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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.
“Independence Day”9 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 that German air power was invincible; indeed, the very name in- spired dread and fear, as the Germans had intended it should. But the triumphs of 1939 and early 1940 had all been scored against weak opposition, and there were limitations to German strength which time would increasingly reveal. Satisfied with the performance of their aircraft for the purposes in mind, leaders of the Luftwaffe had put various models into early mass production; the emphasis tended to be placed on numerical strength rather than on technical superi- ority. At points, perhaps too much faith had been placed in speed at the cost of armament. The Luftwaffe, moreover, seems to have been lulled into a false sense of security by its early successes. Though its commanders explained the British escape at Dunkirk by pointing to the unfavorable weather and a failure of supply resulting from the speed of the German advance, the success of the RAF at Dunkirk indicated that British aircraft possessed technical advantages that in all-out combat might prove decisive. That test soon came in the Battle of Britain. T h e RAF and the Battle of Britain The German bombing of Britain in World War I1 was not unex- pected by the British, nor was it without precedent. During the con- flict of 1914-18,the Germans had made 5 2 air raids against the British Isles, dropping 7 3 tons of bombs which killed 857 persons and injured 2,058. These raids helped to bring the Royal Air Force into existence as an autonomous force, for the enemy's action had pointed up the weakness of British air defenses and the desirability of carrying the air war to the German homeland. At the same time, British leaders in search of a strategy that would break the long and exhausting stale- mate on the western front had by 1918 assigned to the air force an independent mission of strategic bombing. Accordingly, in March 1918 the air forces, theretofore divided between the army and navy, were unified in the Royal Air Force as a third and co-ordinate branch of the armed services, under the administrative control of the Air Ministry. Termination of hostilities that autumn did not permit the full development and execution of plans for a strategic offensive against Germany," but, unlike the American Air Service, the RAF emerged from World War I with its independent mission and sepa- rate organization officially re~ognized.~' * See above, pp. 1 5 , 37. 92
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