Piercing the Fog - Air Force Historical Studies Office

Retrospection
Allied air intelligence community and all the Allied air commanders
agreed to set bombing priorities in line with Tedder’s conception?’
During late fall and early winter, intelligence organizations minimized their
estimates of damage imposed by the offensive against the transportation
network; their approach largely reflected a desire to support the views of the
commanders of the strategic bombing forces. In effect, they prevented the full
fury of Allied air capabilities from destroying the German transportation
network before winter began, and thus they may have extended the war by
several months. In the end, the German transportation system did collapse in
late winter with devastating effects, ending the production of arms; the result
was the collapse of Nazi Germany in March and April 1 945.’8
Intelligence and the War in the Pacifii
The most crucial difference between air intelligence operations in the European
and Pacific theaters lay in the fashion with which American society, specifically
its military, judged and estimated their potential opponents, Germany and
Japan, both before and during the war. In the former case, many, including the
president (who spoke fluent German and read Hitler’s speeches in the
~riginal),’~ were intimately acquainted with Germany, its history, its society,
and its culture. Even in the last years before the outbreak of war, Germany had
remained a relatively open society from which Americans could readily acquire
much information. Many Americans spoke and read German because of
background, education, or family ties. Little of this was true with regard to
Japan. Throughout this period the Empire of the Rising Sun remained a society
that even Westerners who spoke the language found difficult to penetrate. Few
Westerners tried, and even fewer succeeded, to learn the language. The result
was a general ignorance of Japan, its society, and its military institutions; that
ignorance, combined with a general sense of racial superiority, led Americans
to belittle Japanese capabilities and potential, whether one talked about
strategic, operational, tactical, or technological levels of war. That arrogance
carried into the post-Pearl Harbor period; the crushing defeat inflicted on the
U.S. Navy at Savo Island in August 1942 underlines the persistence of such
attitudes well into the war.6o
Luckily in one area, cryptanalysis, American intelligence had made
significant strides before the war, a base on which the country could expand
intelligence efforts. Even here, difficulties abounded in language competence
and in understanding enemy capabilities and intentions. The Pearl Harbor
disaster resulted not from a lack of intelligence, but from a general unwillingness
to understand or to recognize its import. Intelligence analysts and
operational commanders simply assumed that the Japanese would not (or
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