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
strategic bombardment of Germany, AWPD/I was on the whole a
remarkable document. True, neither the B-29, B-32, or longer-range
models were utilized, but in other major respects the pattern set in
1941was sound. The timing was most accurate. The tactics advocated
did prove feasible once the escort fighter was developed. The selection
of target objectives was almost identical with that suggested by the
postwar analysis of the United States Strategic Bombing Survey 14’-
which is to say that, if the analysis was well founded, the program
suggested in 1941 was more realistic than that which was later
followed ,
The several plans which have been described and the meetings in
which they were discussed were accorded a secret classification, but
security was less than perfect. Newspaper versions of the President’s
confidential report to administration leaders on the Atlantic confer-
ence were followed in November by scattered references to the
Victory Program which gave evidence of further leaks.150 O n 4
December, a summary of the Joint Board Estimate, with verbatim
extracts, was published in the Chicago Daily Tribune and other news-
papers. Congressional critics of the administration, on the very eve
of Pearl Harbor, registered protest against this “secret war plan,” now
no more secret than any other item emblazoned in headlines and
entombed in the Congressional Record. Regardless of the political
issues with which these plans were involved, from the military point
of view there is hardly room for debate. It was not an American tra-
dition to enter a war with a carefully conceived strategic concept.
For once, in this respect, the nation was prepared.
But as General Arnold later put it, “we had plans but not planes.”
AWPD/I could be rushed through in a week of frenzied work by a
handful of staff officers; it would take a nation at arms several years
to produce the aircraft and crews, the bases and technicians called for
in the plan. In the summer of 1941, there seems to have been an im-
pression among some of the military that war would not ’come until
the following spring. In such case our preparations, still far from
perfect, would have been more nearly adequate than they were when
the Japanese struck suddenly on that Sunday morning in December.
Yet in spite of the time element the defense measures which had been
taken since the beginning of 1939 allowed us to absorb our initial
losses and to begin, within less than a year, a limited offensive.
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