There were a number of reasons for this “failure of intelligence.”
First, US military intelligence was quite primitive at the time. We are too used to 80 years of progress in military intelligence and forget (or don’t understand) the really bad state of American military intelligence in December 1941.
There were a number of major systemic problems within the military branches, including the lack of funding and personnel; the lack of importance placed on intelligence; the lack of prestige within the military, which meant that good officers avoided it like the plague; the lack of experience in intelligence by the US military; and bureaucratic fighting which hampered operations; among a host of other problems.
I used scare quotes above, because I see this less as a failure of intelligence than a failure of the military top leadership to appreciate and prioritize this field.
No one is going to fault the Light Brigade for failing to achieve their objectives and both Navy and Army Intelligence just weren’t up to the task.
The G2 staff at the War Department comprised 168 personnel divided between five branches (Administrative, Intelligence, Counterintelligence, Plans and Training, and Information Control) in October 1941.
In addition, there was the Signal Intelligence Service, but they were overworked as well, with only 44 officers and 180 soldiers and civilians in Washington, and 150 personnel in the field at monitoring stations. By 1945, SIS had 666 officers and a total of 10,000 individuals just in Washington.
One of my least favorite admirals in the war was Kelly Turner. He was put in charge of war planning in 1940 and 1941. In an apparent power grab, he pushed for signal intel to be sent to him and that the Office of Naval Intelligent not be in charge of evaluating intelligence, simply collecting them. Turner wasn’t a professional analysist and this because another reason for the failure.
Both General Short and Adm Kimmel were kept in the dark.
As Dissonance noted a few posts after yours, it’s unlikely that Churchill knew ahead of time about the Coventry blitz from decrypted radio transcripts and Frederick Winterbotham’s claim that he did known has been directly contested by men who would know better than him. However, Winterbotham’s main role in British intelligence was the establishment and command of the Special Liaison Units. The SLU’s had the responsibility for communicating the information gathered by the Ultra decryption project to field commanders and ensuring Ultra’s secrecy. This included ensuring information was only communicated onwards by the field commanders if it would have a substantial impact and that there was a deception plan in place to disguise the source of the intelligence. If the intelligence couldn’t be protected, it wasn’t used. So the Coventry Blitz attack wasn’t allowed through, but other air attacks were. Similarly, naval and merchant ship captains and army regimental commanders probably weren’t warned of attacks that had been communicated to their higher command, but couldn’t be passed down due to the need of keeping the Ultra decryption code secret. Note that I tried to find examples of specific instances when this happened, but could only find general statements.
FYI the Wikipedia page on Winterbotham quoted earlier by Dissonance briefly describes the role of the SLU’s in protecting the secrecy of Ultra intelligence.
Sort of, & this is 3rdhand; I talked with a Vietnam vet, who told me that an Army Intel guy told him that they knew about an upcoming attack by the VietCong, violating the Tet ceasefire. Supposedly (remember, this is a 3rd-level derivative) Intel knew the attack was coming, but the VC double agent or informer, whatever, was in with the military target part of the plan, and some ground & air bases were attacked. OK but something like 85 areas were hit, and no1 knew about the civilian targets like the US Embassy, South Viet government administration offices, supply depots in civilian areas (always a bad idea). The brass decided to move up reserve battalions near the expected attack areas, and ambush the attackers. Ergo, the US military got either a little bit or just-in-time warnings for the military targets, but not for the civilian ones since no1 expected that. As it turned out the attacks even on the military areas were strong than expected, with the sappers able to get close enough to breach gates, damage pillboxes, etc. and make it a harder fight than the brass was ready for.
So overall the idea was to discreetly lie in wait for Tet Offensive military targets and get them before starting attack, but underestimated the strength and VC popping up from underground tunnels in force, & were shocked by the brutality in civilian areas (eerily familiar to current events).
So, not actually “Letting it happen”, but using the intel to set up an ambush. That’s a legitimate military strategy, and exactly what I would expect them to do. If you know the enemy will be at Point A at Time B, but you don’t know where they are at any other time, setting an ambush and keeping that ambush a secret are good choices.
Now, having your intel turning out to be wrong, or incomplete? Not such a good idea, but also not unprecedented in the history of warfare.
a very thin distinction - instead of attacking by air while the VC were on the move or having the targeted military areas go on alert, they decided to just try & time the reserve battalions’s action when the VC were assembling but not yet attacking (and then alert the US bases’s forces, I guess to avoid security leaks); that is real close to ‘let it happen’ i,e. forgo the safer way to hit a decent-size # of enemy, but take the gamble of trying to nail them all at once. I’m OK with accepting ‘sorta’, tho - letting them get closer without realizing they didn’t have enough of the picture to avoid putting their own guys in danger - what Rumsfeld called the ‘unknown unknowns’.
But could they have hit these troops from the air? The whole point of the VC was that they infiltrated by blending with the civilian population, and slowly built up resources for the attack. There wasn’t really a “large group” that could be conveniently attacked at a distance from their targets.
And you make the point that alerting the bases might tip off the attackers that they’d been compromised. A base is supposed to be able to respond to an attack all by itself, but if the VC had seen that the base was already ready, they might have called off the attack entirely, and faded back into the civilian population.
Things like this are why fighting an insurgency is very different from fighting a war in the open field. When you don’t have complete freedom of action, you need to start getting fancy, and that’s when things start to break down.
There’s also a significant difference between decisions made by a military in combat about combat against a regular (or irregular) enemy vs. the civilian political government choosing to permit “terrorists” to attack civilians in their own country.
This Viet Nam example, even assuming it’s all true and accurate, is a far cry from the Vietnamese government knowing a major attack on their civilians was coming and choosing to let it happen because reasons.
And a friendly shout-out to new member @thevolleyballer . Welcome!
To give you a hint on our culture here, long run-on sentences, wall-of-text paragraphs, and SMS short forms like “any1”, etc., are kinda not our style. You do you, but if you’d like to fit right in, think more “high school essay” than “FB post”.
