After being brought back from the Pacific Theater, this George went to a children’s playground in San Diego, California. The museum received it in 1959 and in 2000 the museum began an extensive, eight-year restoration. They found serial numbers from four different aircraft during the disassembly. This beautiful restoration either came from several different aircraft brought back to the U.S. for exploitation after the war, or from the Japanese putting several aircraft together during the war....

The B-29’s photo-reconnaissance capabilities yielded what Major General Haywood Hansell called, “probably the greatest…single contribution…in the air war with Japan.” The Superfortress’ photo-reconnaissance configuration was the F-13A. On 1 November 1944, one of the two F-13A aircraft that arrived from the U.S. just two days before flew from Saipan to Tokyo. Captain John Steakley’s aircraft flew over Tokyo at 32,000 feet for 35 minutes taking 7,000 images. A Japanese fighter approached the...

The Catalina performed some of the most critical surveillance missions of World War II. An RAF Catalina located the German battleship Bismarck, enabling the Royal Navy to destroy it in May 1941. A Canadian Catalina warned the Royal Navy’s Indian Ocean fleet of the approach of a Japanese carrier group in April 1942 before being shot down by a Zero. A Catalina also spotted the Japanese carrier force as it approached Midway Island in June 1942 and provided one of the most important radio...

The world’s first operational jet fighter was the Me 262A-1. On 16 May 1945, technical intelligence personnel found this aircraft at Munich-Riem airfield where fighter ace Adolph Galland’s Jagdverband (JV) 44 left it behind as the unit fled to Austria. Personnel of the 54th Air Disarmament Squadron named it Beverly Anne and it became one of 10 Watson’s Whizzers aircraft returned to the US at the end of the war. While being ferried from Lechfeld, Germany, to Cherbourg, France it stopped at...

The FW 190D-9 on display surrendered to the Royal Air Force at Flensburg, Germany, up near the Danish border. It served with JG3 during the war. The American technical intelligence troops acquired it from the British and loaded it on board the H.M.S. Reaper for the trip back to the United States. As FE-120, the aircraft participated in six hours of flight testing here at Wright Field, before being stored at Freeman Field and later in Maryland. The D-9 was 20 inches longer than a standard...

American forces captured this Bf 109G-10 at an airfield near Munich at the end of the war. It originally belonged to Jagdgeschwader (JG) 52, the same unit the highest scoring aces of all time belonged to. American technical intelligence personnel trucked the aircraft to Cherbourg, France, where it went on board the H.M.S. Reaper, along with the museum’s FW 190D- 9 and Me 262. After arriving in Newark, New Jersey, in July 1945, the aircraft, then known as FE-124, went to Freeman Field,...

Sometimes technical intelligence personnel went to great lengths to recover enemy equipment and bring it back for exploitation. The museum’s Ju 88D-1 defected from the Romanian Air Force to the Royal Air Force on the island of Cyprus in July 1943. The British flew it to Egypt and turned it over to American volunteer pilots at Cairo in October 1943. Those pilots flew it from Cairo to Dayton across the southern route of Sierra Leone, Ascension Island, Brazil, Guiana, Puerto Rico, Florida and...

When intelligence indicated that the Germans planned to deploy a ballistic missile against England, one of Churchill’s scientific advisors claimed it to be impossible since, in his expert opinion, it required solid propellant. According to Lord Cherwell, that made the missile too huge to hide, thus it was false intelligence. When the V-2s began falling in September 1944, an angry Churchill stated, “We have been caught napping!”27 In that situation, one individual with a wrong idea created...

When the V-1s began to fall in London in June 1944, Dr. R.V. Jones devised an ingenious plan to save lives. Knowing that German double-agents needed to provide at least some truth and that the V-1 flying bombs typically fell several miles short of Trafalgar Square, Jones determined that the spies needed to report the V-1 impacts to the north and west of London, along with the times of the ones that fell in the south and east. He did this in spite of the fact his home was south of London,...

OPERATION FORTITUDE was the Allied effort to deceive the Germans about the timing and location of the upcoming Allied invasion of Normandy. The plan called for intelligence to make the Germans believe that Norway was the primary target for the initial invasion. They also wanted to hide the buildup of forces in Southern England and to convince them that Pas de Calais not Normandy was the real landing site. In addition, once the invasion began at Normandy, they wanted the Germans to believe it...

The Spitfire’s PR, or photo reconnaissance, variant proved to be extremely successful in the imagery collection role. The camera-equipped fighter aircraft accomplished several key reconnaissance missions. For the high-altitude, highspeed area coverage missions, the pilot of a high-flying fighter kept constant watch on the rear-view mirror to make sure that a contrail did not reveal his presence. Once over the target, the pilot maintained a precise course and altitude setting to collect a...

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 collection provided arrival and departure times and locations, as well as the number and types of planes...

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. After the British completed their examination of it, the U.S. shipped the MC.200 here to Wright Field....

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 send a “in the clear” radio message that said, “water distillation plant damaged…send fresh water.” The...

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 to San Diego. After making it flyable, the Navy conducted performance and vulnerability testing against...

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 Poles to develop a calculating computer known as a Bomba. Realizing the German plans to invade their...

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 the system initially because a downed German bomber’s Lorenz navigation system was analyzed and seen to...

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 have ever experienced, he also trained and equipped bomber crews that flew 65 bombing missions for...

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 to communicate beyond three miles. To communicate with the ground-mounted SCR- 67, the observer...

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 for the high speed reconnaissance mission.

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 fan-shaped maps due to their specific field of view. Armies did not begin an offensive without their balloon...

Although the museum’s German Halberstadt CL IV is technically an attack aircraft, it looks like the standard observation aircraft of the First World War, with pilot in front and armed observer in back. Early in the war, it became obvious that the aircraft and the artillery battery required the same map to be successful. The British developed a pair of maps with numbered and lettered 400-yard squares known as a “squared map.” The observation aircraft could drop instructions on the battery....

One Foreign Materiel Exploitation (FME) story during the war involved the synchronized machine gun. French pilot Roland Garros and his mechanic armored his prop with steel plates to enable a machine gun fire through it. He said about one in 10 bullets would ricochet. Garros downed several German aircraft with it before going down behind enemy lines. The Germans tried to copy his design with disastrous results because the French used copper-jacketed bullets and the Germans used steel-jacketed...

The Germans used basically the same rotary aircraft engine as the French and the British, because they licensed it before the war. As the Fokker Triplane’s Oberursel engine became harder to replace later in the conflict, the German ace Josef Jacobs used Foreign Materiel Acquisition (FMA) to solve the problem. He offered a case of champagne to any soldiers that brought him an allied rotary engine from downed enemy aircraft in good condition. The ace not only had a good stock of engines, but...