Piercing the Fog - Air Force Historical Studies Office

Piercing the Fog
of a European conflict, they helped Roosevelt mobilize support for the initial
buildup of American air and naval power.
Hap Arnold’s May 1939 meeting at West Point with Lindbergh was a prime
example of the problem facing the AAF. Arnold, dealing with what he believed
was a gross lack of information about enemy air power, thought that Lindbergh
passed him a great deal of useful material, which he probably did. After all,
starting from a baseline of virtually no information, any information helped. But
that Arnold personally had to gather intelligence to make his own assessments
of the GAF illustrated the magnitude of the problem.
Assistant military attach& for air confronted an almost impossible task in
their intelligence-gathering mission. No one possessed a clear conception of
what was needed. What was important was often unclear. Considering the
technological revolution occurring in the late 1930s, performance characteristics
of enemy aircraft and other design developments were enormously important.
Equally important were the production capacities of aircraft industries, not to
mention the force structures being cast by potential opponents or allies. Any
eventual American employment of its Army Air Corps depended on a thorough
understanding of the capacity, capabilities, strengths, and weaknesses of enemy
economic systems. Little information was available and less was used by the
government or Air Corps in their preparation of production plans for strategic
bombers in the last years of peace.
Much of the intelligence gathered by the attach& tended to overlook the
tactical employment doctrines (e.g., the Germans in the Spanish Civil War) in
favor of technical and quantitative intelligence. That any one officer or even a
small group of officers serving as attach& could address all these demanding
areas was beyond the realm of the possible. Two factors saved American
intelligence and its strategic position from disaster. The first was the time and
space available for the United States to address critical failings and weaknesses
in its intellectual and physical preparations for war. Other people, most notably
the British, paid a terrible price learning lessons that Americans could use.
Second, at least in Europe, the United States had the inestimable advantage of
having the British build an effective intelligence system from which the
American military could draw from and then graft onto their own intelligence
capabilities.
The American problem in gathering intelligence on potential opponents in
the 1930s also suffered from other weaknesses beyond a lack of resources. The
Japanese covered their developing air power most effectively, so that American
intelligence remained blind to this technological and operational potential. The
Japanese largely excluded American observers from territories they controlled,
and complexities of the Japanese language as well as differences between
Japanese and American cultures made the task of American intelligence
analysts all the more difficult. American belief in the inherent superiority of the
white race further exacerbated difficulties in understanding the nature of the
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