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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 hold the islands against enemy assault. Army air units, organized into the Far East Air Force under Maj. Gen. Lewis H. Brereton, had a total of some 8,000 officers and men and more than 300 aircraft, con- centrated largely on the island of Luzon. Fewer than half of these aircraft were suitable for combat, and much of the equipment for air defense was still awaiting shipment from the United States.73But the air force was equipped with thirty-five heavy bombers, more than any other Army air force, either on the continent or overseas. This fact was significant, for the Philippines had not always enjoyed top priority among American outposts. Indeed, for many years the Air Corps garrison there had been regarded as little more than a token force and had not been considered capable of meeting “serious con- tingencies.” 7 4 As late as the spring of 1940, military aviation in the islands consisted of a mere handful of obsolete planes such as the P-26 and B-10, and during the summer of 1940 only three B-18’s were allotted to the Philippines. No additional aircraft could be spared at that time from units in the United States, and prospects of an early augmentation of pursuit strength were dimmed by a statement from the Air Corps that the twenty-eight P-26’s then assigned to the Philip- pine Department would have to suffice until late in 1 9 4 1 . ~ ~Between the time of this statement and the outbreak of hostilities in the Pacific, however, War Department policy with regard to the Philippines underwent a drastic change, and the rapid expansion of aerial defenses in the islands represented one of the more important results of that change. The possibility of American involvement in a Pacific war had been heightened in the fall of 1940by formation of a pact between the Axis powers and Japan. Agreeing to support each other’s efforts in estab- lishing and maintaining “a new order of things” in Europe and East Asia, the parties announced that they would assist one another “with all political, economic, and military means when one of the three con- tracting powers is attacked by a power at present not involved in the European war or in the Chinese-Japanese conflict.’’ ‘I6 T h e reference of course was obvious, and it carried a threat which President Roosevelt described in terms of the greatest danger faced by the nation since settlement of the c~ntinent.‘~ As part of a prompt attempt to strengthen the defenses of our most western outpost insofar as it was possible, the Chief of the Air Corps in October directed that forty-eight P-~s’s,scheduled for shipment to 176
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