Piercing the Fog: Intelligence and Army Air Forces Operations in World War II - Couverture rigide

Air Force History And Museums Program

Couverture rigide

ISBN 10 : 1782663991 ISBN 13 : 9781782663997

Editeur : Military Bookshop, 2013

Synopsis

From the foreword: WHEN JAPAN ATTACKED PEARL HARBOR on December 7, 1941, and Germany and Italy joined Japan four days later in declaring war against the United States, intelligence essential for the Army Air Forces to conduct effective warfare in the European and Pacific theaters did not exist. Piercing the Fog tells the intriguing story of how airmen built intelligence organizations to collect and process information about the enemy and to produce and disseminate intelligence to decisionmakers and warfighters in the bloody, horrific crucible of war. Because the problems confronting and confounding air intelligence officers, planners, and operators fifty years ago still resonate, Piercing the Fog is particularly valuable for intelligence officers, planners, and operators today and for anyone concerned with acquiring and exploiting intelligence for successful air warfare. More than organizational history, this book reveals the indispensable and necessarily secret role intelligence plays in effectively waging war. It examines how World War II was a watershed period for Air Force Intelligence and for the acquisition and use of signals intelligence, photo reconnaissance intelligence, human resources intelligence, and scientific and technical intelligence. Piercing the Fog discusses the development of new sources and methods of intelligence collection; requirements for intelligence at the strategic, operational, and tactical levels of warfare; intelligence to support missions for air superiority, interdiction, strategic bombardment, and air defense; the sharing of intelligence in a coalition and joint service environment; the acquisition of intelligence to assess bomb damage on a target-by-target basis and to measure progress in achieving campaign and war objecti ves; and the ability of military leaders to understand the intentions and capabilities of the enemy and to appreciate the pressures on intelligence officers to sometimes tell commanders what they think the commanders want to hear instead of what the intelligence discloses. The complex problems associated with intelligence to support strategic bombardment in the 1940s will strike some readers as uncannily prescient to global Air Force operations in the 1990s.

A propos du livre

Présentation de l'éditeur

Creating the Army Air Forces’ (AAF’s) intelligence organization in World War II proved a complicated undertaking, requiring new skills and technologies to meet a host of demands. Fashioned and completed within four years, the novel enterprise helped shape the conduct and outcome of that conflict. Beginning the war with a handful of people pursuing information in Washington, air intelligence ended the war with thousands of men and women processing enormous amounts of data and analyzing millions of photographs for what would soon become America’s newest and most technically oriented armed service. Finding that his service had an inadequate understanding of potential enemy air forces, in May 1939 Maj. Gen. Henry H. “Hap” Arnold, Chief of the U.S. Army Air Corps, began establishing personal contacts with those who might help provide it. That month Arnold met unobtrusively at West Point with Charles A. Lindbergh, the first man to fly solo across the Atlantic and recently returned from a celebrated tour of Germany. During the meeting, Arnold later noted, Lindbergh provided more information about the German Air Force’s “equipment, apparent plans, leaders, training methods and present defects” than Arnold had as yet received from any other source.’ The Army Air Corps began studying its intelligence requirements that summer, but it had hardly defined them before America entered World War II. Once in the conflict, in conjunction with other services and in different regions of the world, the AAF greatly increased its ability to collect, analyze, and disseminate the information and material that came to be called air intelligence. Defining intelligence as it affected air operations was one of the first steps in creating an intelligence system. Air intelligence included all the information about an opponent and his military, air, and naval forces that could reduce risk or uncertainty in planning and conducting air combat operations. Commanders have always sought such information, but for the AAF the demands of intelligence gathering and analysis in World War II were beyond the ken of most of the officers who had served between the wars. When America formally entered the war, air intelligence was needed for two types of air warfare: tactical and strategic. Tactical, or operational, air intelligence analysts working in the war theaters had to locate opposing enemy forces and attempt to define their size, combat capability, technology, and tactics. Analysts had to locate targets for the tactical air units that would support the plans of the joint air-ground or air-sea operations commander. Strategic intelligence, similar in principle to its tactical counterpart, also required seeking, analyzing, and disseminating information beyond that needed to support the direct clash of opposing forces. In pursuing the Allies’ World War II military aims, strategic air intelligence analysts attempted to identify German, Italian, and Japanese national war-making resources that could most effectively be attacked by a limited strategic bomber force. These intelligence studies also attempted to establish priorities to guide destruction of target groups as diverse as petroleum refining and distribution, transportation, aircraft assembly, and steel production. Despite the substantial and growing effort that airmen applied to this problem, target categories and priorities could not always be clearly defined, or agreed upon; uncertainty over what was critical to the enemy’s wartime economy could never be completely eliminated.

Présentation de l'éditeur

When Japan attacked Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941, and Germany and Italy joined Japan four days later in declaring war against the United States, intelligence essential for the Army Air Forces to conduce effective warfare in the European and Pacific theaters did not exist. The manuscript tells the intriguing story of how airmen build intelligence organizations to collect and process information about the enemy and to produce and disseminate intelligence to decision makers and warfighters in the bloody, horrific crucible of war. More that organizational history, this manuscript reveals the indispensable and necessary secret role intelligence plays in effectively waging war. It examines World War II as a watershed period for Air Force Intelligence and for the acquisition and use of signals intelligence, photo reconnaissance intelligence, human resources intelligence, and scientific and technical intelligence. Air Force History and Museums Program.

Détails de l'édition

• Éditeur: Military Bookshop
• Date d'édition: 2013
• Langue: anglais
• ISBN 10: 1782663991
• ISBN 13: 9781782663997
• Reliure: Relié
• Nombre de pages: 516
• Éditeur: Kreis John F
• Coordonnées du fabricant: non disponible
• Personne responsable: gpsr@libri.de; gpsr@libri.de; ; Friedensallee 273; Hamburg; 22763; Allemagne