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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.
“King”32 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 had failed to achieve its objectives, and the aerial blitz was gradually reduced to intermittent attacks which continued throughout the spring of 1941. The Luftwaffe had sustained its first major defeat and Britain had been saved, for an invasion was contingent first of all upon defeat of the RAF. It will take no credit from the RAF’s outnumbered “few” to sug- gest that the Luftwaffe had been unprepared for the opportunity offered in the summer of 1940. Except for a few raids against French factories, the force had never been employed in a strategic effort of its own. Trained and equipped for another mission, the Lufnvaffe lacked a heavily armed long-range bomber capable of carrying large bomb loads; * it tended to underestimate the bomb weight required to accomplish its ends; its fighters were not only technically inferior to the British but were at times misused; and faulty strategic planning was reflected in a tendency to shift targets before the completion of a sufficiently prolonged and concentrated effort. The effect which the Battle of Britain had on subsequent planning of the German and British air forces was both characteristic and prophetic. True to their belief in the essentially tactical and support- ing role of air power, the German army leaders felt that the results of the Lufnvaffe’s independent effort over Britain vindicated their position, and with this opinion Hitler seems to have agreed. No in- sistent demand was made for new and improved types of aircraft, nor was there any immediate program for increased plane production or pilot training.35 Organizationally, the Luftwaff e continued to hold its independent position among the German armed forces, but opera- tionally it remained an auxiliary arm, For a time the German Air Force intensified its operations against shipping in the eastern Atlantic and in the Irish and North seas. The attempted air blockade achieved a moderate degree of success, but the action of British fighter patrols and the arming of merchant vessels by mid-1941 appeared to be in- terfering considerably with Luftwaff e plans. Moreover, intensification of German air activity on other fronts in 1941 resulted in withdrawal of much of the Lufnvaffe strength from the west. For some months, Axis operations in North Africa, the Mediter- ranean, and eastern Europe received far more attention than did the dwindling assault on the British Isles, and the Luftwaffe and the RAF * Its four-engine FW-ZOO(military version of the Focke-Wulf Condor) was em- ployed almost exclusively in antishipping patrol. 96
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