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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.
“The Invaders”15 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 bomber groups, and eventually to base two groups of very long-range bombers in Alaska. It is apparent, however, that the air planners were less interested in the problems of the defensive in the Americas or the Pacific than in the war in Europe. The basic feature of their plan lay “in the applica- tion of air power for the breakdown of the industrial and economic structure of Germany.” This involved “the selection of a system of objectives vital to continued German war effort, and to the means of livelihood of the German people, and tenaciously concentrating dZ bombing toward destruction of those objectives.” The objectives were predominantly precision targets, and it was not intended to resort to area bombing of civilian concentrations until German morale began to The main target objectives should be the electric power grid in Germany, the transportation network (rail, inland water, and high- way), and the oil and petroleum industry-with final attacks on urban areas. It was accepted that this program might not be accomplished without some serious diversions. As an “intermediate objective” pre- requisite to successful long-range bombardment operations, it would be necessary to neutralize the German Air Force by attacking its bases, the aircraft factories which nourished it, and the light metals industries upon which those factories depended. And to protect the security of bases and the sea lanes which connected them with Amer- ican production centers, it might be necessary to attack submarine bases, surface craft, and “invasion” bases on the T o calculate the force required to accomplish these missions, esti- mates were made as to the number of individual targets which must be destroyed to disrupt each of the target systems enumerated, as to the bomb weight required for each, as to the total bomb lift required according to computed coefficients of aiming errors under combat conditions, and finally, as to the number of planes required to deliver that total bomb load within the accepted time ~chedu1e.l‘~T h e resultant requirements, in terms of tactical groups, were: medium bombers (B-25, B-26)--10; heavy bombers (B-17, B-24)-20; [very] heavy bombers (B-29, B-32)-24; VLR heavy bombers (4,000-mile- radius type)-#; in all, a total of 98 groups, >with6,834 aircrafr. It was expected that these planes, other than the 4,000-mile-radius type, would be based in the United Kingdom and the Suez region; and that since the latter type would not be available before 1944, an interim 148
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