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This is Volume One of The Army Air Forces in World War II, titled Plans and Early Operations, January 1939 to August 1942, edited by Wesley Frank Craven and James Lea Cate. The University of Chicago Press first published it in 1948, and the Office of Air Force History reprinted it in 1983. The front matter explains how the AAF historical program was set up during the war. The index covers Pacific, Atlantic and European operations, and nothing in the text concerns unidentified aerial phenomena.
“Pacific Ocean”16 pages
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
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