ISR Audio Tour Part 1

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...

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-reconnai...

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 Can...

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...

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 ...

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...

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 ...

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 ...

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 fly...

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...

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 missi...

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 “...

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 ...

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...

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,...

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 ...

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. Kn...

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...

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 generat...

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 X...

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...

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...

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 g...

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 la...

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...

When World War I started, all the warring powers had airplanes, but lacked in a complete understanding of their potential. British and French aviators made critical reconnaissance observations that he...

Wilbur Wright enabled the first use of airplanes in combat by teaching two Italian officers to fly in 1909. The Italians used airplanes in Libya during the Italo-Turkish War of 1911. That conflict mar...

Air intelligence did not begin with the Wright Brothers. It initially became possible because of the Montgolfier brothers’ first manned balloon flight on 21 November 1783. Count Pilatre de Rozier and ...

The National Museum of the United States Air Force began in 1923, not as a tourist attraction, but as an educational tool for Army engineers to study aeronautical engineering techniques from around th...