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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.
“Churchill”21 pages
C H A P T E R 4 * * * * * * * * * * * T H E AIR CORPS PREPARES FOR WAR, 1939-4I N 28 January 1938 President Roosevelt declared our national defenses inadequate in the face of warlike preparations 0 abroad which constituted “a threat to world peace and security.” H e then asked for appropriations, largely naval, to im- prove our defenses. The itemized list of requirements included a sum for antiaircraft materiel but not for aircraft. A year later, with conflict threatening in Europe and an undeclared war raging in Asia, the Presi- dent asked for a much larger sum with which to strengthen our mili- tary establishment. This time Air Corps requirements accounted for more than half the total requests.2 These appropriations marked the beginning of a radical change in our foreign policy. In the decade after World War I, repudiating the League of Nations, we had based our hopes of security on the out- lawry of war, on international disarmament, and on our geographical isolation. In the mid-thirties, as other great powers began to rearm, we had sought further to insulate ourselves against foreign wars by enacting neutrality legislation, which in effect abrogated our tradi- tional policy of freedom of the seas and which denied to our govern- ment the right to distinguish morally between aggressor nations and their victims. But by the beginning of 1939 we had turned to rearma- ment, and before the year had run out we had begun to scrap the neutrality restrictions. For three years before the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor we were preparing, by these and other measures, for a war which we did not want but which many had come to feel was inescapable if we were to maintain our traditional way of life. This preparation was without precedent in our national history, un- less an exception be claimed for the very limited efforts of I 9 I 6- I 7. Our I 0 1
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