Piercing the Fog - Air Force Historical Studies Office

Piercing the Fog
With the Normandy invasion in June 1944, ULTRA gave away the German
movement of fighters to the invasion front and enabled Allied covering forces
to destroy many of the German aircraft and much of their supporting infrastructure
before the Germans ever got it in place.44 Similarly, ULTRA indicated on
June 9 and 10 the exact location of Geyer von Schweppenburg’s Punzer Group
West’s headquarter^.^^ The resulting air attack not only destroyed most of the
panzer group’s communications equipment, but it also killed seventeen staff
officers, including the chief of The strike effectively robbed the Germans
of their only organization capable of handling a large number of mobile
divisions on the western front.
The greatest contribution of intelligence information in 1944 came on the
strategic level. Intelligence kept the focus on the Luftwaffe through spring 1944
by pointing out the severe difficulties under which the Germans were operating,
while it suggested the extraordinary measures that the enemy was taking to
escape those difficulties. By May 1944, Spaatz and Doolittle had persuaded
Eisenhower that the German petroleum industry now represented the crucial
Achilles’ heel of the whole Nazi war effort, military as well as economic. On
May 12, Eighth Air Force struck the synthetic oil plants at Zwickau, Merseburg-
Leuna, Brux, Lutzkendorf, Bohlen, Zeitz, and Chemnitz. Speer recalled in his
memoirs that he immediately warned Hitler of the extraordinary danger:
The enemy has struck us at one of our weakest points. If they persist at it
this time, we will soon no longer have any fuel production worth
mentioning. Our one hope is that the other side has an air force general
staff as scatterbrained as
Speer was being a bit unfair to his own air force and was missing a
substantial point: in war it is extraordinarily difficult to estimate the long-range
effect of military actions on an enemy’s capabilities. This was especially true
for the air war up to 1944, where damage was consistently difficult to estimate.
The result had been a tendency of airmen to hedge their bets by attacking a
number of different target systems in the hope that one would provide the key
to success; the Luftwuffe high command’s conduct of the Battle of Britain was
an especially good example of this approach. In terms of the American conduct
of the oil offensive in 1944, intelligence, and particularly ULTRA, played a
crucial role in keeping the interest of air leaders firmly centered on one target
system. At this point, with the vast growth in its force structure, Eighth Air
Force, supported by the Fifteenth Air Force in Italy, struck on a continuous
basis at the relatively few oil facilities available to Germany.
Within days of the opening of the oil offensive on May 12, BP was
forwarding decrypts indicating a substantial movement of flak forces within the
Reich to defend the petroleum sites.“’ On May 21, another intercept from an
unspecified German source ordered:
Consumption of mineral oil in every form.. . be substantially reduced. . .
in view of Allied action in Rumania and on German hydrogenation plants;
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