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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
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. 1 50
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