Piercing the Fog - Air Force Historical Studies Office

Retrospection
thought best, rather than do what best suited the enemy’s own needs. The
operational bent was surely the case for some, Arnold included, but not for all.
Hansell singled out Spaatz and Maj. Gen. Frederick Anderson as exceptions.
Kenney was operationally oriented, but he and Whitehead were more than
capable of understanding the nature and importance of targets, and both gave
targets ample thought.66 Even Chennault can be faulted only partially on this
score, as he was forced by logistic circumstances to carefully judge the value of
targets before committing precious gasoline to a raid.
Hansell did not stint in criticizing his own go-along attitude, either. He
considered his worst wartime mistake to have been failing to oppose the COA’s
target recommendations that he thought were inappropriate. The most
prominent error he saw was the COA’s effective removal of Germany’s electric
power generation capacity from the the CBO target list. At the time, in 1943,
Hansell justified his actions as those of a good team player who refused to act
to the possible detriment of the Am, still struggling for serious consideration
as a wartime service. He believed that to oppose the COA would challenge the
very agency that the AAF had created to study the goals of strategic bombing.
The result of strong objections might have been to “have industrial targets and
the whole idea of strategic air warfare eliminated altogether” by those on the
JCS and elsewhere who did not understand air power. In other words, Hansell
was a loyal soldier who supported Arnold and his service, first and foremost.
But Hansell may also have considered that his action fostered too many poor
ideas, including urban area attacks. His opposition to that tactic seems to have
contributed strongly to Arnold’s decision to remove him from Guam and the
XXI Bomber Command in 1945.67
Conclusion
Clearly, intelligence played a crucial role in the Allied victory in World War
I1 and contributed to a shortening of the war. In large part, the success of
American air intelligence rested on the significant and timely commitment of
resources and sustained effort by senior air commanders, even in the darkest
days of 1941 and 1942.
Intelligence did not and could not fully illuminate the enemy’s situation.68
It rendered a significant contribution by suggesting the parameters within which
the Germans and Japanese worked, allowing Allied commanders to see with
some clarity occurrences in the enemy camps. At the strategic level, it provided
the American leadership with a sense of those attacks that were having the most
significant effect on the German situation. In 1942 and 1943, the AAF was not
in a position to act on such intelligence; the losses at Schweinfurt, for example,
prevented repetitions of the attack with sufficient frequency to shut down the
German ball-bearing production. Nor could intelligence’s knowledge of
42 1