Piercing the Fog - Air Force Historical Studies Office

Piercing the Fog
Sweden’s sale to Germany of ball bearings have led to military interdiction of
that source of supply. Consequently, intelligence could not compensate for the
gap created by operational or diplomatic weaknesses.
The Schweinfurt raids raised other significant problems for air intelligence
analysts, most notably the difficulty of evaluating the economic and strategic
effect of attacks on certain target sets. That problem unleashed a host of other
questions which depended for their answers on knowledge that even in
peacetime would be beyond the ability of intelligence organizations to answer:
How dependent is the enemy on any particular industry? What are his
alternative sources of supply? How rapidly can he disperse his production?
What is the capacity of his industry to repair significant damage? How long will
it take him to feel the effects of damage done to particular target sets? Indeed,
the enemy himself may have a hard time in calculating his own capacity to
adapt to the damage on his military or economic structure. Seeking the answers
remained a prime task of intelligence, one not fully resolved, but one met with
ingenuity and skill in most instances.
As with strategic intelligence, the growth of operational and tactical air
intelligence analysis skills were of considerable help to command planning. It
was useful for American airmen to know in 1943 that a substantial portion of
the Lujlwaffe’s fighter force was moving from the eastern and Mediterranean
theaters to the defense of the Reich. In a strategic sense, this information
suggested that damage to targets selected for daylight bombing was hitting the
Germans hard. In an operational sense, such intelligence could not alter the
reality that American bombers had to fight their way through an increasingly
effective German air defense.
On the tactical level, intelligence had to be timely; by 1944 the cooperation
of operations and intelligence had become so refined in the American tactical
air forces that the flow of information created frequent, if fleeting, opportuni-
ties. Thus, Lujlwafle fighter-bomber formations that moved to Normandy
following the successful Allied lodgment on June 6 were savaged even before
they landed. Similarly, intelligence providing the location of Panzer Group
West enabled American fighter forces to destroy one of the crucial links in the
German command and control system. The significant aspect of intelligence-
operations cooperation was the fact that both worked to a high level of
understanding for each other’s needs and requirements. The close relationship
between commanders and their intelligence deputies fostered cooperation that
made the whole greater than the sum of its parts. But that level of cooperation
was established over a long period and after considerable trial and error.
Intelligence was not the servant or handmaiden of operations; it was rather a
partner, and that partnership played a major role in winning the war more
effectively, quickly, and at less cost.
The American military did an impressive job in creating effective
intelligence organizations out of minuscule cadres. First, the British provided
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