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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.
“United Press”36 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 were common to all theaters-health, morale, etc. Thus, though the seven volumes are planned as a unified whole, certain volumes or com- binations of volumes are to a certain degree discrete segments-as I, 11, and 111, or I, IV, and V, or VI by itself. Certain matters of form require brief explanation. Considerations of space have kept the detail of footnote citations, which appear at the end of the volume, to a minimum. Except where the file number or other evidence of physical location is an indispensable part of the cita- tion, no attempt is made to locate the document. Similarly, the subject in letters, memoranda, and other forms of military correspondence usually has been omitted. In view of the multitude of documents that must be cited, the very limited number of them that for some time will be available for use of scholars outside official agencies, and the fluid state in which official files are kept, it has seemed that documentation for the purpose primarily of indicating the authority for statements made would serve as a practical and useful compromise. The work is based chiefly on the files of the United States Air Force and especially on materials now filed with the Office of Air Force History. Scholars accredited for research in official papers will find additional assistance by reference to the fully documented AAF Historical Studies. The problem of providing maps for a text of this sort has presented its own peculiar difficulties. AAF operations were literally world-wide in their scale and hardly less so in the early than in the later stages of the war; even when some smaller segment of the story is presented, such is the range of an airplane that the cartographer’s task becomes chiefly that of showing relative positions and distances within areas of vast extent rather than depicting the few hundred square yards so fre- quently pertinent to an immediate situation in ground operations. Moreover, the variety of air force combat operations, not to mention other activities on the ground and in the air, multiplies greatly the place names mentioned in the text. The choice tends, therefore, to become one between a reference map, which by its very lack of emphasis serves little or no illustrative purpose, and a map that is frankly illustrative in character. In facing such a dilemma, the editors have felt that there was no choice but to use maps designed primarily for illustration of the text, and, where additional detail would diminish or destroy the illustrative value of the map, they have not hesitated to leave it out. The reader will find any standard atlas a useful supplement to the text, but the editors have not felt called upon to provide still xx
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