Piercing the Fog - Air Force Historical Studies Office

Retrospection
questions dealing with oil and the economic position of the Axis powers.
Cooperation on sharing other crucial raw materials was slower to develop;
through 1943 the Americans relied heavily on British assessments of the
German economic situation.”
From the beginning, cooperation between Eighth Air Force’s growing
intelligence organization and the RAF’ s already well-organized and skillful
intelligence effort was close and fruitful, remaining so to the end of the war.
Throughout the war the British Y-Service, responsible for intercepting and
determining the location of German radio transmissions, provided its intelli-
gence directly to the U.S. Eighth Air Force as well as to the RAF, much of it
(i.e., the intercepted high-grade encrypted messages) going directly to BP, the
central analysis agency. Close cooperation between the U.S. War Department
and British military intelligence provided a forum through which the British
could funnel their experience and capabilities into the growing U.S. intelligence
network?’ The American Air Staff in Washington found the system less than
satisfactory since there was a pervasive feeling that the G-2 was filtering out
key pieces of the puzzle, not through malice but because of its ignorance of air
matters. Key pieces were being filtered out for that reason and to protect ULTRA
sources worldwide.
In Europe, direct contacts with British intelligence were enormously
important for the development of American air intelligence. Even before the
United States entered the war, the R4F had trained eleven AAF officers in the
techniques of photographic interpretation. Those officers returned to the United
States in October 1941 to help in the creation of an American photoreconnais-
sance effort.” By spring 1942, the British had agreed to establish a combined
office with the Eighth Air Force to interpret all photographic intelligence at a
common location, the CIU. There, the results of British and American
photoreconnaissance over the continent could be gathered, collated, and passed
back to the using units.” While relations between the British and the Americans
were often rocky, the overall impression of American airmen involved was one
of unparalleled honesty and openness in the working relationships between the
intelligence organizations of these two powers.
By summer 1942, the first American long-range bomber units had arrived
in the United Kingdom; almost immediately they launched the first daylight
raids onto the continent against targets relatively near their home bases. The
British made every effort to persuade American airmen that daylight, unescorted
bomber raids against German air defenses would have unwanted results.
Certainly the British experience thus far in the war had provided a salient
warning. The disastrous raid of Wellington bombers against the Heligoland
Bight in December 1939, the heavy losses involved in the 1941 CIRCUS
operations by RAF fighters and bombers over the continent, and finally the
pummeling of a low-level Lancaster attack on the M.A.N. works in 1942-a11
lent considerable support to the British position. But American airmen insisted
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