter was his comment,
“When it became evident that the Target Analysis Section of [Twentieth Air
Force’s] A-2 would have difficulty keeping abreast of the scale of effort
maintained by the command, a civilian analyst who for four years had been
working on the Japanese industrial systems came to Guam from MIS to help.”83
LeMay directed his remarks to G-2, not to the air intelligence staff of the
AAF. In doing so, he echoed and reinforced the feeling within some parts of the
AAF that its air intelligence office had not done well in the war against Japan.
Moreover, many in the Army believed that the A-2’s function was a wartime
expedient, to be disbanded or greatly reduced when peace came. In fact,
intelligence assessments of Japan done in Washington did not match the scope
and breadth of those made by the Allies in the war with Germany; this was so
for many reasons, not all of them properly laid at A-2’s doorstep. Japan had
concealed much of herself before the war, and for many years she lay far
beyond the prying eyes of photoreconnaissance pilots and photointerpreters.
Hap Arnold summed up matters after a fashion when, in December 1944, he
told the OSS’s General Donovan of the necessity for translating the German
bombing experience into a method for evaluating the potential effects of attacks
on Japan. Using the German information as a basis for study was a perfectly
fine idea; the problem was that strategic judgment of Japan still had a long way
to go on the eve of the B-29 campaign. The frustration with the lack of
adequate data on Japanese target systems, locations, vulnerabilities, and
relationships to Japan’s economy had a significant effect on the.course of the
strategic aerial war in the Pacific.84