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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 France and the apparent vulnerability of England, realism demanded that the American staffs lay plans for a war in which we might face a hostile world alone except for the help of Canada and Latin America. It was this danger which had led our administration to lend material aid to Great Britain and to undertake with that nation mutual meas- ures for defense of the Western Hemisphere. Simultaneously there was a growing rapprochement between the military establishments of the two powers, manifested in an exchange of military intelligence and more significantly in new war plans, jointly conceived by American and British officers. Begun in 1940, these plans were perfected in the following year. There was nothing novel in the fact that the war plans divisions of the US. armed services should be, in peace, preparing for war. But the plans drafted in 1941went beyond the academic exercises of earlier years. Assuming a military co-operation with Britain and other nations already a t war with the Axis, the planners worked in close and frequent co-ordination with the British staffs. For obvious security reasons, the mutual plans were not treated so frankly as were other preparations for the war which seemed imminent, though in 1941 occasional public statements by the President and the Prime Minister and less intentional disclosures through leaks to the press gave some indication of the close rapport between the military leaders of the two nations. Political opponents of the administration were pro- claiming the existence of “secret agreements,” but at the staff level, at least, there was due regard for legal limitations: no military alliances were made which would commit the United States to war; the plans only recited what should be done “if” this country should enter the conflict. In the nature of their task, the planners were not so stringently bound by the time factor as were those responsible for other defense measures. And so though strategic planning was carried on, as it were, in the subjunctive mood, the broad pattern of military strategy evolved in 1941was to serve after Pearl Harbor without radical modi- fication as a workable basis for Anglo-American collaboration. The first systematic statement of common strategic principles was arrived a t early in 1941. A series of conversations, beginning on 2 9 January, was held in Washington between a U.S. staff committee and a delegation representing the British chiefs of staff. The final report which they submitted on 2 7 March is usually known by its short title, ABC-1.”‘ The purposes of the conversations, as outlined in the direc- tive, were: to determine the best means whereby the United States and 1 36
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