The Army Air Forces in World War II, Vol. 1 (archived PDF)

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
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