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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
P E A R L H A R B O R A N D C L A R K F I E L D T h e 3d Pursuit Squadron at Iba and the 17th a t Nichols each had eighteen P-4oE’s; the 20th a t Clark was equipped with the same number of P-qoB’s. T h e 2 1st and 34th Squadrons, respectively based on the Nichols and Del Carmen fields, had arrived in the Philippines only in late November and did not receive their planes until 7 De- cember, when the former was assigned approximately eighteen hastily assembled P-4oE’s and the latter took up its duties with P-35’s, each of which had an average flying time close to 500 hours. Also available were a miscellaneous assortment of noncombat aircraft and twelve P-26’s flown from Batangas by pilots of the Philippine Air Force.’l Had the Japanese been able to keep to their schedule, the attack on the Philippines would have coincided much more closely than it did with that at Pearl Harbor. But inclement weather above Luzon de- layed execution of the plan for an early morning attack, and gave the Americans advance notice of several hours.” In fact, the major attack on Clark Field, where virtually half of our total bombing force was destroyed on the ground, did not develop until after noon, some nine hours following the initial bombing of Oahu. In the Philippines, which lie on the other side of the international date line, it was Monday, 8 December, when shortly after 0300 (0830 in Hawaii) a commercial radio station picked up a report of the Pearl Harbor Though no official confirmation was immediately available, base commanders received prompt notification and all units were placed on combat alert. Within thirty minutes of this first warn- ing, the radar set at Iba plotted a formation of aircraft about seventy- five miles offshore headed toward Corregidor. T h e 3d Pursuit Squadron immediately sent out planes for interception. As the radar followed the course of the outgoing P-~o’s,it showed them making contact with the approaching aircraft, after which the latter swung off to the west and their plots disappeared. It was later learned that our pursuits actually had made no interception. Apparently, the P-40’s in the darkness had passed underneath the enemy planes.24 There were no other alarms prior to receipt of official confirmation of the outbreak of hostilities with Japan by 0500. A plan of action which had been considered for this eventuality by the Far East Air Force was an American air attack against Formosa, the natural point of concentration for a Japanese invasion of the phi lip pine^.'^ Objective folders, although without calibrated bomb tar- get maps or aerial photographs, had been prepared,26 and Col. Francis 2 0 3
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