Audio by NMUSAF PA | National Museum of the U.S. Air Force | 05.23.2013
One of the greatest Foreign Materiel Exploitation stories of World War II was the testing of a crashed Japanese Navy A6M2 Zeke, known as Koga’s Zero. After the Japanese attack on Dutch Harbor, Alaska, in June 1942, a Zero piloted by an Ensign Koga, crash-landed on an island in the Aleutians. A PBY Catalina spotted the Zero. Navy personnel recovered it, buried the pilot and took the aircraft......
Audio by NMUSAF PA | National Museum of the U.S. Air Force | 05.23.2013
The cipher machine known as Enigma encrypted and decrypted secret message traffic for the Germans in World War II. Although invented in the early 1920s, Germany used it before and during the war. The Polish Cipher Bureau earned the distinction of first breaking Enigma ciphers in December 1932. Beginning in 1938, the Germans increased the complexity of the Enigma system, which required the......
Audio by NMUSAF PA | National Museum of the U.S. Air Force | 05.23.2013
Moving into the World War II years, the circular radio directional finder antenna on top of the museum’s O-47B recalls an interesting intelligence episode early in the war: The Battle of the Beams. Knickebein (Crooked Leg) was a German program that used two radio beams to accurately navigate and bomb at night. British intelligence at the Air Ministry, led by Reginald V. Jones, were aware of......
Audio by NMUSAF PA | National Museum of the U.S. Air Force | 05.23.2013
Strategic bombing became a reality in World War I with both Zeppelin and fixed-wing crews attacking infrastructure targets and even civilian populations. Fiorello La Guardia, congressman from New York and future mayor of New York City, led about 100 Americans that flew Italian-built Caproni bombers for the Italian Air Force. While he used his political influence in ways few U.S. Army captains......
Audio by NMUSAF PA | National Museum of the U.S. Air Force | 05.23.2013
The U.S. developed an aircraft-mounted radiotelephone near the end of the war known as the SCR-68 (Set, Complete, Radio). This DH-4 has one, indicated by the generator on the wheel strut. That generator is a good example of linking a modification to a new capability: voice communication instead of telegraphy. The U.S. Army Signal Corps discovered many problems with it, primarily its inability......
Audio by NMUSAF PA | National Museum of the U.S. Air Force | 05.23.2013
The Fokker D.VII was arguably the best fighter aircraft of World War I. As a part of the Armistice Agreement, the U.S. received 142 Fokker D.VII aircraft as war reparation payment. Eleven of them came here to Dayton, Ohio, to the Engineering Division at McCook Field. There, engineers made extensive modifications to their powerplants by installing Liberty and Packard engines. They also gave......
Audio by NMUSAF PA | National Museum of the U.S. Air Force | 05.23.2013
The German fighters of World War I inflicted tremendous losses on the opposing photo-reconnaissance sorties. To counter those losses, France began configuring single seat fighters, such as this SPAD XIII for high-speed reconnaissance. The mission did not call for extreme fighter-like maneuvering, but very fast, level flight, at high-altitude. The 94th Aero Squadron had one aircraft configured......
Audio by NMUSAF PA | National Museum of the U.S. Air Force | 05.23.2013
The stationary observation balloon, or aerostat, had an advantage over aircraft in that it had a direct telephone line to the artillery battery, giving near real-time reconnaissance feedback during an attack. The armies deployed them no closer than three miles from the front, and two observers normally ascended to 3,600 feet. While fixed-wing aircraft used square maps, the balloon used......
