Audio by NMUSAF PA | National Museum of the U.S. Air Force | 05.23.2013
The P-38 played a critical role in applying the decisions of national policy makers after intelligence provided critical information. On 14 April 1943, the U.S. naval intelligence effort, code-named “Magic,” intercepted and decrypted a message containing specific details regarding an upcoming inspection tour by Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto, the commander of Japan’s Combined Fleet. The SIGINT......
Audio by NMUSAF PA | National Museum of the U.S. Air Force | 05.23.2013
The Italian aircraft on display is a Macchi MC.200 and it represented the British technical intelligence cooperation the US received in World War II. The aircraft transferred from a squadron in Italy to the 165th Squadron in North Africa during November 1942. The Italians abandoned it at Benghazi airfield following the battle of El Alamein and General Montgomery’s forces captured it there.......
Audio by NMUSAF PA | National Museum of the U.S. Air Force | 05.23.2013
During the first months of the war in the Pacific, the Navy OP-20-G group broke the very complex Japanese Imperial Navy JN-25 code. In decrypted transmissions, they saw the code “AF” mentioned several times and thought it might mean an attack was coming on that location. To affirm it was Midway Island, they used a communications cable that ran on the bottom of the ocean and had the Navy......
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......
