“Nevers”44 pages
- p. 43 …cavalry mounted on gas driven flying horses” never arrived to
“sweep the Germans from the sky…
- p. 46 …Mitchell never received an American air force commensurate with
the ambitious idens of air power which…
- p. 49 …This project, like so many others, had lagged, and the Air Service was
never equipped during…
- p. 50 …the Army or the Air Corps?” but never, “Are
you in the Army or the Corps…
- p. 55 …any Air Service officers, and I have never heard
anybody yet-any Air Service officer-against…
- p. 69 …But one axiom,
with its corollaries, never varied. T o him the airplane was first and…
- p. 75 …Powerful air attacks resolutely pressed home could never be
completely stopped, but their effects could best…
- p. 94 …rate for the time being, the decision never-
theless left an open question as to how…
- p. 121 …large-scale warfare; production of combat types never exceeded 300
aircraft a month. The pattern of…
- p. 122 …the German Air Force, the
Regia Aeronautica never exhibited sufficient power to be decisive in
the…
- p. 133 …Except for a few raids against French
factories, the force had never been employed in a…
- p. 140 …into
a complete war economy production was never equal to the demands
of our own forces…
- p. 150 …Long-term needs
of the Air Corps and the sudden availability of funds in quantities
never…
- p. 181 …Actually, the Air Staff had
never approved of the method followed in RAINBOW No. 5 . l…
- p. 217 …Members of the Hawaiian Air Force, who had never flown
heavy bombers, began to receive intensive…
- p. 219 …were not then satisfactory for permanent garrisons. Never-
theless, the commander of the Hawaiian Department, Lt…
- p. 227 …T h e planes never reached their destination. Other
bombardment units were being prepared for transfer…
- p. 241 …responsible officers, a few crucial points
have never been satisfactorily explained.
T h e general pattern…
- p. 277 …motors, sole-
noids, and gun mounts-were never found. After many hours of fruit-
less search…
- p. 288 …planners and
from which AAF Headquarters was never to deviate.
The translation of the accepted grand…
- p. 303 …the principal features of the plan
were never challenged, it was subsequently revised in a draft…
- p. 309 …W a r Plans Division was
never incorporated into GHQ and remained a potential rival to…
- p. 336 …the shooting and wrote that they were never
able to make out an airplane.g6It is…
- p. 412 …As it happened, the B-24's never
returned to India, but, instead, remained in the…
- p. 457 …Meanwhile the Edsall with the remaining
pilots had headed for Java, never to be heard from…
- p. 492 …Squadron was assigned, but which it would never reach, going from
Australia to Tongatabu; ( 3 ) Christmas…
- p. 500 …deck of a carrier presented a problem never
before challenged by Army planes. Hence an accelerated…
- p. 502 …the bows and wetting the flight deck. Never before had this been
accomplished, yet now it…
- p. 509 …Island, in the
Louisiade Archipelago.” They were never needed, for on 7-8 May
the two…
- p. 513 …exist, it was at a point which never reached the
aircrews, for on the operational level…
- p. 524 …handicaps under which
AAF planes had operated. Never were more than fourteen B- I 7’s…
- p. 527 …AAF planners clung firmly to their belief that
proper observance of economy of force would never…
- p. 531 …Crews which had
previously never loaded torpedoes now for the first time fitted these
weapons into…
- p. 544 …But the Japanese never at
any time based their bombers in appreciable numbers a t either…
- p. 548 …26's in torpedo-dropping, but they never would be put into
All told, the record…
- p. 556 …until it had been thoroughly trained and never to com-
mit it piecemeal. General Magruder had…
- p. 560 …pressed into service against the Germans," and never reached the
CBI." Colonel Haynes had reached India…
- p. 606 …reason that the Antilles Air Task Force
never evolved, as did I Bomber Command, into an…
- p. 614 …that reason deserving a high
priority, could never dispose of the U-boat menace but must…
- p. 635 …In Washington the Munitions Assign-
ments Board t had never considered this schedule as more than…
- p. 670 …they bombed from 39,200 feet, and never
below 30,000. By AAF standards they had…
- p. 672 …Goering had never put enough bombers over England,
nor had he concentrated his forces on the…
- p. 690 …of co-operation and combined action probably never
before equaled by the military forces of two…
- p. 729 …shoot at aerial targets, and several
had never operated a turret in the air. This deficiency…
T H E A R M Y A I R F O R C E S I N W O R L D W A R I 1
data.lss Military characteristics for the new 5,000-mile-range bomber,
approved by the General Staff on 16 May 1934, were adjusted to a
tactical mission for “the destruction by bombs of distant land or naval
targets” and a purpose “to reinforce Hawaii, Panama, and Alaska
without the use of intermediate servicing facilities.” June 1934 saw
completion of the preliminary contracts with the Boeing Aircraft
Company, and a year later a contract was closed for the purchase of
one XB-IS, as the projected plane had now come to be designated.lso
The plane itself was not completed until the fall of 1937, and subse-
quent tests proved that its size and weight had been conceived on a
scale too ambitious for the power plants then available. But Project A
became the parent, too, of the B-17, the B-24, and the B-29, to mention
only those heavies which carried the weight of the bombing attack on
Germany and Japan in World War 11,
The B-17 grew out of proposals distributed in 1933 among manu-
facturers for a design competition in the following year. These
proposals specified a multi-engine bomber, and all save one of the
competitors apparently assumed that the Air Corps sought only a
superior twin-engine plane. Boeing, however, undertook to develop
a four-engine bomber of revolutionary design. In July 193 5 the XB- I 7
underwent successfully its first test flight. The following month it
flew nonstop a t an average speed of 2 3 2 miles per hour from the Boe-
ing plant in Seattle to Dayton-a distance of 2,100 miles. Unfor-
tunately, the original model crashed and burned on 3 0 October 1935,
after completion of all detailed engineering inspection and study of
performance data, but before a formal evaluation board had met.lsl
Pending the final action of an evaluation board, the Air Corps had
already recommended the purchase of 65 B-17’~in place of 185 other
aircraft previously authorized for the fiscal year 1936. But destruction
of the original model, though investigation cleared the plane of
mechanical fault, was followed by a reduction by the War Depart-
ment of the figure from 65 to I 3 . In fulfilment of a contract closed on
17 January 1936, the first of the 1 3 B-17’s was delivered in January
1937, and by August of that year the full number had been deliv-
ered.lsz
The reader perhaps will have noticed the coincidence of key dates
in the origin of the heavy bomber program with other major develop-
ments affecting the role of the Air Corps in national defense. The
report of the Drum Board, with its recommendation of a GHQ air
66