Benjamin Foulois Was Keeping Track of German Aviation After the Armistice

Benjamin Foulois, the Army's First Pilot

Aviation pioneer Benjamin Delahauf Foulois (1879–1967) had an amazing number of "firsts" in his long career.  A nice summary of his achievement can be found at the USAF site HERE. In this article, though, we are going to address one of his missions carried out under his air intelligence specialty.

Apart from his pioneering efforts in aerial reconnaissance during the World War, Foulois made another significant, if unheralded, contribution to U.S. Army intelligence. In 1920 he volunteered to become military air attaché  to post-World War I Germany. While in that post he employed considerable ingenuity to gather important intelligence on the advances of German aviation technology, sending back his findings to the Military Intelligence Division.

Because the U.S. had not ratified the Treaty of Versailles and was therefore technically seen to be still at war with Germany, the other Allies in the Aeronautical Inter-Allied Commission of Control refused to share any information with the U.S., a non-member of the commission. When he approached the chief of the commission, an RAF general told him that he would  get nothing through his office.  

Foulois explained how he got around this lack of sources:

This rebuff concerned me, but I had a job to do for my government and I felt there were other ways to get information. I found out that the place in Berlin where many of the German Luftwaffe pilots congregated was the bar of the Adlon Hotel. For the good of my country, I made that bar my headquarters for almost a year and found there the best sources of aviation information in all Germany. . .  I  introduced them to good Allied whisky. . . Their tongues gradually loosened to repay me for my generosity.

Among these drinking acquaintances were Ernst Udet and Hermann Goering. They nominated him for membership in the two leading aviation organizations in Germany, and he attended all their lectures and functions. He toured German factories, talked to engineers, and even flew their planes. Foulois realized that they were still so far ahead of the rest of the world that he was genuinely shocked. He approached the Germans openly and offered to pay for their inventions. They agreed to do so if he did not pass any information on to the other Allies. 

Three Aircraft Designers Foulois Cultivated 
Hugo Junkers, Ernst Heinkel, Tony Fokker

He explained:

From the moment I agreed to this condition the United States leaped ahead two decades in aeronautical progress. Using military intelligence funds, I started shipping German studies, plans, blueprints, and reports home by the ream. I was taken into the innermost recesses of aircraft, armament, and instrument factories and shown exactly how far ahead the Germans were in aeronautics. They had been experimenting with new aircraft and weapon designs that were so far ahead of the times that it wasn't until more than forty years later that I fully realized how advanced they were. ...I started shipping all sorts of aeronautical material out of Germany to the States right under the noses of the Allies. At one point I had accumulated enough to fill a boxcar.

Additional avenues of information Foulois pursued were the memoirs of German scientists whose vanity, he reported, was a goldmine. In a report to the Military Intelligence Division he listed 180 contacts who were his sources of information. He said, "They represented the entire spectrum of the aeronautical sciences and were all in the top echelons of their professions." By the end of his tour in 1924, he had amassed an impressive list of contacts, including Dr. Hugo Junkers, Gustav Krupp, Dr. Theodore von Kármán, Claudius Dornier, Ernst Heinkel, and Anthony W. Fokker.

Summing up his four years in Germany, Foulois wrote, "I felt an honest sense of accomplishment... My policies of playing fair with our former enemies and paying for what we got netted millions dollars worth of advanced aeronautical data for the United States. I only hoped that it was being put to good use in America."

But this was not the case. Foulois wrote unhappily, "The lack of an air intelligence collection system, inexperience on the part of the military intelligence officers in regard to aeronautics, and a lack of appreciation for the potential value of the fruits of German genius caused much of the material I sent to end up unopened in a warehouse and later sent to the trash heap."

A high-ranking member of the general staff told Foulois when he returned from Germany,  "This is peacetime and the war has been over for more than five years. Most of that junk you sent was either so old or so farfetched that not even a museum would be interested in it. If we ever go to war again, none of that stuff will ever be of any value." This shortsighted view of military intelligence may have been all too common in the U.S. Army between world wars. Nevertheless, his work was appreciated at the highest levels and his responsibilities would grow through the interwar period.

Before Retirement

Foulois had been a brigadier general during World War I,  serving as the first chief of the Air Service, American Expeditionary Force, and reverting to the rank of major at war's end. He held a number of important positions within the U.S. Army Air Corps, eventually holding the top post in the corps. Foulois became Chief of the Army Air Corps from 1931 to 1935 when he retired. He devoted the remaining years of his life to the military aviation cause, speaking around the country and writing, as he did as a student in 1907, about the potential of airpower. He died at Andrews Air Force Base on 25 April 1967.

Source: "Benjamin D. Foulois and the Beginnings of Aerial Reconnaissance," Masters of the  Intelligence Art,  US Army, Intelligence Center

Source: "Benjamin D. Foulois and the Beginnings of Aerial Reconnaissance," Masters of the  Intelligence Art,  US Army, Intelligence Center