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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.
“Italian Air Force”14 pages
C H A P T E R 3 * * * * * * * * * * * AIR WAR, 1939-41 HE unique capabilities of air power, merely suggested in the small-scale aerial activity of World War I, were effectively T demonstrated in the conflict which broke out in 1939, for World War I1 was characterized from the outset by extensive use of the air weapon. Numerous forecasts of such a development had been voiced since the end of the earlier conflict, both in the aggressor na- tions and in those nations which became the victims of aggression. In 1919 an American aviation mission, sent to Europe by President Woodrow Wilson to study the future of military aviation, found “that any future war will inevitably open with great aerial activity far in advance of contact either upon land or sea, and that victory can- not but incline to that belligerent able to first achieve and later main- tain its supremacy in the air.” ’ For a variety of reasons, some of which have been suggested in the preceding chapter, full recognition was not accorded to this finding in the postwar development of our na- tional defense. Only the fact of a second war, world-wide in its impli- cations and holding forth from the first the prospect of our own eventual involvement, created again conditions favorable to a full exploration of the potentialities of the air weapon. Consequently, at least a brief account of the major belligerent air forces and their activities in the period prior to December 1941 must precede any attempt to describe the expanding role of the Air Corps after 1939 in our feverish preparations for war. From the attention given to the development of air power in Japan, Italy, and Germany, it was clear by 1939 that those nations recognized the airplane to be a redoubtable weapon in achieving their expansionist ends. But the three countries varied in the doctrine, materiel, and 75
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