Documents / Document
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 I R C O R P S P R E P A R E S F O R W A R , 1 9 3 9 - 4 1 armament in his message of 28 January 1938, it was in the interests of “national defense,” a familiar In his comparable message of 4 January 1939, he repeated the phrase but he also pledged “our people and our resources” to the protection of the Western Hemi- sphere and its common ideals.46This was only a reaffirmation of the principles of the Monroe Doctrine, but the nature of the threats against the Americas and the means of defense were rapidly changing. Traditionally, military threats against the hemisphere had been con- ceived in terms of a naval attack followed by an invasion by ground forces. Against such dangers, the U.S. Navy had generally been con- sidered our main bulwark, and since the inception of the Monroe Doctrine we had enjoyed the tacit support of British seapower. Only to the archisolationist did defense mean literally the repulse of an enemy from our own shores. In January 1938, the President stressed the need of keeping “any potential enemy many hundred miles away from our continental limits.” 4 7 The war in Europe did little to allay anxieties concerning an amphibious assault in force, and by the end of June 1940 the danger seemed acute. The Nazis had overrun Poland, Norway, Denmark, and the Low Countries; France had collapsed and Italy had joined her Axis partner. The British Expeditionary Force, broken as an effective army, had barely escaped from Dunkirk, and the Atlantic coast from Narvik to Bordeaux was in the hands of the Germans, who seemed poised for the assault on Britain. Gone was American skepticism over the “sitzkrieg,” and our ideological sym- pathy toward Britain was sharpened by concern for our own security. It required not too much imagination to envisage a complete Axis vic- tory in Europe which would a t best deny us the moral support of the Royal Navy with its shipyards, and, at worst, place that fleet and the French at the disposal of the Germans. Such additions to a com- bination of Japanese, Italian, and German sea forces would have imposed upon the U.S. Navy an impossible task. That the gravity of the situation was widely appreciated in the United States was shown not only by the wide publicity given to the threatened realignment of ~ e a p o w e r , ~ ~but also by the celerity with which Congress sped through additional appropriation bills to give us a “two-ocean navy.” But there were, as well, threats of a new sort. The war in Europe, with its co-ordination of military and political action, its emphasis on surprise and speed, and its concentration of power against nodal points had indicated that aggression against the western world might “7
Document, cited by the archive. The PDF is mirrored here; the original link is under it. 863 pages are in the text index: search them above, or from the library's search.