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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.
“Churchill”21 pages
F U N D A M E N T A L B A S E S O F S T R A T E G Y reference to the broadest national policies and that firm decisions on those policies must await further consultation with the British, whose declaration of war against Japan had come with ours on 8 December. The need for close co-ordination of the efforts of all anti-Axis powers was recognized by the American government and its military leaders. During World W a r I, the Allies had achieved unity of civilian direction and military command only in the face of threatened defeat in the last year of the conflict; the lesson had not gone unheeded. In his request for a declaration of war against Germany and Italy, the President emphasized the need of “rapid and united effort” by all freedom-loving peoples in their struggle against the Axis power^.^ T h e Declaration of the United Nations, signed in Washington on I January 1942 by twenty-six nations, gave a plcdge of mutual co- operation, but the significance of that document was largely politi- cal.’’ T h e most concrete military measure took the form of bilateral agreements between the United States and the United Kingdom. These agreements, while of special import to the two principal parties, provided a workable means for co-ordinating the activities of the British Commonwealth of Nations and of certain governments in exile, through the influence of England, and of Latin-American re- publics and China through that of the United States. Collaboration with the U.S.S.R.-because of its geographical isolation, its neutrality toward Japan, and the absence of any tradition of intimate relations with the western powers-was to constitute a unique problem throughout the war. T h e A R C A D I A Conference: Over-all Strategy and lmmediate Deployment On 2 2 December, the press announced dramatically the arrival in Washington of Prime Minister Churchill, his chiefs of staff, and other high-ranking British officials.” On the following evening, the British party met with President Roosevelt and his military and civilian advisers a t the White House.l* T h e conference thus inaugurated, coded as ARCADIA, was in frequent session until 14 January. In his address to the Congress on 26 December, the Prime Allinister declared that he had come “in Order to meet the President of the United States and to arrange with him for all that mapping out of our military plans and for all those intimate meetings of the high officers of the armed services of both countries which are indispensable to the successful 2 3 7
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