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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 Wash”17 pages
F O R E W O R D ters, ATC. Capt. Alfred Goldberg, after working on the histories of the VIII Air Force Service Command and Air Service Command, USSTAF, was assigned to Headquarters, USSTAF. Finally there remains something to be told about the history itself. T h e title is descriptive of its scope. It is not a complete history of the Army air arm, since it covers in detail only a four-year period. Nor is it a complete history of those war years, since it deals as exclusively as possible with activities of the AAF. This is through no childish fancy that the AAF won the war single-handed. Victory was possible only through the combined efforts of the several arms of the associated powers and of the civilians behind those arms. But to tell the story of the AAF’s share in the air war is itself a heavy assignment, and the authors have dealt with the operations of other services and nations only as they impinged directly upon those of the Army Air Forces. This volume constitutes, according to present plans, the first of seven. It deals first with the Army air arm before 7 December 1941 and more intensively with its fortunes during the first eight or ten months of the war. For that period of defeat, retreat, small-scale oper- ations, and frenzied preparation, it has been found convenient to describe under a single cover AAF activities in every theater. With the beginning of the offensive in late 1942, limited at first but swelling in intensity as men and material were made available, the story becomes in effect that of two large-scale wars waged simultaneously, intimately connected by highest strategy and the allocation of forces but tac- tically independent. Hence it has been thought best to avoid a strictly chronological account, treating the air war against Germany and Italy in Volumes I1 and 111, against Japan in I V and V. Throughout, an effort has been made t3 relate operations in the several theaters through discussion of pertinent strategical and logistical plans developed by the Joint and Combined Chiefs of Staff. Similarly, problems of the Zone of the Interior-organization, production, training, transporta- tion, and the like-have been treated briefly wherever necessary for an understanding of combat operations. But these problems have seemed so important-indeed to the degree that one may find the main clue to our victory in American manpower and production-that the whole of Volume VI will be devoted to activities on the home front. T h e final volume will include an account of the world-wide services of the Army Air Forces, such as the Air Transport Command and Army Air- ways Communications System, and of the handling of problems which XiX
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