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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.
“Williams Air Force Base”12 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 by that act was too short a period to justify any extended technical training3 Civilian instructional facilities did not, of course, satisfy all the needs of the Air Corps. Additional schools and readjustments in exist- ing arrangements were provided under the general expansion program. Training for individual flying specialties, which had been conducted under the Air Corps Training Center at Randolph Field, Texas, was expanded in July 1940 and placed under the direction of three flying training “centers,” spaced geographically in areas enjoying the best flying weather and each including a number, steadily growing, of basic and advanced Responsibility for crew and unit train- ing was vested in the GHQ Air Force and after June 1941 in its suc- cessor, the Air Force Combat Command. The Technical Training Command, with responsibility for all individual technical instruction, was established in March 1941.’~ In all phases of the training program, courses of study were com- pressed and pared down to the essentials. Curricula were made as pragmatic as possible; there was no time for theoretical frills. In train- ing, as in the development of aircraft, efforts were made to incor- porate tactical lessons of the air war in Europe, which emphasized the importance of formation flying at all altitudes, of accuracy in bomb- ing and gunnery, and of the development of well-integrated combat crews.36If in these respects the green crews of the early months of the war did not always appear proficient, it was not for lack of ap- preciation of the importance of this sort of training. Rather it stemmed again from the lack of time, the shortage of instructors and equipment-especially of planes. The shortage of trainers, acute at first, was gradually overcome as factories concentrated first on their pro- duction; but the very serious dearth of combat planes, in which alone successful unit training could be carried out, lasted until long after we were at war. Lacking equipment, the schools improvised; lacking time, some adopted a 24-hour working day and a 7-day week. It was not the sort of school life which would draw the nostalgic alumnus back for a twenty-fifth reunion. But it got results. The expansion of the Air Corps in materiel and in personnel re- quired a comparable growth in its physical plant; new airfields were needed for the training program, new depots for maintenance and supply of the increasing number of planes, new bases for the tactical units responsible for national defense. This aspect of expansion, like I I2
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