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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
C H A P T E R 7 * * * * * * * * * * * EST ABLZSH M E N T OF THE FUNDAMENTAL BASES OF STRATEGY RILLIANTLY executed though they were, the Japanese attacks of 7 December against Oahu and Luzon appear in retro- B spect as a colossal blunder. The perfection of those operationsgave evidence of meticulous planning a t the tactical level, but not of sound thinking along broader military and political lines. In fact, an analysis of postwar interrogations of high-ranking military and gov- ernmental leaders in Japan suggests that they had precipitated a major war without formulating for it an over-all strategy. Hopelessly out- matched in actual and potential industrial capacity, the Japanese had attacked with no firm pattern of operations in view and with no con- cept of how the war might be brought to a successful conclusion. There was some hope that if a formidable chain of island defenses could be thrown around the Inner Empire, American preoccupation with Germany and discomfiture over initial defeats might bring a negotiated peace, with Japan in uncontested control of the Greater East Asia Co-prosperity Sphere. Such a hope was, of course, based upon a most erroneous interpretation of American psychology. Before Pearl Harbor the administration’s foreign policy had been bitterly opposed by a highly vocal minority in the United States. This lack of agreement, perfectly consonant with our democratic process, might easily have been exaggerated by the misunderstanding of totalitarian leaders until it appeared as a paralyzing disunity. But among many of the isolationists the prospects of war with Japan had been less distasteful than that of war in Europe, and the very means by which the Japanese chose to open hostilities served tempo- rarily to still dissident factions. When on I I December Germany and Italy joined their Axis partner, the new U.S. unity was cemented; the 2 34
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